I'm staying in New Jersey for a couple of weeks (still a week to go), doing some work with a long-time client. Not an amazing amount to do around here in the evenings, though, so last night I went into Manhattan to catch up with Luis and Krissa for dinner.

For those keeping score at home, we ate at the small and very crowded Caracas Arepa Bar. Very good food for a nice price. Recommended (particularly, the Quesillo for dessert).

However, none of that is the point. The point of this entry is my random comment on the way back about some pretty cool sculptures — like this and this — in the metro station at 8th avenue and 14th street. Luis mentioned there was a book on subway art and it occurred to me today that there might also be a website. Everything has a website, after all.

Sure enough, paydirt! I love what people do in this area of creativity. Some of these pictures look familiar and I've no doubt seen them in trips around the NYC metro. Others are making me think I may need to visit particular stations just to check out the art.

Topics: art, travel/New York

[#]

I may have mentioned this before: books in Australia cost a lot. It's more than the cost of shipping and exchange rate (and there is no import duty). It's some sort of magical far away tax. Something about supply and demand, I guess. Or possibly suckers and their wallets.

I have been very good about (not) buying a lot of books on this trip, though. They're cheaper, but not free. Two trips to Powell's Technical Books in Portland (and one trip to the main store) and no books were bought (by me). Still, I'd finished the two novels I brought with me to read on the road by last weekend, so I needed to stock up for the flight back home. A quick trip to a Barnes & Nobel yesterday and that problem was solved (plus a couple of extra for the suitcase, just in case).

Often when I'm over here, I'll buy one or two books that I am unlikely to ever purchase deliberately online or at home. This time it was Three Nights In August, a "follow the team manager" baseball book by Buzz Bissinger, the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights, about US high school football. It better not suck. It's that and one other book to last 22 hours of flying (plus movies, safety demonstrations, a couple of take-offs and landings, meals and some catnaps).

Looking forward to being home now. Travelling is fun, but living out of a suitcase in a tiny hotel room gets tiring after a while and home is easier.

Topics: books, travel/New York

[#]

Songs from Mary Poppins and Les Miserables sound wrong when sung with American accents. Native US speakers were a very under-represented group in both revolutionary-era France and London. Yes, musical numbers and flying nannies were similarly under-represented in those periods, but that's not the point! I've just been subjected to some Americanised versions of some popular numbers. Oh dear. Does tradition count for nothing in this place? To be fair, the lady singing the Mary Poppins lines had quite a pasable English accent in her songs, however I suspect the guy singing about empty chairs at empty tables was thinking of his ranch back in Texas, rather than the cafes of Paris.

Topics: travel/New York

[#]

The New York Public Library remain convinced that people want to read. Furthermore, they apparently maintain a belief in the old printed word on paper format. Witness this outdoors reading area they have set up and staff during the day outside their building...

They're even sun smart (all the umbrellas are part of the reading area).

Topics: travel/New York

[#]

As predicted, I went to the Museum of Natural History yesterday afternoon.

Every museum wanting to attract visitors should make itself available for a movie. No matter how formulaic, providing it's good fun and appeals to children, especially, there will be a flow-on effect. Wandering around yesterday, I frequently overheard children telling their parents things like "that's where the monkey is from that peed on him" (clearly a highlight for many), or "here's the big head statue". Since you could stand next to the big head statue (a.k.a Easter Island statue) for a photo, there was quite a crowd around it.

More than one parent was being asked to explain why the layout was different than in the movie. One brave dad was explaining about artistic license and rearranging things to make the story flow. Another couple I overheard were resorting to "maybe they've changed things around since then."

Watching the people enjoying the exhibits was nearly as interesting as the exhibits themselves. At times it was a bit of a United Nations gathering; I lost track of the number of foreign languages I heard around the place. Despite the large crowds, the vast amount of space meant you could always see something whilst waiting for a gap at another exhibit. Almost everybody was considerate of other people and the layout was sensible and kept the crowds flowing between locations.

A good way to spend four hours.

Note to self: Two museums in two days plus walking all over the place will make your legs sore the next day. Trust me on this. You need to get in better shape.

Topics: travel/New York

[#]

Greetings from the sunny day, shaded tables in Bryant Park, NYC.

Updated: Re-reading this, it looks like three parts whining to two parts fun. Really, things are better than that. I was noting down thoughts without planning ahead. I'm having fun. Truly. I sometimes use this blog to update close friends back in .au, so delve into too much detail. Oops.

Since my plan was to exploit being in the US to enjoy another week of summer, it was ironic that my flight from Chicago to New York was delayed for 90 minutes due to inclement weather (thunderstorms). Upon arrival at La Guardia airport, I got to witness first-hand the debacle that is US air travel. Planes had been backed up for quite a few hours as the airport was effectively closed whilst the thunderstorms passed. So a whole bunch of flights landed quickly, one after another. Two immediate consequences were: not enough gates for all the planes to stop at, so we cruised around for 45 minutes (literally, cruised around, rather than waiting in one spot). Then, finally getting inside, baggage collection was chaotic, at best. Our luggage belt was right next to "complaints and lost luggage" and they were doing a roaring trade. Final exciting moment was getting one of those taxi drivers who did not consider it necessary to either know his way around Manhattan, own a street directory or be able to contact dispatch or other drivers to get directions — do they get cab licenses from cereal boxes these days?

Now that I'm here, things have improved. Greatly. Museum of Modern Art and some bookshops yesterday. Possibly going to the Museum of Natural History this afternoon; haven't been there for a few years and not being outside in the middle of the day seems sensible. Staying in a new (for me) hotel this trip, near Riverside Park, along the Hudson, so I should make the effort to do an early morning photo stroll tomorrow or Thursday.

Continue to be unimpressed with the general rudeness and insensitivity of drivers in this city, and the pedestrians often don't help. Still, as I sit here in the park, drinking a not unreasonably priced juice and watching the people all around enjoying the weather and each others' company, it's hard to be grumpy. This is why I came — things to do when I want to, places to relax when I don't.

Random moments from the last couple of days: saw a guy at a table nearby with an OLPC prototype; had a girl ask me whether Threadless was an okay place to shop, since she'd heard of it and saw the Threadless sticker on my laptop; the receptionist in the American Airways lounge at Chicago recognised my Creative Commons T-shirt on Sunday. Advertising works, even when it's for reasonable causes.

Topics: travel/New York

[#]

(This a follow-up to this item, which may not have been syndicated to all the same places, since it isn't in exactly the same categories.)

Selected moments from the last couple of days of OSCON:

• The Python BOF on Wednesday night. Excellently moderated by David Goodger. Probably around 20 or so people there. Many being fairly experienced Python users. A general consensus that selling Python to the PHB level of management is still senselessly hard. It's almost an argument for certification. All involved in the hiring process seemed to agree that wouldn't change the way they hired, though. Teaching Python to good people is easy and Python's the type of language where you can get a good feeling about an existing developer's work in a number of ways. A piece of paper won't change that. Other topics including code organisation, other languages used, promoting certain packages as reference implementations were all interesting. Over two hours of good conversation (and beers).

• The Django BOF on the following night was well attended, too. Around 18 people, ranging from a few who were just starting out to some who were using it in high profile site. Conversation mostly driven by the more experienced users. I came away with a list of about 15 things that we can look at that I need to write up as an email to django-dev over the next day or two. Hallway conversation after the hour-long BOF went for another 90 minutes with a different group of people.

• A talk on 37signals' experiences with using Amazon's S3 for mass storage was interesting. Mostly it was a litany of woes about "what can go wrong will", but it provided some very constructive lessons learnt about the extra work you have to do and expectations if you're going to hitch your business implementation to something like S3.

• r0ml is a very entertaining speaker and I enjoy hearing him talk. Always something to learn about presentation. However, his point and generally excellent arguments are sometimes obscured by his entertainment style and this is a shame. It took a lot of work to sort wheat from chaff in his Preventing Code presentation.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk on the state of the Linux kernel in 2007 will be useful as data for the future. He's done a lot of crunching of numbers with regards to number of contributors (including nice chart), number of lines of code, proportion of change in various subsystems, and so forth. The simple conclusion is that anybody trying to maintain a parallel branch of the kernel is looking impossibility in the face. Pushing things into the mainline is the only way to go, because it's just too frantic. And yet, the system mostly works. The kernel remains healthy and solid.

• Having contact with other Django developers and users during the day was very motivating. I got a lot of coding done during downtime between talks and in the evening back at the hotel. Some big ticket items, too (since the little ticket stuff tends to take care of itself).

The last few days have been a bit of a blur, so there might be an OSCON, part III post once my brain settles down and organises things.

Mostly recovering today and doing very little. Off to New York City tomorrow to enjoy ... I don't know ... stuff. Weather. Central Park. Manhattan Restaurants. Things like that.

Topics: software/django, conferences/OSCon, travel

[#]

OSCON has been a blast so far. Been good to meet up with a few people I only see once a year or so, as well as meet some people who were previously only names on mailing lists.

Had a few good conversations with Jacob, Simon and Jeremy (Dunck), amongst others about some broader Django issues and design things. So much easier to thrash out the early details face-to-face before writing up a more reasoned presentation for the mailing list.

Entering the US was not the most pleasant part of the trip. Took an inordinate amount of time to complete the queue-and-shuffle dance through immigration. Increased terror scare levels or something. Lots of questions about my intentions, return date, etc — and it wasn't just me; everybody was getting the extra attention, so it took a lot longer than normal.

Still... here now. Recovered (mostly) from the trip. Enjoying the food, conversations and company. Lots of fun. :-)

Topics: conferences/OSCon, travel

[#]

A recent justifiable rant by Mary Gardiner on the price of laptops in Australia (with subsequent clarification post, too) has reminded me that I've been thinking about upgrading whilst I'm over in the USA at the end of this month.

The second week of my trip is when I'm most likely to have some spare time to do some shopping and during that week I'm going to be in New York City. So, my question...

Is there any place in New York City (or nearby) that is the computer equivalent of what B&H is for cameras?

If I was in California, I'd go to a Fry's, but I'm not. So what are my alternatives? Sure, walking up and down fifth avenue looking in all the slightly suspect places along there is possible. But it'd be great if there was a one-stop place I could go to that wasn't going to rip me off and where I could see (and preferably hold) the machine before paying out a thousand-plus dollars.

(Since my blog is too lame to have comments at the moment, email is good.)

Topics: technology, travel

[#]

Yesterday's New York Times has an article describing the fairly woeful ability of US airlines to schedule a barn dance, let alone a plane flight to a pre-determined location.

What struck me about the article, though, was the fairly restrained tone taken by the reporter, in stark contrast to the ludicrous situation they were laying out. If a plane is diverted to another airport, it does not count against an airline's delay statistics. Ditto if the plane taxis out to the runway and then is called back and canceled. What the..??! The article informs us, in polite, restrained NYT style, that the US Department of Transportation is taking comments "on whether it should tighten airline reporting criteria." How about we call a spade a bloody shovel here. Ask the airlines to stop telling lies! If I am on a plane and it does not arrive at the airport marked on my ticket at the time indicated, it is late. This isn't something that's open for debate. Depositing the passengers at another airport (right time, wrong location .. sorry about that) shouldn't even be an option for counting towards on-time. Not even leaving the original destination is certainly a mark against you.

This is how the whole situations arises in the first place: airlines are permitted to — and let's call it what it is— lie about their reliability.

The article does do nice job of briefly covering the consequent extra loss of time to passengers when a flight is delayed. It's not just the two hour delay getting in; that is just the start of the domino effect that can cost a day or two (when international travel is involved).

I really shouldn't have read that article today as I was finalising some travel bookings for a trip to the US at the end of this month. I have two internal flights and a relatively short transfer time in Chicago. It's the same airline and they say it's a connecting flight, but it's only going to take a 30 minute delay in Portland taking off and I'm completely screwed. Might not get into New York until hours after my expected time.

(via Justine Larbalestier, who, it should be mentioned, may actually be more cursed than normal when it comes to flying.)

Topics: life, travel

[#]