Unwelcome visitor

The other night I was lying in bed feeling a bit ill and crappy when I heard this rustling in my window. At first I thought it was a breeze, but the sound was a little bit off for that. The noise then stopped so I started to fall asleep, but suddenly a movement above me woke me up – throwing the light on I jumped back as I saw a HUGE cockroach right on the wall above me. The bugger was almost 3 inches long and didn’t move slow for its size.

Long story short: epic chase round apartment, handy plastic bowl later the little wotsit was caught and I went to sleep. This morning, after a minor jail break, the little chap (or chapette) was duely released into the wild on my fire escape – where it proceeded to fly away. Huzah!

Meanwhile New Orleans is going through a major disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As I write they are talking about thousands being dead as the bowl that is New Orleans fills with water from the broken levees around it. 80% of New Orleans is under water – not good. However the Daily Post headline ‘Our Tsunami’ still does not seem appropriate.

33 and a day

Wow. I want to turn 33 all over again. What a great day so there’s a few people I want to thank.

First up a big thanks to the weather – perfect. Sunny, warm but not too hot and a great breeze. This, combined with my new dive watch (thanks dad, Kate & Abby) proved the perfect incentive for the first trip to Coney Island since 2001 – had it really been that long? Wow. Guess it must have as they’ve done over the subway station there and it looks awesome.

Wandering along the boardwalk is an intense visual feast – people of all shapes, size and dis-robement wandering around. the interplay of characters who have been there for years, selling things, watching people and just enjoying the sun is amazing. In fact it was slightly unnerving to be there without a camera since it broke without warning on Friday night. One minute there was a totally working Canon S30, the next – nada. Zip. Bupkiss. The camera just stopped and no attempt at turning it on/off, taking out batteries, sliding random things or anything seemed to bring it back. Hmm.

Being back on the beach really felt good. My last beach trip was out to the Hamptons back in September the previous year – too long. Just hearing the sea break against the shore made me feel happy. Jumping into the sea and playing in the waves felt so good – according to my Mosquito it was a lovely 24 degrees in the shallows and the water was 0.7m deep. Swimming 20m killed me completely – a far cry from my 18th birthday swimming in the olympic pool in Chamonix where I did a length for each year without straining. Hmm. No body surfing in that pool though. Give it a few days and hurricane Katrina will be passing by so there may be some crazy surf to play in.

Heading out from the beach – a sad moment with some beautiful views of the fairground as the sun set – we stopped to get nathan’s hot dogs for that proper tourist moment then headed back to the ‘burg. Being at the beach had reminded me of thailand yet they’re both so different – all Thailand had next to most of the beaches was palm trees and small huts, although I’d imagine that since the tsunami a lot of those places are gone, replaced by bigger developers with money for ugly concrete hotels. Dinner the night before at Sweetwater had also reminded me of Thailand, their back garden is wooden slats, with a beautiful tree hanging down across triangular shaped sun shades – the whole effect was just like so many places in Thailand on the beach and it really made the evening.

Back in the ‘burg we met up with John and Jemma for dinner at aurora, a great italian with a garden and an apparent dislike for lighting. Then back over to supreme trading for drinks in their courtyard – the weather was still holding out so getting the chance to be outside so much was just perfect. Then there may have been some drinking. And then maybe some more. Finally we all piled over to Union Pool for the final beer garden of the night. Finally the bar closed at 4 and my extended birthday celebration was over.. although I’m considering playing the ‘birthday weekend’ card today. Nice!

Thanks to everyone who came out to play – it was great to see you all on what was possibly the only night you’ll ever see me without a camera. Today’s task: camera shopping – thanks to mum, nan & Henry for that. And a big thanks to Miette for putting up with me all day – you roque.

Shake it like an ironic hipster

Ah bless, the ‘mainstream’ press has picked up on a random club here in our very own Billyburg. The reason? The club is serving ironic hip hop to a mostly white clientele under the name ‘kill whitie‘. Irony, thy name is hipster. Or Mr Ironic. Take your pick.

A visit to the Tivologist

Another IT conversation thought provoker: this time it was listening to Noshir Contractor’s great talk at Mesh Forum. Mesh is a gathering that discusses the impact of social networks on the world and current developments within them, all very interesting and extremely relevant to the current ‘Web 2.0’ explosion.

Noshir made a comment that “Amazon thinks I’m pregnant, and my Tivo thinks I’m gay” based on the recommendation technology they employ on his book buying and TV watching. Obviously he meant this comment because he isn’t gay and definately isn’t pregnant, but then a thought struck me; what if his Tivo knows him better than he knows himself? I mean, Tivo has watching habits collected across thousands of people and surely some of them at least are gay. This could mean this if, on average, Dr Contractor’s watching habits match those of the gay Tivo watchers then, just perhaps, he may be gay at some level? Either that or he should cut down on watching those house renovation programs.

Obviously Dr Contractor’s comments were based on Tivo recommending shows that he perceived as ‘gay’, hence his comment. Tivo has no form for entering your sexual preference as far as I’m aware. However just imagine if it did. All this interesting social behavior, at least on TV watching habits, would be collected and you could pay Tivo for the value added service of analysing your choice of recordings and presenting a report on your deepest, darkest psyche.

The strangeness of some Amazon recommendations was something that I’d laughed at years ago whilst running the customer relationship practice at Quidnunc. One of our sales guys, who shall remain anonymous, was asking exactly what recommendation engines were – so we pulled up Amazon on his computer and pointed to the section ‘Amazon Recommends for you’. Apparently he should have been buying ‘How to please your man: sex tips for gay men from a straight women’… after a bit of red faced blustering this transpired to be due to a book he’d bought “as a joke” for his girlfriend. We all laughed at that as he flipped his hair back, left the room and went to the gym – again. In this case, Amazon had thought he was gay rather than Tivo (which didn’t exist back then) – all of which was an issue with Amazon making assumptions based on implicit actions rather than explicit actions – ie, Amazon assumed he bought that book for himself, rather than someone else.

The fad of recommendation engines seems to be making a bit of a resurgence at the moment, for example last.fm recommends ‘bands you will like’ purely on entering a single band. Pointless. Average recommendations are just wrong (on average). Even with more detailed source information recommendation engines don’t take into account why you like something – the emotional context in which your preference exists, which runs from where you first heard it, to who told you to try it through to having a great guitar sound. Where web 2.0 kicks in is with social groups that share recommendations – people you like and bond with suggest things you might like based on their own preferences. Sounds like the real world to me.

The intention is the thought

So there was I, happily running around McClaren Park when my brain spun back to an old favourite idea of mine; having photos tagged geographically so you could do really cool things like search for all photos taken around the Empire State Building, and then make an amazing time lapse film of it all. Simple really.

As I was running I realised that now, with the ever-awesome Google Maps, and the hella-cool flickr this could be so easily achieved by tagging photos with longitude and latitude, and then combining the search. A pretty simple idea all told, so with high determination I continued my run home to think about how one would build this.

Of course, like all good web ideas folk I turned to Google for a quick search to see if this had been done, which might have saved me some time on Tripsta if I’d found this at the time although my interface was cuter and Google Maps would totally work like a dream here. I digress, as my search found the quite lovely, if a bit slow, Geobloggers. Ah well, saved me some coding effort I guess. Now all I need to do is go and tag all my photos so that my stalkrs can find me… yes, that means you Natalie Portman – stay away!

Thunderous

Woo-eee! What a day of weather. New York summer storms can often be intense and sudden, but yesterday was by far the most impressive I’ve ever experienced.

The first one hit about 3.30pm, while I was out shopping in town. One minute it was a little bit overcast, the next a sheer wall of water came out of the sky. Since I was already stupidly hot and sweaty after cycling across the ‘burg bridge in 34 degrees of 90% humidity I decided to go outside and enjoy some real rain. Large drops impacted on me as I stepped outside bringing a smile to my face, and within a few minutes I was drenched.

At first the rain was pretty warm, and you could still feel the heat from the sidewalk rising up. After about ten minutes the rain changed into cold large drops which felt wonderful after all the heat. Usually at this point storms tend to stop, but this one just kept on going for about 40 minutes. Totally drenched I couldn’t actually go inside for shelter anywhere due to the excessively high air conditioning that was going on – within seconds inside I’d have probably caught hypothermia.

Then the lightning strikes began. Wow. You could hear them coming closer and closer across midtown down towards the East Village where I was. By this time I’d picked my bike back up and was walking towards the Billyburg bridge ready to head home and get dry. After a bolt of lightning hit within a few blocks of where I was, I decided that maybe going across a large metal bridge wasn’t such a bright idea.

By this point the streets were pretty much empty, with everyone huddling under whatever shelter they could find. Huge lakes of water gathered on every street corner trying to get down the over-loaded drains. Then, suddenly, it stopped. People poked their heads out from under the shelter and looked up nervously before stepping outside – some running just to make sure they made some distance before it started again. As for me, well I headed on over to the bridge on my bike which for some reason had stopped it’s usual creaking when I pedalled. No lightning strikes on the bridge thankfully, although i could see it hitting in Brooklyn about three miles away so I made sure I got over the bridge quickly.

Once home I hung everything up to dry, thanked my bag for managing to stay vaguely waterproof and settled down to recover and enjoy the much cooler weather.

Then at 7pm it started all over again – this time with the addition of gale force winds. At first I could see lightning strikes gather over Manhattan – rapid flashes hitting repeatedly around 50th street. Then the lightning crossed over the whole sky to the north and the strikes got progressively nearer. Once the rains started, pushed by a strong southerly wind, I couldn’t see much out of the window – in fact I had to make sure all my windows were crossed to stop the rain driving in.

This storm raged around my building for a couple of hours – combined with very flooded streets below, a strike of lightning again within a few blocks (probably one of the chimneys in the industrial estate) and some very strange wind effects. At one point I looked out of the window and it looked like a cloud was flying down the street at high speed; the wind was driving the moisture off the ground so hard, even while it was still raining torrentially, that a large volume of mist was being thrown up. Very eerie but cool.

Then, once again, it all stopped, but unfortunately this time the hot weather returned – I guess the storms marked a transition into and then out of a band of cooler weather. Ah well. The good news was that all of this didn’t happen on Saturday, when it would have totally ruined Marcin and Crystal’s wedding in New Jersey! Congratulations to the Bichalskis on their happy day.

At war with Ir??

Rumsfeld is all aghast at finding weapons “clearly from Iran” hidden in Iraq. Shock. Horror.

Go to war? With Iran? Well, what else could any reasonable country do? This is a threat to international freedom! Quick, to the oil-copter! I mean ‘International Freedom-Copter’!

*sigh*

Again.

In the meantime here are some happy thoughts for those of us in the world not dedicated to beating the crap out of the rest of it in order to keep their oil and war machine making buddies in business.

Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Big thanks to Karma for pointing out That Jack Johnson is playing here in NY of C on 12/13 September, in Central Park no less!

The gig’s all sold out already, but the great thing about central park summerstage thing is, well, it’s in the frikkin’ park people! Lots of memories surfing in Australia to relive at that gig f’sure. Big ups to all my Aus buds wherever you are at the mo…