Archive for August, 2006

I *heart* nyc

New York City is now my second favorite city in the US after Chicago. I love cities. I love the urban life.

We did lots of eating.

Friday night
- pizza in west village
- guinness at some bar near the apt.

Sat
- dumplings at Rickshaw Dumpling Bar
- dumplings and fried tofu at mandoo bar in manhattan koreatown
- bagels at Ess-a-Bagel on the west side
- beer at Heartland Brewery in Union Sqaure
- cannolis in little italy
- mexican beer at some place in the east village
- LOTS of tea at teany (formerly co-owned by moby, but not anymore)
- sausage, sauerkraut, potato pancakes, german beer at lederhosen in west village

sunday morn
- breakfast at grey dog cafe
- mini eclair at some italian pastry shop

It was a good trip overall. We didn’t really have a plan; basically just wandered around manhattan looking for anything interesting to eat and/or drink.

Observations/Thoughts
- most stuff in nyc is more expensive but especially so in times square; restaurants were a lot more reasonable in other parts.
- none of the italian bakeries we went to did made-to-order cannolis like they do in boston’s little italy. i guess boston does beat new york in something. :)
- i lived out my ideal city scenario on sunday morning when i walked out of the house with just my collection of key fobs (including the citicard paypass) and the house key. went to work out at nysc, took an extra jog around the west village, then went to CVS and paid for my gatorade with my paypass. yes! yay for a barcoded, rfid’ed, cashless society.

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Running races

Anyone want to do a 5K and maybe a 10K this fall?

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More lala

I’ve been wanting to get Fiona Apple’s first two albums for a long time… now I finally have them, thanks to lala.com!

I think Fiona is such a ridiculously talented musician. Her album Tidal was released in July 1996 but it doesn’t sound dated at all when I listen to it now, more than ten years later. Even though many female artists of the same era (Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Sheryl Crow, etc) became much more commercially successful, Fiona is the one that still blows me away when I listen to her tunes.

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Mr. Brightside

I just got Hot Fuss by the Killers through lala.com (let me know if you’re interested in signing up and I’ll send you a referral; you can sign up yourself, but I get something if you do it through me!).

The album on the whole is okay (I’d probably give it 3.5 out of 5 stars) but I love the song Mr. Brightside. It’s probably one of my favorite songs of the past few years. I like it so much because it has a really huge anthemic energetic feel to it that I just can’t help but get swept away in when I hear it.

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Off to the Big Apple this weekend

The second to last hurrah of the summer will be a trip to nyc this weekend with nerd. Hopefully, we don’t get mistaken for a gay couple with our trips to get tea and jamba juice.

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T-Mobile To Go

My parents rarely use their cell phones. They used to have a $70 per month family plan which gave them 700 anytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends but they only used, on average, about 100 minutes total per month.

I thought about having them get prepaid service but at the time, they all had some sort of expiration date where you had to use the minutes within 30 or 60 days. In the end, it ended up not being that much cheaper.

However, I recently found out that T-Mobile’s pre-paid service has a thing called “Gold Rewards” where once the user spends $100 on their pre-paid account, their minutes don’t expire for a whole year!

So instead of my parents spending $70 per month ($840 per year) on cell phone service, they can each get $100 pre-paid cards which will give them 1000 minutes that don’t expire for a year: a savings of $640!

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Poutine

One of the top reasons for going to Montreal is poutine. I found a great website with reviews of the best Poutine shops:

http://www.montrealpoutine.com/reviews.html

Here are some pictures of Poutine that I’ve had in the past:

beer and poutine

mcdonald's poutine

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movie date tonight

The wife and I don’t go out for movies often. When she really wants to, I let her go with her friends. There aren’t many movies that demand that I watch them on the big screen. (The upcoming Turtles movie might have to be an exception)

Anyways, we’re going out to see Little Miss Sunshine tonight. We got cheap movie tickets from Costco. Yay for Costco!

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HDR Photography

The New York Times has an article about a digital photography technique called High Dynamic Range photography:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/technology/03basics.html

I first learned about this from Luminous Landscape a while ago:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

It’s a pretty simple idea, but you get some amazing results.

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Where to get Emacs info

The EmacsWiki is a great resource for anything and everything related to Emacs:

http://www.emacswiki.org/

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