Delta Tango Bravo

It's been a couple of weeks since I was in New York and I figure a brief post about it is in order. Thanks to everyone who offered their great advice before the trip. It was much appreciated. The following are my incredibly concise impressions of the city garnered from a whirlwind trip. Please forgive inaccurate place names and the like.

THREE DAYS IS FAR TOO SHORT

I guess this one is obvious to anyone who has ever been to New York. We really only had two nights in the city and this proved to be considerably too quick. Even staying focused in Manhattan, we barely scratched the surface.

WALKING IS A GREAT WAY TO SEE THE CITY

I was very surprised how close everything was in Manhattan. I had expected that one had to take the subway to get between neighborhoods all of the time, only to find that you can walk all the way from Chelsea (where we stayed at the lovely Chelsea Inn) through Greenwich Village through Tribeca through Battery Park through Wall Street through Chinatown through Little Italy through Soho in a good morning's walk. Even with wintery weather, walking was a wonderful way to get a brief sense of each neighborhood.

CLEAN STREETS AND COURTEOUS PEOPLE

I found almost all of the infamous stories about New York to be grossly untrue. Granted we were only visiting for a few days, but we found all of the areas we walked through and the subway to be relatively clean. We also found people surprisingly friendly. People thanked you for holding a door open, apologized for bumping into you on the street (no my wallet didn't get stolen), and were generally very polite. Even driving in Manhattan, cab drivers and others on the road drove aggressively but were reasonably courteous. Also, I'm not sure about the cause of this one, but I only saw one homeless person the whole time. This had more of the effect of making me ask "where the heck did they put the homeless people?" as opposed to making me feel like a problem had been solved.

THE MET IS TOO BIG

On the last day we were in New York we went to the Guggenheim Museum in the morning and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the afternoon. There was a confusing line to get into the Guggenheim, but it was certainly worth the wait. I was a bit lukewarm on the current exhibition "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated)" but the permanent collection, and really the building itself, were worth the whole trip in themselves. We unwisely arrived at the MET around one o'clock without having eaten lunch. Their collection is so vast and so dense that we left around five having strolled through maybe a third of the galleries. I guess this should just give me the impetus to return to New York sooner rather than later.

I SHOULDN'T NEED AN EXCUSE TO VISIT NEW YORK

Aside from some icy winter driving at some points, I honestly really enjoyed the entire trip. I had a great chance to spend a week traveling with my girlfriend. We enjoyed great food, we met some nice people, and we saw some wonderful things. I can totally see the attraction New York has for so many people. Enough said. I'll have to return soon.

Google announced that they're launching a web-based email service called GMail that will allow people to store a gigabyte of emails and will enable them to search through their mail using search technology. Sounds cool... but can you trust any news report on or around April 1?

Google got in under the wire by a few hours, even on Atlantic Time, and Evan Williams would've had to be in cahoots deceiving his readers, so I can only assume the news is true. So, does this day of deceit actually affect how companies release their news? Does anyone take anything they hear seriously on April 1? I've been burned too many times in years past with promises of incredible occurrences like the year my dad convinced us there was a worm in my sister's cereal bowl... Hmm. Hmmm.

A number of us at silverorange went through difficult addictions to one or more of the Tony Hawk skateboarding games over the past few years, characterized by ridiculous muscle memory for key combinations and detailed knowledge of each and every level. Many of the maps are based on real-world locations and we all now have a perverse knowledge of certain cities based solely on our experiences within the polygons of the game. On a recent trip to San Francisco I think each of us looked longingly out into the Bay towards Alcatraz and imagined nose-grinding the wire between the water tower and the cell block, then manualing across the roof, to misty flip into the...

Anyway, Steven and I were discussing this phenomenon earlier today, after Matt Haughey commented on his experience, when I recalled the exact same thing occuring over a decade ago (damn I'm getting old). When I was about 12, my family lived in England and we took a trip across Europe for a few months. As we were driving through Monaco, my Dad was busy trying to tell us about the historical significance of something when my twin brother and I excitedly pointed out that we were driving the Monaco race from Accolade's awesome "Grand Prix Circuit". We could predict tunnels, curves, and landmarks around the corner. Everything was freakishly the same, but a lot less pixelated.

Over the past month or so I've been collecting some of my favourite favicons on the web for interest's and posterity's sake. In case you're unaware, favicons are the wee icons that are displayed occasionaly, it seems depending on how the stars are aligned, in the location bar of your browser or in your bookmarks or in your tabs if your browser supports them. Some people have clearly put a lot of effort into their 16 x 16 pixel creations. In my collecting, I just discovered today a nice review of good favicons at Makiko Itoh's site which includes many of the icons I caught in my butterfly net.

I'll keep gathering good ones as I go and maybe update this tiny collection with more over time. Suggestions for addition are welcome.

Despite having now visited New York, I'm still not sure I quite get all of The Kid America Adventure Hour, but there are some hilariously entertaining and offensive short videos to be watched and a great cartoon illustration on the site. Apparently it's a radio show on East Village Radio. Also check out the great logo for 'anything' that splay, the group behind the Kid America site, designed. (Correction: Splay did not design the logo. Still nice though.)

I just got back from an all-too-brief week-long road trip to New York last night. It was a fantastic trip and I'll try to compile my impressions of the city and put some of my photos in my gallery in the next couple of days.

While on the road, I was pretty much out of touch with online happenings. I checked my email a few times but my regular reading schedule was interrupted for almost exactly a week. It's kind of fun to catch up on a whole week's worth of reading in a single morning. Here are a few of the most notable things I missed:

• Jason of 37signals sparks a great discussion about the recent emphasis in web design on CSS over usability.
• Steven broadcasts Acts of Volition Radio, Session Eight which is a tribute to the great Gene Eugene.
• R. Stevens serves up yet another great week at Diesel Sweeties.
• Dave at Scripting News links to a fantastic cover from The Economist magazine.
• Jim Coudal links to an intriguing discussion on the outdated practice of double-spacing at the beginning of sentences at Typophile. I'll never double space again.

I'm off to New York in thirty minutes but I managed to get our latest "Slice of the Month" done on the silverorange website before I go. Each month there's a bit of a debate in the silverorange offices over who we'll feature. Each slice is someone we all admire or someone who makes us laugh. As we add more and more people to the list, it's becoming more difficult to come up with new ones. So, give me your suggestions. Who would you most like to see¹ as a slice of the month?

¹ Note: Just because you suggest something, don't expect to see it right away. We reserve the right to be picky, choosy, and snooty. Thanks for your help.

I'm quickly working at reducing my list of cities I've always meant to visit. Two weeks ago it was San Francisco and next week I'm heading off to New York with my girfriend for a vacation. The kindly Ian Williams and his readers have been very helpful with some great and contradicting suggestions on where to stay, what to eat, and where to go during our brief visit, but I'm still soliciting advice. (Apparently there is much debate whether or not to ever proceed above 14th Street)

My only solid plans right now are to visit several of the major art galleries and to generally peruse the landmarks. If you had three or four days in the city what would you get up to?

Some acronyms are helpful, some aren't really acronyms at all, and some are just downright cool. The following are the best of the best that the nerds of this world could come up with.

1. GNU (GNU's Not Unix)
2. FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)
3. LISA (Local Integrated Software Architecture)
4. QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System)
5. Modem* (Modulator-Demodulator)

GNU, the name of an operating system, is the greatest recursive acronym of them all and a neat animal to boot. FUBAR, which predates the modern computer era, sounds great when expressed at high decibels and it's also the title for a fantastic Canadian mockumentary film. Apple users fell in love with their Lisa computers in the 1980s only to discover her name is officially really an acronym. QDOS, the predecessor to Microsoft's DOS operating system, has an appropriate title. Well, *modem may not strictly be an acronym, but there's nothing nerdlier than saying you're busy configuring a "twenty-eight-point-eight kilobaud modulator-demodulator."