unwiredben

Just a reminder to you all that we've got some great classes coming up at NYC Resistor.

First, this Saturday, Raphael is teaching about the wonders of the Joule Thief!  It's a class about how to pull every bit of current possible out of little batteries. If you want to run something for a long time, check this out.  Details at http://joulethief.eventbrite.com/.

On Sunday, Liz and Ryan are leading an Arduino workshop where you get to solder up a Freeduino kit and then make it do amazing things.  If you want to get your hands dirty, this is the class to take.  There are just a few slots left for this one. http://arduino101.eventbrite.com/

On Sunday, November the 8th, Chris is teaching "CPUs 0b1100101: Intro to computer processors".  We've been talking about it here on the list -- it's all about computer architecture and how those chips that power your computers and devices work. http://cpus.eventbrite.com/

I'm very excited about the Build Your Own Retrocomputer class on November 12th.  Vince Briel is coming in from afar to lead a session where you can build one of his kits, including the Replica 1, a clone of the original Apple I.  It's way cooler than having an iPhone. There also will be a bit of an intro on the Parallax Propeller chip that's used in both the PockeTerm and Replica 1 included.  Details at http://retrocomputer.eventbrite.com/.

Finally, I'm teaching my popular Webduino class again on November 22nd, just before Thanksgiving.  Won't time with your family go even faster when you've got an Arduino acting as a webserver in your home? Come to the class and find out how you can make it happen.  It's online at http://webduino.eventbrite.com/.

These classes are fun, and they help keep NYC Resistor alive and in our great space in downtown Brooklyn.  Come down and learn.

Yesterday, GM declared bankruptcy. They did it from the 25th floor of the GM Building. Annelies works about ten floors above that. She was told the avoid the 25th floor on Monday.

This story from the Gothamist has a nice picture of the very tall building. It's the only skyscraper in New York that fills up a whole city block.

I wonder if there's a connection with us getting rid of our cars and GM (and Chrysler) going under? I expect that if we'd stayed in a place where we needed cars, we'd probably not be considering any current GM cars. I'm a guy who bought two cars in my life, both Saturns. They gutted that brand and its promise and they failed to deliver better technology and more efficient vehicles. I hope the best for those affected by the collapse of that manufacturing area, but I think I agree with Robert Reich in Salon: "...in many ways, what has been bad for GM has been bad for much of America. The answer is not to bail out GM. It is to smooth the way to a new, post-manufacturing economy."

By the way, the GM Building hasn't been owned by General Motors for a while. According to the Wikipedia article, it was sold back in 1998, and currently is owned by real estate funds primarily financed in Kuwait, Qatar, and Dubai. You still get paper badges with a GM logo on them when you visit.

BTW, if you're up here in New York and want to learn about making embedded devices that act like web servers, I'm teaching a two hour class on the subject on March 28th at NYC Resistor. After the class, I'll be putting my materials online, but I'm still working on everything right now.

You can get details on the class at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/302042417.

Work continues with Mozilla.  We're about to go into a week of testing on the first beta release of Fennec for the Nokia N810.  I've got one major patch that should be in this release.  I've been working in the JavaScript code that acts as the front-end of the browser.  We had a problem that we could drag around the content of the page, but lists that were in the chrome around the page, like the URL suggestion list or the bookmark list, couldn't be moved.  My patch moved the drag handling to a higher level so it can be used to handle both cases.  Most of the implementation strategy came from Stuart and Mark, but I did the actual grunt work of writing the code and getting it to run correctly.

I really like the Mozilla review process.  Basically, I do work on my own machine and post it as a proposed patch to the bug.  Other people on the team get a change to review the change, and if they like it, they give it a thumbs up.  If they have issues, they post them back to the bug, I fix them, and produce a new patch.  Once the reviews are all accepted, the change gets landed in the source repository, and it goes into the next official build.

Outside of Mozilla, I've started doing some work with a new hacker group here in New York called HTINK.  The h is silent, so it's pronounced like "tink", and makes me a htinker.  We've got a big workshop we're doing here in NYC on March 14th where we'll be building lots of Arduino-compatible microcontroller boards and hooking them up to RGB LEDs and robot servo motors.  There's more stuff being discussed later in the year too.  I'm also working on material for an Arduino web server workshop where I'll show how to hook up one of the boards to your Ethernet and run a simple server on it so you can read sensors or change outputs.  That class will happen at NYC Resistor, probably in early April.

I've been very lax about writing. In part, it's been because I've been busy and I can't talk about work things here. It's also because a lot of the general "what am I doing" stuff is now showing up in my Facebook profile.

Kittens
Velco and Magnolia continue to get bigger, but they're staying very cute. I think they're getting more cuddly as they grow up, although they still have their wild kitten fight times. We're letting them around the house more, although my office is still a no-cat zone and probably will remain that way for the foreseeable future. They just had their last vaccinations, and in March they will both get spayed. They sleep with us in the evening, although that does lead to some interesting bedtimes; last night, one of them kept attacking my toes under the cover, and it got really annoying. Usually, they're quite nice, and they often curl up and nap on our laps when we're watching TV in the main room.

Electronics
I've taken up electronics and microcontrollers as a new hobby, mostly inspired by the antics of Brooklyn's own NYC Resistor hackerspace. I've taken a few classes there where I made some programs run on an Arduino board, then I ordered myself a soldering iron and some kits and made all of those. The immediate feedback of having code you write run on a board and control basic electronics is really great, and there's enough momentum with sources like Make Magazine. I'm fortunate to have always had a small interest in this, but I never could get over the hump of designing circuits. I think I've finally found the right combination of development hardware and support network to get me into the game.

My favorite project so far has been a solder-it-together board called the Mignonette. It's a small AVR Atmega88 microcontroller with four push buttons as inputs and a 5x7 LED matrix display. It came preloaded with a test application and simple "Munch" game. Last night, I got the TinyUSBISP programmer that I built from a kit to work and loaded up another game, Attack. I'm in the middle to taking the source for Attack and converting it into a dice roller application that uses the four buttons to let you pick a die type, pick a multiplier (for doing 3d6, for example), and roll the die. Of course, I'd make it play some sort of beep over the speaker while it's rolling so no one rolls without being noticed.

Christmas Celebration
Annelies and I stayed in New York for Christmas, but we were in contact with our families. On Christmas Eve, we used Skype to do a video call with my mom, dad, and aunt back in Georgia and we opened presents over the webcam. Annelies got us a microwave oven for the kitchen, something I think we'd both been secretly craving. My dad made some gorgeous wood stands that he shipped up here. I got a printer stand for the desk that lets me use the room above my laser printer in the corner of my desk, while Annelies got an amazing music stand that rests on the edge of a bookshelf and lets her see her sheet music while she's practicing the violin.

We cooked a nice Christmas dinner for each other with Annelies making some delicious baked macaroni and cheese, and me making braised collard greens with garlic and onion. We've been doing a fair amount of cooking together, often inspired by the great selection of produce we can get at the Park Slope Co-op. Just last night, we made portabella mushroom soba noodles with roasted beets and turnips in a red wine reduction.

Family Travel
I got my sister an airline ticket to New York for her Christmas present. She's going to be coming here in mid-January for a week in the city away from the darkness of Copenhagen. I'm very excited to be taking here around and getting a chance to do some tourist stuff that I don't normally do. We don't have a formal plan, but she'll be here on January 20th during the presidential inauguration, so I'm sure we'll find a party that evening to attend.

I saw this last weekend while out on a walk. This is one of four water fountains in a little park in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Our debate watching skills and eagerness to be brief pundits earned Annelies and me a brief moment on a German internet news site, zoomer.de.  We're the first of many Pacific Standard bar patrons to be interviewed.  You can't really hear my voice, so I hope the translation is correct.  Yes, I wish I actually looked at the camera when I talked; it looks like I'm rolling my eyes the entire time when I really was looking at the face of the interviewer.  Annelies did much better with that.

Here's a link to the automatically translated version of the page courtesy of Google, although they don't seem to grab the comments so I can't tell what people are saying about us.

By the way, the bar we were at is called Pacific Standard.  They're about ten blocks down 4th Avenue from our apartment, and so far I find them to be pretty cool.  They've got team pub quizes on Sunday nights, and it looks like we're going to try to make a team with friends up here for their new season.  Any suggestions for team names?  When we went and played one night as a duo, we were SWxNE (Southwest by Northeast), but I don't think that moniker is long for the world.

Last night, I went to a debate viewing party out in Manhattan with some of Annelies' law school friends.  It was a lot of fun, and we headed back to Brooklyn via the subway.  The B train was taking forever to get to the West 4th station, so we grabbed the second F train, since it stops about twelve blocks from our apartment.

We got some seats, and there was a man sitting next to us that looked very familiar, but I dismissed it.  The train got delayed while police were called to remove someone from the tracks up ahead, and while we were waiting, the man asked if we were from Austin.  I guess the KOOP radio t-shirt and SXSW bag gave me away.  I said yes, and asked him if he was Jerm Pollett, and he said yes.  It was very surprising.

Jerm has been around Austin for a while with several notable projects including the band The Total Foxes and the comedy group The Sinus Show.  I first started going to his productions almost ten years ago and usually had a really good time, so it was weird but cool to be talking with him in the middle of a subway tunnel in New York.  Annelies and I introduced ourselves, I named dropped <lj user="poyboy"> and the Show With No Name, and I found out that he'd just arrived in town that day and was looking for a room to rent. We couldn't help with that, but we did give him some suggestions for some theater spaces that might be amenable to doing his kind of comedy.  Alas, I found out the sad truth about the lack of an Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn; there's a long-standing New York City law that prohibits a movie theater from selling alcohol.  I think I'm going to write some letters soon!

Anyway, it was very cool to see a fellow recent Austin-to-New-York transplant. I look forward to seeing what he does with his comedy career up here, and hope we get to hang out sometime.

With a new location, I get to start a new blog.  Tonight, I registered and set up Veg Out! Brooklyn, the followup to my successful Veg Out! Austin site.  That one has been taken over by lizardprincess who will start adding her own content soon.  The Brooklyn site is trying some different things, with the only categories being "News" and "Reviews", and everything else being done with tags.  I've got my first review up for a little cafe called the Perch Cafe. 

For the geeks out there, I formatted all the contact information using the hCard microformat so browsers and other tools can automatically recognize that there's an address on the page.  I installed the Operator plugin for Firefox, and it recognized the hCard right away, giving me the option of adding it to my address book or mapping it on Google.

I'm not going to publicize the new blog much until I can get some more content on it; I've been enough cool places in the last week to get started, but I won't really have time to write more until I get to California on Wednesday.

We moved into the new apartment on Monday, and the last week has been a flurry of activity in getting everything setup.  The first few days were spent getting some essentials, but the big fun started on Friday morning when the movers arrived with all of our stuff.  It arrived in fairly good condition, and we've not noticed anything missing yet that we did not later find.  We made lots of walking trips to Costco, Target, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  I got renter's insurance and a ZipCar membership for doing errands.  We even had our first houseguest on Saturday night.

I'm afraid our life is looking suspiciously like the entries in http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/.  Park Slope will do that to you.  However, we've been mixing it up.  Saturday, when we were walking to lunch, we made up a game where I'd get points for every stroller, and Annelies would get points for every dog we passed.  I got off to an early 4 to 1 lead, but she came from behind on the walk back to the apartment to win the match.  I'm not sure how to count babies that are strapped to the parent in a Baby Bjorn contraption; if I'd gotten those points, it would have been a tie.

We saw Kristen Schaal (the fan Mel on Flight of the Conchords) and Kurt Braunohler perform on Saturday night amid the downpour from Hurricane Hannah.  Here's a clip of one of the bits they did, although I think our version actually went a ltitle longer.

I just found this article about the future of movie theaters and there's a particularly useful bit of info:

At Alamo Drafthouse, an 11-year-old Austin-based chain with seven locations, every other row of seats has been replaced with café tables, and customers can write orders for pizza and microbrews on slips that are silently picked up by black-clad waiters. The company is in negotiations to open theaters in large markets like New York and Los Angeles by late next year, with the goal of having 200 screens by 2012.

Very exciting! Now, the NYC location, if it happens, will probably be more like Lake Creek than the Ritz, but that's still better than the usual movie experience. Very cool!

In a previous entry, I mentioned New York City as playing a major role in the upcoming year. Here's an elaboration.

My wonderful girlfriend of almost two years, Annelies, is about to head to Africa for her last semester of law school. She's going over to Tanzania to work with the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, leaving in late January and returning in May. She'll be stationed in Arusha, the large city near Mt. Kilimanjaro. I'm planning on traveling out to Africa at the end of her internship and spend a little time there with her before she returned to the US.

While she's gone, I'll have lots of work to finish for Palm, plus in March, I'll have the 2008 SXSW festival. I'm doing the Palm OS schedule again, although I hope that we got enough infrastructure changes into the program last year so that we don't have to add more hacks to deal with the ever increasing number of events.

The next two months will be spent with Annelies preparing for the New York State bar, which is at the end of July. She'll be able to study for it here in Austin, but she'll have to fly up to Rochester to actually take the two-day exam. She won't know the results for a while after that.

I've also got my sister's wedding to attend at the end of July. I get to be a groomsman, and I really like her fiance.

After that, we'll start our rental search in NYC. We want to find a nice place in Brooklyn near the main subway line that goes to her law firm in Manhattan where she has a job waiting for her in their litigation department. Since I already work remotely for Palm, I expect that I'll continue to work for them once I move; the big change will be that my flights to California will take a few more hours each way and I'll have to deal with lousy JFK instead of the more hospitable AUS. At least I can do a red-eye back to New York.

We're planning on not having a car up there. Going car-less worked well for us this summer during our trial run; we rented a car once to go to an out-of-town wedding, and almost every place delivers there, although we might have to rent out a truck for a day to do some IKEA and Costco runs.

The move will happen sometime in August or early September. I'm excited about my new adventures up in the big city, but I'm also sad that I'll be leaving Austin as my home. However, Austin won't leave my heart; I'm already planning on coming back every March for SXSW as long as I'm able. I've still got a while here, including some time where I'll be on my own, so I'm going to take advantage of as much of the city as I can before I leave.

scottbateman is a cartoonist and animator who is pretty active here on the LJ. I first got into him a couple of years ago when he was doing a lot of political cartoons, then I started following his Sketchbook of Shame postings and watching his experiment in daily Flash animation, the Bateman365 project. He even animated a voice recording I made for one of the 365 entries.

He's got a new self-published DVD out called "Scott Bateman: Re-animator" featuring about 30 different animations made in the last year. I got my disc in the mail today and watched a few this evening, and they looked and sounded very ncie. While you can watch them online, they're beautifully recreated at high resolution here, and you get a unique hand-drawn cover by Scott with the disc. I highly recommend getting one for yourself and maybe one to give to a special person by going to http://www.batemania.com/2007dvd.html. It's only $15. If you like "Flight of the Conchords", there's a great story about Andrea Rosen flubbing an audition for them, and another bit features the actress that plays Mel on the show animated as a tower-building and kitten-hating femme-bot. There's also a few cool Scottmanimated music videos on the disc, including one by Sarah Shannon, the former singer for Velocity Girl.

For a few days, I'm back in Austin... there's more travel coming soon, but nothing that will have me away for months at a time.

It's been a bit odd getting readjusted to life in suburbia. The distance from my house to the nearest shop (the Texan Mart) is about seven NYC city blocks, and the shop is far inferior to most of the not-so-great delis that were on Broadway or Amsterdam. Less foot traffic means fewer sales which means less selection and higher prices which means the store isn't very attractive. The distance between here and the closest eatery is about twelve blocks, and that's either the not-very-veggie Cool River or the not-that-great Bear Creek, and both of those require long walks through parking lots filled with cars that don't know what to do with pedestrians.

On the other hand, I've been really enjoying the local food that I've gotten to by car since arriving: Food Shui, Kerbey Lane, Alamo Drafthouse, Chuy's, and TacoDeli! I also got a jar of homemade pickles in the mail from my friend Jessi yesterday... I had a few last night, and they're spicy and delicious. I had some good food up there, but I like things better here.

(originally written on Monday morning... just pulled off my Foleo and posted now)

I'm sitting on my JetBlue flight back to Austin, and I had a few more memories about New York that I wanted to write down.

In my last posting, I forgot to talk about our trip out to Coney Island. I'm glad I went, because redevelopment in the area may mean that this is the last summer with Astroland. A developer bought the land, and the rumor is that they're boosting the rent for the amusement park from $160,000 a year to $3 million.

We took the train out the Brighton Beach and walked down the boardwalk for a ways. Brighton Beach was interesting for its dense Russian population. Many signs were in Cyrillic, and Annelies had to translate some of the text for me. She was really excited to see women selling lots of different kinds of fried dough from little carts.

The boardwalk was long and not in the best repair. There were many uneven boards, and you always felt light you might just step through a hole and lose a limb to the structure. We took care to walk near the middle at one of the support beams just to have a little more wood under our feet.

Astroland was just as I expected, a dirty carnival with rigged games, cheesy rock music, and lots of nasty food. I glanced at the arcade, but I didn't see much in the way of classic video games. The highlight was the Cyclone, the 80-year old wooden roller coaster. We got a car in the middle-rear of the train, sat on the stuffed seats and pulled in the lap bar for an exciting and jerky ride. It wasn't quite as intense as the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, but it had more character.

To end our trip, we walked over to Nathan's and got a plate of crinkly french fries, served with some excellent mustard and two long red plastic forks. There wasn't any free seating, so we found space outside on the sidewalk and ate the fries standing up, swapping between holding drinks and fries. We then walked out the pier and watched men send metal baskets with raw chicken to the bottom of the bay to catch little crabs.

It was great. Hopefully, Coney Island will get a reprieve, but if not, I'm glad I got to see it before it's gone.

More recently, we headed up to Vermont for a wedding. Two of Annelies' friends from college got hitched after seven years of dating in a very pretty ceremony at a rural farm school. We got to help with the setup and breakdown, and I got to run the MacBook and iPods that provided music for the various parts of the evening. I got to spend a lot of time with Ani's friends from school, and there were many car rides of hysterical laughter.

We got back to the city on Sunday afternoon, and for our last night, we went out for Aghani food. The restaurant was lovely, with low tables where you sat on cushions. I really liked the spicy chutney, and the kudu (pumpkin-filled pockets served with yogurt sauce) was quite excellent. While eating, the NYC police closed off the block by the restaurant to traffic. I'm not sure why, but I did see a street sweeper pass by once before it was reopened.

I've been lax writing about my New York visit for the last few weeks since getting back from LinuxWorld in San Francisco. It's been a very busy time here in Morningside Heights. Annelies finished her summer associateship and has been working on papers for school during the day, and I've been busy with a lot of detailed work on speeding up the video playback on the Foleo.

We've been to a lot of cool restaurants. Just this evening, we headed over to downtown Brooklyn to visit Grimaldi's for some very yummy pizza. They've got a coal-fired oven that gets up to about 850 degrees, and it makes the crust really nice, crisp and chewy. They don't skimp on excellent toppings either.

On Saturday, we headed down to Chinatown to go to Vegetarian Dim Sum House, a place that serves all veggie dim sum (duh!) It was a bit of an adventure; I really loved the hot-and-sour soup, but some of the other items were a bit mushy and odd tasting. It was nice to have "pork" bun finally, and the place was hopping.

We also got to see some of the FringeNYC festival pieces. The first was "Galatea", an interesting take on Pygmalion, but its clunky takes on science and Buddhism and trite ending made us view it as a failed experiment. The better work was "Helmet", a videogame-themed take on the relationship between a troubled teen and a video-game store owner. It made clever use of gaming tropes and had sharp dialog and a lot of action.

There were more interesting food adventures. I recommend both Cafe Viva Natural Pizza on north Broadway and Hangawi, a really nice vegan Korean restaurant near the Empire State Building in Koreatown. I also really like the local bar and grill up here, The Heights, with their second floor dining room and great veggie-friendly lunch specials.

Finally worth noting: Nussbaum & Wu. It's a deli and bakery just a couple of blocks from year that makes lots of really delicious bagels. I've discovered the wonder of a good egg and cheese bagel; I'll have my last one (for now) this morning before we head out. They've helped me appreciate how good bagels can be.

I fly back to Austin on Monday. I really do love New York, and I don't think I'll wait another 33 years to return.

What have I been up to? Lots.

Last Tuesday, I went down by myself to the Upright Citizen's Brigade theater for Harold Night. This packed show had five of their improv teams all doing half-hour long interconnected skits from a single audience suggestion. I really liked the venue and the friendly vibe, and I'll probably go back down this coming Tuesday to see more stuff.

Last Thursday, we had a sneak peak for the Foleo at the Palm Store at Rockefeller Center. It was fun for me; I love meeting potential customers for the product and getting their feedback. Some of their requests were a bit out there, but a lot of them are feeding into our future plans. They had some good food there, then after the event, I went out with the Palm folk to El Cid, a Spanish tapas restaurant downtown at 14th and Broadway that was quite nice.

On Friday, I stood in line with lots of parents and little kids to get book 7 of the Harry Potter series. On Tuesday morning, about 3AM, I finished the book. In the middle of all the reading, Annelies and I headed to Brooklyn where we had a wonderful birthday celebration meal at the Four Course Vegan supper club, a really intimate dinner with a bunch of cool strangers at Chef Matteo kitchen space. I loved the corn pudding and the radish ravioli, but all of the food had something to recommend it. On Sunday, Ani and I rented a car and drove out to Massachusetts to attend a friend's wedding. It was about four hours each way, but the wedding was very nice, and my new dress shoes worked out quite well.

On Wednesday, I met Annelies at work, then we headed down to the East Village where we had dinner at a Moroccan cafe, then we headed to the Bowery Ballroom to see Les Chauds Lapins, a very cute quintet playing French jazz hits from the 1920's and 30's. They were followed by this group called They Might Be Giants that I think some of you might know. They're really old, so old that their show was mainly songs from the early 1990s. They had some new ones, but I only knew the words to the classic stuff. Seriously, I really enjoyed their show -- it's the fifth time I've seen TMBG in concert, and they're always great. Highlights were Flans wearing a giant drum for a rousing version of "Whistling in the Dark" including a confetti cannon that dumped lots of shredded paper on me, the whole band performing the "Fingertips" suite, and all the back-and-forth between the two Johns about how some fan said they weren't having enough fun on stage.

Earlier this evening, I went to the prom. Well, not exactly -- it was the summer formal for the law firm where Annelies is working this summer. It was a private party at the Museum of Natural History and it had a safari chic theme. Despite not having a suit with me in NYC, I ended up being one of the best dressed men there through some creative costuming -- I found a great white silk blazer at Filene's Basement along with some white silk pants, so I added a real pith helmet I found at a costume shop in midtown. I got lots of compliments. The party was nice -- they had a buffet setup in the room with the stuffed elephants, while there were bars and casino night stations setup in the huge lobby with the dinosaur skeletons. I was really impressed by the displays, so I'll have to go back before I leave town. Alas, since the event was in the evening, I learned the hard way that the events of "Night at the Museum" are probably not true. Annelies looked very pretty in a black and white print dress, and I got to meet lots of her law firm summer associate colleagues.

This weekend another friend comes into town, so we'll likely try to go out to Coney Island for roller coasters and freak shows. Next week I head to California for LinuxWorld. The fun never stops.

Since I last updated, I've spent a long week working towards the Summer release of the Foleo mobile companion. I'll be at the Palm Store at Rockefeller Center this Thursday night with a bunch of marketing people doing a sneak peek of the device.

Tuesday night, we went to a cute cafe called Josie's at Amsterdam and 74th Street. Apparently, they started as a vegetarian diner but have added natural-raised meats to their menu in recent years. The beet salad we shared was quite good, but I found my lentil loaf disappointing until I added some lemon juice to it.

After that, we met one of Ani's law firm friends and then saw the midnight screening of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoneix" at the AMC Loews at 67th. I really enjoyed the movie, and I thought it caught the emotional arc of the story well, without being as much of a "favorite scenes" movie as "The Goblet of Fire". We had to catch a cab back uptown because the 66th Street metro station was closed at 2:30 in the morning.

On Thursday, we got visitors, with Gretchen and Travis (Annelies's sister and her boyfriend) showing up mid-afternoon. We hung out some with them on Friday night, going to a cool French/Moroccan bistro in SoHo then ending the evening at a dive-ish bar called Milady's.

Saturday was a big tourist day for me. We caught a torturous #1 train heading south at a very slow pace because of construction, got off at Chambers St, walked down to the Hudson River where I got to see Ground Zero, then took the Staten Island Ferry both ways to get a view of the city and the Statue of Liberty.

Later that afternoon, we walked up to SoHo and the East Village where I finally got to go to Moo Shoes, the vegan shoe shop. I got a pair of Earth Vegan shoes for walking and some fancy Oxfords for going to events. We then headed up towards Tompkins Square and had dinner at Crif Dogs and Pomme Frites. The later was super yummy with us trying out the rosemary-garlic mayo, Irish curry, and parm peppercorn dipping sauces with a large order of freshly cooked Belgian fries.

We just saw Gretchen and Travis off to the airport, and we're preparing for an afternoon at the Met, the huge art museum on the east side of Central Park. More adventures to come this week, including the rental of a car next Sunday to take us up to a wedding in Massachusetts.

So, my first week isn't officially over until Wednesday night, but I don't anticipate anything big until later this week, so I figured I'd do a wrap-up now.

I got in on Wednesday, the 4th, on a pleasant flight into JFK on JetBlue. Annelies found me at the airport and we took a cab into Manhattan to the apartment, a 2 bedroom flat on 114th street next to the Columbia University campus.

That first night, we went out into the city, with me taking my first ride on the NYC subway system. Dinner was at a vegan organic restaurant called Caravan of Dreams where we had walnut and sundried tomato pate and a variety of yummy grilled vegetable dishes. We were going to walk to the west side waterfront for the fireworks, but it was intermittently rainy, so we just headed back to the apartment.

On Thursday, I had my first day of working from NYC, then we went to the opening night of Austin's Salvage Vanguard Theater production of the (new and improved) "The Intergalactic Nemesis". They've done a good job with the rewrite, making it flow better and run quicker, and while the plot was familiar, there was enough new material to make it surprising.

Friday night was when Ani's friend Becca showed up. She's the one we visited in Costa Rica in January, and she's up in the states on vacation for a week. We hung out a while, but the big fun was the following day when more of Annelies' friends showed up for an impromptu Sarah Lawrence reunion. We spent the day eating brunch, visiting the huge Strand bookstore, hanging out in Washington Square, checking out a street fair, and eating dinner at Spice (a hip Thai place on University Avenue). I enjoyed the trek through the city and meeting up with her friends.

On Sunday, we went out to see Jill Sobule play at Joe's Pub. If you don't remember her, she had a minor hit in the early 90's with the song "I Kissed a Girl". She didn't perform that work, but she did lots of songs from her recent albums and some that she'd just written. It was a really fun performance, and Joe's Pub was a great, intimate setting. We had seats at a table about five feet from the stage, and after the show, I got to wait in line to say hello to Jill and get a USB dongle from Qigo that will let me download the show in MP3 format later this week.

Tomorrow, we've got tickets for a midnight show of the new Harry Potter film at the Lincoln Center AMC, then the next day, Ani's sister and her boyfriend come into town to visit. I've already identified a few shows to see and places to go. It's going to be a busy summer up here.