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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Note: This is getting posted almost a week late. Sort of “forgot to hit send” on it last weekend.

I wrote a short wrap-up post for our trip to Japan. It might have some useful nuggets for travelers to Japan. Perhaps it will also serve my future self if we make a another trip there. This concludes the posting of pictures and prose from that trip. We will now resume regular programming.

Just a week shy of a year ago, I said I might want to set up a PBX system at home. Because, why not? This week, I got Asterisk running on an old Raspberry Pi. After a couple evenings of updating the OS, compiling code and configuring things, I was able to connect two softphones. Success! Now I need to get the actual phones working.

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