Tag: brooklyn

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Photo of the inside of a freight elevator. The walls and floor are painted light blue/turquoise color with black, white and orange cartoon characters. An old sign with the text "THE NATIONAL CAPACITY 6000 lbs" is painted over. There are two other signs: "CLASS A LOADING - THIS ELEVATOR DEISGNED FOR GENERAL FREIGHT LOADING" and "THIS IS NOT A PASSENGER ELEVATOR - NO PERSONS OTHER THAN THE OPERATOR AND THE FREIGHT HANDLERS ARE PERMITTED TO RIDE ON THIS ELEVATOR"

This week’s photo comes from Industry City. Every time we go, it seems to be drawing bigger crowds. This is pretty much the same statement I made when, coincidentally, we were there the exact same week last year.

This week, I decided to do a cleanup of the drafts here on the old blog. Office Space was mostly written, but never published, so I put a couple finishing touches on it and shipped it! There are a couple other posts that have been draft status for a while that I’ll get out in the coming weeks.

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It’s hard to believe that summer is upon us. Although, here in New York, it feels more like fall. I don’t ever having the heat kick on in June, but it did last night.

There are a few AI related links below. I’m conflicted about the whole thing. First of all, what gets labeled with “AI” today, while quite remarkable, is far from intelligent. I don’t even think it should be called AI yet. Perhaps I’m just being pedantic, and I believe that ship has sailed anyway. So, AI it is.

I’ve dabbled with a couple of the Large Language Models (LLM), and they are pretty damn useful for a number of things. However, the power to drive all of this is approaching crypto-mining levels of greenhouse gas production, which seems pretty short sighted. Plus, the thought of neophytes vibecoding production systems is the stuff of nightmares.

Even if AI is a bit over-hyped at the moment, it seems like it is here to stay. I just hope we remember that it is a tool and continue to treat it that way.

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I don’t have much to say this week, so it’s all about the links.

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Photo of a plaque on a blue wall with square, gray paving stones below. The text engraved on the plaque is: "City of New York Department of Plant and Structures, Transmitter House for Radio Station WNYC, F.H. La Guardia - Mayor, F.J.H. Kracke - Commissioner, 1936, Constructed by Works Progress Administration.
Plaque at the old WNYC Transmitter House – Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

NYC Congestion Pricing Data is being published by the MTA. Sadly, there have been many reports of government data becoming unacceptable over the last couple weeks. So, it’s nice to see a new dataset available. Go forth and visualize!

We took a trip to Greenpoint on Saturday. I say “a trip” because it involved a ride on the G train (running in two parts this weekend, even more exciting!), which makes it feel farther away than it really is. We took a walk around WNYC Transmitter Park. The old, WPA-constructed transmitter house is still there, but there are no vestiges of the old towers.

It was a successful trip, we returned with a very affordable ($6!) Bob James/David Sanborn record I’d been looking for (courtesy of Captured Record Shop), a Bodega Kitties mystery box (from myplasticheart), and an apple fritter the size of my head (from Moe’s Doughs).

After a couple weeks off, our regular jam session was back on. None of us have been practicing, but despite the rust, we didn’t sound too bad. It did serve as a reminder to try to pick up that bass a few times during the week though.

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Photo of the band for Marky Ramone's 2024 Holiday Blitzkrieg in front of a rehearsal stage. From left to right: Tommy Victor, Marky Ramone, Craig Setari, Pela SCB.
2024 Holiday Blitzkrieg lineup. Photo credit: @markyramoneofficial on Instagram.

Our Japan trip concluded with my longest Thursday ever, about 32 hours. While there were a couple naps involved, I managed to stay up for Marky Ramone’s Holiday Blitzkrieg at the Gramercy Theatre, and a night cap. If it wasn’t for the show, I would have crashed by 5:30 PM.

The Marky Ramone show was a blast. They played pretty much non-stop for over an hour and a half. That’s a lot of songs when most of them are in the sub two minute range. It was great to see a lot of mature fans in the audience. By that, I mean (well) over forty, which includes me. Keep on rocking folks. And, thanks to Kenny for the ticket!

Now I’m preparing myself for what awaits at work after three weeks out of the office. Should be fun!

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