The World According to Josh

SPACE.com — Best Hubble Space Telescope Images
This site has some pretty amazing pics. Too bad Hubble will be decommissioned soon.

+josh

Tech

I got to see New York City for the first time in my 33 years. It was a brief trip, but it was enough to get the idea just how overwhelming it is. I was sent by my company to the LegalTech trade show. My boss Tony came as well. We flew into Newark, NJ and caught a train into Manhattan (Penn Station) and when you get out to the curb, it looks like this:

(You can click on the pictures to get the full sized version)

I had to get a picture in front of my favorite news channel’s big sign, of course.

We caught a cab to our hotel…

and let me just tell you…cab drivers don’t care if they’re about to hit pedestrians. They will plow right through you if you are in the street and not supposed to be there. They can change lanes very quickly and get honked at quite a bit. But it’s THE most effective way to get around quickly in Manhattan.

We then made our way to the Merrill production shop there in NYC. I wanted to see how Oleg, my couterpart there, was doing so well with blowbacks, scanning and e-discovery work. This image shows the blowback section of the production floor.

About 5 Imagerunner 105’s surround a worker who is using Zprint to do a “measley” 86K page job. These guys mean business.

Back to the city itself… we just happenned to stumble on a familiar spot in Times Square, so I had to get a photo.

We made it across the street over to the Hershey’s store and got some free samples. Yum. Later, we walked back towards our hotel and stumbled upon the Ed Sullivan theater, where David Letterman does his nightly Late Show. Had to pose there too.

Later, we asked for a median-priced steakhouse for dinner. A lady at a hotel sent us to Gallagher’s. We got there and I had a 40 dollar top sirloin steak. And that price doesn’t include a potato! Yikes! If that’s median-priced, I sure need to stay away from expensive! Tony had the 38 dollar prime rib and we were both quite happy with the quality of fod and service there.

Then the hotel room…The next morning, my view out of the room was like the following two shots:

It was very cold, but not quite as cold as it was the night before.

So we made it to the trade show, and saw a bunch of companies with which we do business, as well as others that we had yet to hear of. We collected lots of gadgets and freebies that each booth would give away. Mostly fun stuff for the kids that I brought home. One of my proudest takes was a useful keychain separator I talked our direct competition Pitney Bowes out of.

Merrill was there, in its 3-booth-wide grandeur. This picture doesn’t capture it here, but there was quite a buzz at this booth. That’s good news for our company.

After the show, it being Tony’s birthday, we went to a bar and grill a couple of blocks over and had dinner to celebrate. Tony was able to hook up with some of his friends. Here’s a shot:

The next morning, we checked out of the hotel, then hiked up to Central Park and walked around a bit amidst the snow. Upon closer inspection, we realized that much of the snow near the entryways and sidewalks was “yellow snow”. Nice. Here’s a shot of me on one of the walkway bridges with some huge buildings in the background.

We also saw children playing soccer, and we noticed an unused baseball diamond behind them. If you could see through all of the trees, you would see the rest of Central Park.

We noticed on our short hike that Carnegie Hall was just right there. THE Carnegie Hall. Wow.

Just down the street from here is the Brooklyn Diner. We stopped in there for some breakfast. It was interesting how they had little plaques of famous people’s names bolted to each booth where patrons sit. We sat at a booth where Gloria Estefan once sat, as well as Kevin Spacey and a few other I can’t remember. Our waiter mentioned to us that Sir Paul McCartney himself was just in the diner about 5 minutes before we got there, and was sitting in the booth right next to ours. Wow. That’s the closest I think I’ll ever get to a real Beatle.

We then caught a cab down to the southern tip of Manhattan to see the World Trade Center site. Here are some photos of that sobering experience.

Then a short walk towards Wall Street brought us to a lunch cart, selling yummy Mediterranean chicken gyros. I had one to go and ate it in the cab on the way to JFK airport.

From the cab, going over one of the many bridges there, we could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

That’s the last picture I took of NYC. I obviously need to go back again sometime and see the million things that I missed. But it was a quick business trip, so it had to end abruptly.

That’s about it! I (heart) NY!

+josh

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