The Frugal Traveler has a round up good information for those wishing to experience New York City on the cheap. They include recommendations for travel to and from the city, a range of inexpensive lodging options, and of particular interest to locals and tourists alike, inexpensive things to do while in the Big Apple. The original post drew many, many comments. There is a follow up post highlighting some of the reader recommendations for experiencing NYC without breaking the bank.
I’ll also take this opportunity to plug Tais’ Cheap and Fabulous blog, which showcases all manner of fabulousness on the cheap in New York City.
This is the scene at the bus stop on 2nd Avenue at 34th Street around 17:30 on Tuesday the 15th. Sorry, the image quality here is quite poor, but you can see how the buses are forced to stop in traffic. What you can’t see is that there are at least 3 or 4 of these police vans parked side by side (behind the one shown). I’m sure there’s a good reason for the police to be parked here with their lights flashing; I’ve seen them doing the same thing in this spot once before. But, it seems like fewer people would be inconvenienced if they set up on the other side of the avenue when they are doing whatever they are doing.
Here’s a short list of what is wrong with this picture:
- Major bus stop is blocked forcing busses to pick up and drop off in the street. If this were a better picture, you could see the woman with a cane that would have had an easier time boarding from the curb.
- Police vans backed up onto the sidewalk are blocking about half of it.
- Busses stopped in one of the travel lanes cause other street traffic to back up for blocks.
Farmville is the most popular application on Facebook. With over 70 million monthly active users, more people are playing Farmville than using Twitter. I think Twitter should fold before everybody realizes that the whole tweeting thing is a bigger waste of time than harvesting virtual crops. But, my unpopular opinions about Twitter really aren’t the point here.
Mark Newheiser posted a good story on just why Farmville is so popular and what elements keep people coming back for more (several times a day). I’m sure many game designers are looking at Farmville closely to see what “sticky” bits they can roll into their games.
Reading this made me realize that some people take these things way more seriously than I do:
I got roped into playing Farmville when my girlfriend insisted I needed to help her out and play with her. Together we worked up a spreadsheet to figure out what the profit per hour was for each crop in the game, which lead to some interesting results: unlike the other farming games that I’d encountered, trees and animals seemed to simply be an afterthought, they offered nowhere near the profitability of harvesting crops.
No wonder I never attained godfatherhood during my brief time on Mafia Wars.
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