Friday, May 28, 2004
Sprint Updates
Still having troubles with my Sprint service on the Treo 600 so I finally called the service line yesterday. They told me two interesting things.
1. Sprint had service outages the other night because too many crazy people were voting in that "American Idol" thing.
2. My phone was due for a "roaming update" - which apparently Sprint users are supposed to do once a year. I've had Sprint for about three years and this is the first I've heard of this, thank you.
I was told to dial *2 to get the update. Unfortunately I couldn't get a signal for hours - in Brooklyn or Manhattan. So I reset the phone and finally got a faint enough signal to complete the call on the second time. As soon as I got through to Sprint, it automatically told me I needed an update and was done about a minute later.
Unfortunately, I got a call right after that, and it was dropped in under 30 seconds. So now I'm supposed to take it into a Sprint store to have my Treo tested. Not happy.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Red Hook it is
Isn't it nice to have smart readers? Francis Morrone -- who teaches at NYU, leads walking tours all over the city and has just written a new book, "Brooklyn, A Journey Through the City of Dreams" -- has been kind enough to fill me in with some good info on my new neighborhood. Passing it along (with his permission, of course.)
(I love that area on the other side of the BQE. Historically, it's Red Hook. "Columbia Street District" was a name realtors started using so they didn't have to say "Red Hook." Ironically, "Red Hook" would probably be a plus nowadays.)Francis will be at Book Court in Cobble Hill next Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. with his co-author, Judith Stonehill, to celebrate the book's publication. Book Court is at 163 Court Street -- a mere block away from all those Smith Street restaurants. And while I'm plugging all things Francis, I should mention that his walking tours this weekend focus on Fort Greene and DUMBO.
If you walk around your new neighborhood, or look at a map, you'll see how the BQE, and the Gowanus Expressway, and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel all chop up the area into distinct sections. Well, none of those was there until the 1950s. That means that Carroll Gardens, the Columbia Street District, and Red Hook were all a seamless whole. Many very old Carroll Gardens (a name that didn't exist until the 1960s) will tell you they live in Red Hook. But more common among the old-timers (including those who live in what we now call Red Hook) is to say they live in "South Brooklyn." This confuses people, because on the map this isn't that far south. But it was once the southernmost part of the original City of Brooklyn, which extended south to about halfway into what we now call Sunset Park before hitting the border of the Town of New Utrecht, which later became part of the City of Brooklyn--south of South Brooklyn. ... I think you can proudly call yourselves residents of Red Hook.
Stacy Talking Kosovo Today
Just got e-mail from my friend Stacy Sullivan, who will be on WNYC this afternoon talking about her new book, "Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War."
If you're near a radio today at 3 PM, tune into WNYC, 820 AM at 3:00 PM and listen to The World. I'm on the show with the main character in my book, Florin Krasniqi.
The book officially comes out today.
Addicted to Blog
The lead story in the New York Times Circuits section is about people who are addicted to their blogs. Oddly, I know or have e-mailed with four of the people mentioned in the story. (That probably reflects less on me and more on the probability that the person doing the reporting followed links from only one page to get sources.)
Tony Pierce is prominently featured, and seeing as how I've known Tony since college, I thought I'd add a few facts that probably would have been useful for the NYT report. First, here's a little bit of what they wrote:
Mr. Pierce described the rush he gets from what he called "the fix" provided by his blog. "The pleasure response is twofold," he said. "You can have instant gratification; you're going to hear about something really good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I've written something good, it's enjoyable to go back and read it." And, he said, "like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again."Tony, you may want to know, has been this way about writing as long as I've known him and long before there were blogs. He majored in creative writing at the university's College of Creative Studies, as opposed to going the traditional route as an English major in the College of Letters & Sciences, (like I did.) Tony wanted to write all the time - and that's how we met when he showed up at the college paper and would write on just about anything you asked him to cover. For Christmas - many years in a row - Tony mailed all of us his latest collection of poetry he'd run off at Kinko's. In fact, I just grabbed "Ilka" off my bookshelf (1995) and see the bottom of the dedication page states: "nothing in this book is true." There's also an Ebony Knights condom glued to the last page.
Tony should be getting paid to write fulltime, but he wants to be able to say "fuck" whenever he sees fit, and that doesn't fit in with a lot of companies' business plans. So at least for Tony, I think it's not the blog that feeds his habit, since he had the habit before the blogs came along.
There's also this from the NYT story:
Now Mr. Pierce's blog, a chatty diary of Hollywood, writing and women in which truth sometimes mingles with fiction, averages 1,000 visitors a day.Well, OK, whatever. Truth does mingle with fiction on Tony's blog, especially since he says "nothing in here is true" at the top of the blog. There is some true stuff in there, but he also has a running story about working for a secret government agency, the XBI, and flying a chopper all over Los Angeles fighting crime. Though I suspect some readers read that line and assumed he just gets his facts wrong sometimes.
I'm interested to see if Tony writes his behind-the-scenes report about being interviewed for this story. He called me a couple days ago wanting to know if he really had to tell the NYT some irrelevant personal information they were pressuring him to reveal. Ultimately they backed down.
In case you're still wondering who else I know in the story - and by extension you dear readers might know, here they are: Jeff Jarvis, who works in the giant Conde Nast building on Times Square and has been known to brag about blogging from church; Jocelyn Wang, who you may recall was a key player in that funny little photoblogging story of mine that took place in line for Producers tickets; and finally there is Tom Lewis, or TomDog, another "active user" (like me) at Buzznet.
And, OK, one last thing from the NYT story, though I don't want to admit how true this is:
Some compulsive bloggers take their obligation to extremes, blogging at the expense of more financially rewarding tasks.
Mr. Wiggins has missed deadline after deadline at Searcher, an online periodical for which he is a paid contributor.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Subway Camera Ban in Question
Looks like there's a little he said/she said going on in regards to the origin of the proposal to ban cameras in NYC subways. From a story in Newsday:
But they want to give the police wide discretion in enforcement, akin to the city's response to jaywalking. "It's a discretionary thing with the cops," said one high-ranking transit official.Anyone ever seen an NYC cop tell someone not to jaywalk, let alone ticket for it?
Know Your Nabe
This week's Gotham Gazette suggested Web links focus on good spots to research New York City neighborhoods. It will get you to a nifty site run by the Municipal Art Society, and then to the NYC Building site where you can check the violations at your building. Useful for those doing apartment hunting, I suppose.
Netflix Goes to 500 - and Stops
Following up on the Netflix Neurosis topic from last week, Sarah Goldmann notes in my comments below that the you can't add more than 500 movies to your Netflix queue. She asks, basically: Are they crazy?
I got the message "Sorry, you have reached the maximum Queue size." today when I tried to add a movie to my Netflix queue. 500 movies. Why do they do that? What does it cost them to have my imaginary queue grow and grow? I know I may not live long enough to see all of these movies...at 3 a week I am still looking at 3.2 years to see all of them, but now that my queue is full I have lost one of my favorite pasttimes. It is in their best interests to let us add to our queues ad infinitum...when us flix-heads are fiddling with our queues at work it is good advertising for Netflix!I think she's probbaly right about this. I think the "queue" is an incredibly great way to build loyalty. Why would you switch to a new Blockbuster service - even if it's cheaper - if you've already invested a big chunk of time selecting the movies you want to see at Netflix.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Blog Survey Results
Henry's survey of blog readers came back with some interesting results you may want to check out. More than 17,000 people took the survey, but since it was a self-selecting group, you need to take the results with a grain of salt. To paint with a broad brush, the biggest chunk of blog readers are men over 30 who make at least $60,000. When they shop online, they're most likely going to buy books, and of the magazines they get at home, the New Yorker and Economist are the most popular titles. Lots of interesting nuggets in there.
New Curb
I'm pleased to report the husband and I signed a lease last night for a new apartment. We'll be in a 2-bedroom at the edge of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The most exciting bit is that it has a deck out back -- big enough that the current tenant has a BBQ out there.
To be precise, it turns out we'll be living in the Columbia Street Water Front District.
We found it though Craigslist, and paid no broker fee. The building's owner lives one floor above us, so things look good. It also means we will become F train riders. Or if we're feeling crazy, the Water taxi is just a short bus ride away.
The thing about looking is that it makes you delve into neighborhoods you don't know much about. My hairdresser gave me the big sell on Greenpoint last week, and a girlfriend from college recently bought in Fort Greene and she loves it. For the past two years we've been in Park Slope and unfortunately had never spent much time in Fort Greene eventhough it's less than a 10-minute bus ride. In addition to the brownstones and funky old mansions, there are some awesome churches and schools and a Masonic temple that if you plopped them into any medium-sized city in the country they'd be considered major landmarks. I also saw an old building -- which looked recently renovated and possibly turned into a four-family residence -- that had what appeared to be an original stone sign out front: Gotham Home for Old Ladies.
We had lunch at A Table on Lafayette and Adelphi. Nice little French place with big sturdy tables and outdoor seating. Very comfy, nice food, and service slow enough to remind you Saturday afternoons aren't made to be rushed through.
So, as it happens we'll actually be closer to Smith Street for our dining options, but Fort Greene was indeed something of a surprise.
While I'm at it, I need to point my New York readers to Curbed, the new real estate site launched by Lockhart Steele.
Curbed looks at real estate from the outside in, taking stock of the highs and lows from the point of view of those caught up in it, buyers and sellers alike. We delight in tales of the property hunt: overcrowded open houses, frenzied brokers, bizarre interior decor, insane celebrities. And we go beyond real estate to chronicle what makes a neighborhood a place to call home: new architecture, crazy urban planning, hot new restaurants, welcome newcomers.Since real estate porn is something of a sport in New York even when you're not looking to move, Curbed will become the new must-read for those who call NYC home. And if you don't live here, I'm sure it will be good for your daily you-must-be-kidding read.
Monday, May 24, 2004
Lesson One
Never ride the subway with me.
All last week, I was guaranteed that as soon as I hit the subway platform, the train I needed was just pulling out of the station. But today's Monday, so I thought maybe it was a new ballgame for me. Indeed, it was.
It starts like this:
9:50 a.m. "The train's emergency brakes were activated. It is now under investigation."
Would you believe I was in the last car of the B train between DeKalb and Atlantic -- not much unlike during the blackout when I was in the last car of the Q train between the same two stations.
There's more, but my Sprint cell phone service still isn't working, so I'm actually typing this from a Kinko's on 53rd Street. You know I had to actually use a pay phone on Madison Avenue this morning? Eww. They still cost 25 cents, by the way.
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