1.5 days of crazy

This is just a very quick, random post about my last 1.5 days in NYC. I arrived yesterday evening from Florida and was in my hotel for about three minutes before some buddies of mine called (two of my best friends live in Brooklyn) to setup the night’s activities. We ended up eating some great Indian food and went to a couple of bars in the East Village area of Manhattan where we met up with a bunch of people and saw a few shitty bands give it all they had.

Today we spent the entire day walking up and down Manhattan. Along the way we hit up the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I got some neat pics that I’ll put on Flickr when I can find the time (along with a lot more from the latest Florida trip).

The highlight of the day however was when we went to Union Square. There was an anti-Bush protest going on that covered everything from “Bush and his daddy are child rapists” to conspiracy theories attached to 9/11. The first guy to speak started foaming at the mouth (literally) as he belted through his megaphone, and just when we thought it couldn’t get any weirder better, a seemingly random guy ran up to the “stage” and began shouting over the frothing guy (even though his views seemed to parallel those of the interrupted speaker). For reasons I’ll never figure out, this guy began spouting the worst, most offensive obscenities I’d ever heard in public — everyone was like, “wow” (yes, even the New Yorkers).

This went on for over an hour; he’d just randomly taunt the audience (which usually involved grabbing his crotch and telling us that we didn’t have balls) and then every once in a while he would kind of act like a “background” rapper for the current speaker, yelling things like “yah,” “they don’t understand,” etc — basically echoing the speaker at times.

Finally, perhaps after tiring of getting no real response from the crowd, he threatened to take off his pants, and seriously, is there a better way to make known your opposition to the administration than showing the world that you aren’t very well endowed? Yah, I couldn’t come up with anything either.

So, he proceeded to take off his pants (I’d say it was a 2-3 minute process) and if you’d like to have a laugh, you can follow his progression here (photos might offend): one, two, three.

He wasn’t through. After publicly humiliating himself (see pictures), he put his clothes back on and sat on a plastic crate near the speaker(s). Then, and for no apparent reason, he stood up quickly and kicked the crate with his heel. The crate went flying and hit one of the speakers (the main organizer I think) who quickly shattered his glass bottle on the ground and took off after the soccer star. They ran all over Union Square punching and kicking each other until they were finally out of sight. The protest continued.

I love New York.

It’s almost over

As has become the ritual when back home, I rarely sleep (seriously) and am never actually “home.” My days and nights are spent gallivanting around town with various people whom I haven’t seen for the past year (or six months as it were this trip) and by the time I actually have two free minutes to sit down and write about some of the things that have happened (and that are appropriate to be discussed here) I feel incredibly overwhelmed by it all and end up writing nothing. So as not to ruin the quasi-personal nature of this site, I’ll keep with tradition and again refrain from elaborating more on the hijinks of this trip.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to it — I’ve only a couple more days before I head off to NY.

Random plea for sympathy: I’m not sure I’ve ever been this sore in my life — I feel like a wrecking ball has had its way with me — multiple days of wakeboarding and wakeskating has definitely taken its toll.

The inevitable cameraphone switch

The time had finally come for me to get a new point-and-shoot camera. It had been a long while since I purchased a new camera, but if I changed digital cameras like I changed mobile phones/PDAs, I’d be broke (err, more broke) — you have to choose your vices.

As I mentioned before, I plan on getting a digital SLR as soon as I can afford it (sometime this summer) and have since decided on the Nikon D70 (and not either of the Canon models I spoke of in the previous post), but I thought I could definitely stand to get a new non-SLR digicam in the interim.

As was no doubt expected, I did a fair amount of research concerning the new camera and narrowed it down to the Canon SD400 and the Sony CyberShot DSC-T7 (you have to see this camera in person — it’s incredible). The problem is, my decision to get a new point-and-click camera coincided with the release of the Sony Ericsson K750i in Europe and Asia; mine arrived from Hong Kong earlier today. This will be my only camera until I get the D70 (I’m selling my old one).

The K750i has a 2 megapixel camera with ‘flash,’ autofocus, and macro mode, not to mention a host of other neat camera features. Though this phone choice deviates some from my last five, which were “smartphones,” it has no real imaging match in the world (outside of Korean prototypes) and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to use; the fact that I’ll always have a decent camera on me is very exciting.

This is my fifth Sony Ericsson phone and while I’d like to get up a review similar to the [way-too-long] K700i review, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the time.

Finally, wonderful weather

How quickly I’m reminded of everything I miss about Florida — time to get out on the lake.

Silicon Valley is one big stoplight

I’m fully convinced that the powers that be in Silicon Valley have conspired to not only require a stoplight at every other street (at least), but to also prevent these stoplights from being connected to each other in any useful way.

The following rules seem to govern the stoplights in Silicon Valley:

• If car is approaching the light and it is likely that the driver of that car can see that the light is green, immediately move to yellow and then red so as to stop the approaching car lest it get above second gear between any two lights.
• If car is approaching the light and it is likely that the driver of that car can see that the light is red, do not move to green until the car comes to a complete stop.
• Under no circumstances may one light work together with another, in any direction, to create what might be interpreted as a “flow” of traffic.

Headed home

I’m headed back to Florida tomorrow for a week and a half before I fly to New York for a week-long orientation with the law firm I’ll be working for this summer. My plate is incredibly full back home so I’m not quite sure it will be the “vacation” I was somewhat aiming for, but then again, I’ve never been too good at relaxing anyway.

Outside of seeing all my friends (including old college buddies I’m going to visit in Gainesville), I’m most looking forward to getting out on the lake and doing some serious wakeboarding. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some pics of the action and will try to get video of some flips if possible.

On writing posts

Believe it or not, I’ve actually been asked quite a few times how I go about writing posts and felt compelled to share the answer with the rest of the world (as I often do).

My current text editor of choice is TextWrangler, which I’ve written about before. As I get an idea of something I want to talk about, I open up a new document in TextWrangler and immediately save it to a folder I call “scratch,” which is for these posts and whatever other mind-fleeting thing I feel the need to jot down before I forget it; I give the document the name of whatever it is I’m writing about. TextWrangler keeps all of your open documents in a “drawer” to the side of the editing window and lists them in alphabetical order by name. I currently have 23 documents open, 15 of which are future posts. I’ve also created a shell script that syncs my local “scratch” folder with a folder on my webserver every couple of hours so that I always have access to my posts.

There are two advantages to this setup. The first is the fact that I can see, at a glance, all the posts that I’m currently writing or plan to write. The second is that if TextWrangler crashes (it never has) or I need to reboot for some reason (and close the application), I can easily get back to where I left off; I simply open TextWrangler, highlight my entire “scratch” folder in the Finder, and drag these items over to the TextWrangler icon in the dock.

In conjuction with TextWrangler, I also use John Gruber’s Markdown, a plain-text formatting syntax. Initially, it was lost on me the need to learn John’s syntax given that I’d been proficient in web markup for 10 odd years and hadn’t really ‘thought’ about it in a very long time — it had become as natural to write as English — but over time, and especially for longer, more involved posts, Markdown became indispensable and now I can’t imagine writing without it. It makes ‘pre-markup’ plain-text much more readable. Period.

Back to studying for Patents, my last law school final of the [academic] year.

Amazon Associates Bookmarklet

I’ve been participating in the Amazon Associates program for some time now and decided to make my life (and maybe yours) a little easier by whipping up a bookmarklet to turn any Amazon product page into a page ‘tagged’ with my Associates ID. I can now use this bookmarklet to easily create Amazon links that I put on this site (or *cough* for other less noble causes that I’ll let you figure out for yourself).

You can find it on the Amazon Associates Bookmarklet project page along with a more detailed explanation of what it is and how it works. Enjoy.

Revolution In The Valley

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while now and figured it was time to get it out there given that I don’t have time to actually write anything new at the moment because of law school finals (in case there was ever any doubt, law school finals suck).

A couple of months ago I started to read Revolution in the Valley - The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made, and it’s just that, insanely great. I picked it up one very exciting Friday night when a friend and I were at the local Borders “studying.” I couldn’t stop reading it, but I was informed that I had to part with it because the store was closing and the guy was all like, “You can’t take that out of the store without paying for it.” I thanked him for the heads-up and put the book down.

Between the often personal stories (as told by a lot of different members of the initial Mac team), pictures, drawings, and diagrams, the book really sucks you into the mindset and environment of those so passionate about the Mac at its inception, and oddly, makes me somewhat proud to be a small part of that today.

I was informed by Richard (who has some similar anecdotes of his own) that I could essentially read the entire book online, but I opted instead to pick it up every now and again when I was in the library at school (you know, to put some small portion of my $30,000/year tuition to good use).

If you don’t get a chance to check it out in the flesh (highly recommended), you should at least read over a few of my favorite stories:

Reality Distortion Field

Bud defines Steve’s unique talent

Saving Lives

Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

I’ll Be Your Best Friend

Burrell Smith was creative in more than just engineering

Quick, Hide In This Closet!

Steve forbid us to work with Sony

And Then He Discovered Loops!

Bob has written many lines of code

I Invented Burrell

Burrell imitates Jef

What’s A Megaflop?

We visit my alma mater to try to sell them Macs

-2000 Lines Of Code

It’s hard to measure progress by lines of code

Shut Up!

The first time we demoed the Macintosh to Microsoft

Mea Culpa

Here are some of our worst mistakes