“At first I was worried about it,” Ponton, 69, told The Washington Post on Tuesday, “but then I realized as it was going viral if the country could take a moment to laugh at my cat moment at my expense, I’ll take it. We’ve had a stressful year.”
Seeing the moment as an educational opportunity, Ferguson [the judge] posted the video and it was shared by Texas attorney Kendyl Hanks and Reuters U.S. Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley. By Tuesday evening, one version on Twitter had been viewed more than 18 million times.
“It’s something that’s given the world a smile — and it’s an innocent smile at no one’s expense,” Ferguson told The Post.
Ferguson also said that while he was genuinely happy to see people enjoy a laugh — one he hopes is with the lawyers and not at them — he views the video as a testament to the professionalism of Texas lawyers, as the other attorney present was notably straight-faced in the video.
“Every one of those people in that room kept their composure,” Ferguson said. “The lawyer who was, I guess you would say the butt of the joke, has handled it with absolute grace.”
Ponton, who says he prefers dogs to cats if you ask (and we did), has another tip to take from the tale: “It happened to me today, it can happen to you tomorrow.”
The rest of the article is good to read, but I thought these small bits illustrates how they took it. I left out a lot. (I know because, for some reason, I accidentally pasted the whole thing and had to go back and delete the parts I wasn’t trying to quote.) Seems it was spread intentionally for humorous purposes and to give people a heads up about these sorts of problems. And the judge only released it because he thought everyone handled it very well.
It was not. The filter was from some software bundled with his Dell laptop from 2010:
Which makes it even more forgivable. Lots of people know about the filters on Zoom and other videoconferencing software. But this one was a standalone app, probably buried in his task tray or the like. And highly specific to his laptop, so no one else would know how to get rid of it, either.
It’s not adding cat features to a human face; it’s creating a cat model, and then using the human face to model how the cat face moves. A failure wouldn’t manifest as the cat flickering back to a human; it’d manifest as the cat briefly not doing anything.
That said, this is the first I’ve seen this particular sort of filter. My first thought on reading the thread title was that the guy’s pet cat walked in front of the camera, and then after reading the OP, I thought it would be a Snapchat-like filter that drew ears and whiskers over one’s face.
The deal here seems to be that while this particular expressive white cat is indeed from some old software called Live Cam Avatar that was bundled with the webcam software on some older Dells, this software is supposedly no longer available. The claim is that there are Snap Camera filters that are similar.
I think that I located the Dell software in question, which is Dell Webcam Software (R230103). I would highly discourage anyone installing this, though. The only part of it that is a distinctly separate app is something called Live Cam Avatar Creator. The actual filter itself, if it’s there at all, seems to be part of the whole mess of webcam drivers and related stuff, which you definitely do NOT want to install on the wrong computer, and is probably not separable from the rest of the stuff. So much as I would like to have that particular white cat, I’m not going to risk messing around with this. It seems to be not so much that the Dell software is “not available” as many articles claim, but that it’s not actually usable on any computer that it didn’t come with.