Tag: nyc

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Photo of snow covered trees and the Meadowport Arch in Prospect Park, Brooklyn."

The last (full) week of 2025 is in the books. That means a wrap for the 2025 weeknotes. There are enough year end review type write-ups in the world—no need to include one here. Looking forward, I hope the coming year brings some ever so slightly less interesting times. I’m not sure what that would look like. Trump and the rest of his corrupt administration out of office and in permanent exile somewhere would be a great start.

As is often the case, it is pretty quite around here since so many people are out of town. We did get a nice coating of snow just after Christmas. it was pretty good timing (unless it derailed your travel plans). All weekend felt like an extended snow day. Warmer temperatures and rain are in the forecast, so it may turn out to be the be the best sort of snow—one that melts before it gets too grimy.

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Photo taken from a NYC Subway 2 train of an 8 train across the platform.
8 train?

Aboard a downtown 2 train, I looked up and saw this 8 train across the platform. What the? I had just enough time to snap this picture before we left the station. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, there have been a few 8 lines over the years and the MTA includes an “8” on the roll signs. While this particular sign was an error, there may be 8 trains on the rails in the future.

Recently, I received the renewal notice for vintagesailors.com domain. It is an oft forgotten ecommerce site that sells t-shirts and other goods emblazoned with old sailboat logos. The site’s existence can be chalked up to me wanting a Pearson Ensign t-shirt and not being able to find one I liked.

It wasn’t much of a leap from making one t-shirt to thinking “Hey, I like this, wouldn’t everybody want one?” Of course, everybody absolutely doesn’t want one. But, a few people did, despite an almost total lack of marketing.

I say all of this because I’m going to let the domain expire and I feel like it is worthy of marking the occasion. Plus, there’s still time left to get a hat if you want one! As of 2025-12-28, the site is shut down, I can still get you a hat if you want one, just let me know.

The jukebox project is coming along. I made some good progress this week on a couple utility type things that make managing the music library much less cumbersome. I also learned a bit more about what it’s going to take to interface with vintage hardware. There’s a short write-up here: Jukebox Title Strips (and more).

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Photo of the door of a Brooklyn Firehouse with a mural of an alligator in a swamplike scene holding a fire hose in its mouth. A flaming forest and the Manhattan skyline are on the back ground of the mural. The text in the mural is "FDNY ENGINE 239 - GOWANUS GATORS". The mural is signed INDART 2024.

This swampy mural really stands out on 4th Avenue. I’m surprised I’ve never noticed it before.

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Photo of a sticker depicting a pizza box guy drawing holding a rose, with the text "New York City Democratic Socialists of America". The sticker is on the restroom wall of a Brooklyn bar and other stickers and graffiti are partially visible.
Oven fresh!

This week’s random photo comes from the wall of the men’s in an unnamed, Brooklyn bar. Regular readers will undoubtedly know the place. Glad to see that they used union printers for these stickers.

The holidays are now officially upon us. Just for fun, I’m going to keep a running count of how many times I hear All I Want for Christmas is You between now and the 25th—I think I’ll hear it at least 10 times. I broke a long-standing, personal tradition of buying nothing on Black Friday. The rationalization was that I saved hundreds of dollars on something that was truly needed (just not at this moment). While this made financial sense, dismounting my high horse is painful.

Given the long weekend, I hoped to make some progress on a couple projects. That didn’t happen, and not just because I was spending time spending money. Now, there is something to be said for rest and relaxation, but I feel like I squandered some time when I could have been establishing forward momentum.

I did manage to “fix” one thing that has been on my list though. Over the past few weeks, one or two of our jams were plagued with really poor audio quality—the musicianship was, of course, stellar. I’m not sure if it was the server configuration, or network congestion. Since I can’t do much about the latter, I updated my Jamulus server docker image with the hope that it might improve things. Rather than building from source, I’m now using a precompiled distribution. In theory, that really shouldn’t make a any difference. But, I wondered if I might be doing something wrong, especially with the dependencies. The initial test sounded great. The real test, however, comes when we all connect to jam. Wish us luck.

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Photo of a NYC Halloween Voter sticker with a drawing of a pigeon wearing a witch's hat carrying a jack-o-lantern candy pumpkin in its beak. Silhouettes of bats and a witch also appear. The text reads "HALLOWEEN VOTER 2025". There are also small white ghosts and Vote NYC logos.

Voted early again this year but didn’t make the rookie mistake of not voting on Halloween this time. Sure, they give stickers to all voters, but none can match the cool factor of the coveted Halloween sticker!

I realized that it was a year ago this week when I loaded my former sailboat on a trailer. While I miss sailing as frequently as I did when i had my own boat, it was wonderful not having to think about hauling a boat out this fall.

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