Macy*s Parade Studio
So I lived in Hoboken for over three years and never realized that the heart of the Macy*s Parade is maintained and nurtured in Hoboken.
From the Hudson Reporter:
For 364 days of the year, the nondescript warehouse near the city’s northern border blends effortlessly into its industrial surroundings. But for one day in mid-November, the studio abandons the shroud of secrecy that surrounds it. It invites the press and hundreds of children from the tri-state area to visit and explore.
And it all happens in the former Tootsie Roll factory. From the Weekly Reader:
Macy’s refers to its balloon experts as “balloonatics.” Once parade organizers decide on a character to put on display, the balloonatics sketch the balloon, create scale models from clay, and then construct the balloon from hundreds of sheets of polyurethane-coated nylon. The pieces of fabric are carefully sewn together to create chambers that help prevent leakage. Wires are attached to strategic areas so that balloon handlers can control the balloon. Earlier this month, the parade crew conducted test flights to make sure all the balloons—old and new—are fit to fly on Thanksgiving morning.
Now I just have to find a way for a tour of the Studio… I wonder if the son of a store employee of the year would have connections… (hint hint)
Web 2.0 History
A very interesting essay on the history and meaning of Web 2.0 by Paul Graham. You don’t always get to hear about how something got its namesake, and also get some insight regarding how this is not Bubble 2.0:
The reason this won’t turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you’ll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That’s only off by a factor of 10 or so.
And I do like the quote below when talking about a key part of Web 2.0:
what “Ajax” means is “Javascript now works.”
But what makes Web 2.0 so interesting to me is the non-technical aspects:
Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? … But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it’s meant to be used. The “trends” we’re seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble..
And of course Google fits into the mix:
Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms, “Don’t maltreat users” is a subset of “Don’t be evil,” and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.
Some China photography
I was very impressed with the photos here, so felt the need to share. Found from Reddit
Restaurant Week 2006
It’s a lovely time of year, Restaurant Week 2006 in NYC, when you can check out some nice restaurants without breaking the bank.
Hoboken has been pretty smart to have their own during the same period, Hudson Restaurant Week, and I have checked out most of the nice places in ‘Boken.
So today I had lunch in Tribeca at 66, a Jean-Georges creation. It seems you can’t throw a rock without hitting one of his eateries (ok, a slight exaggeration and I am not encouraging vandal behavior). So this makes my third of his line, after Jean-George and Jo Jo.
The food is asian themed and the decor is very clean and fairly open, with frosted glass separating a few rooms. The beef with eggplant was tasty, but the shrimp with noodles was bland. The Thai Tea ice cream was nicely presented and tasted just like the real thing. Overall I was not impressed, the bottom of my list for J-G.
St Mary’s Hospital
New Jersey never ceases to be an interesting place to live. It was announced last week that St. Mary’s Hospital in Hoboken would be closed at the end of the year unless a buyer was found. The hospital was founded in 1863 and is currently owned by Bon Secours Health Care System.
From the Hoboken Reporter:
Bon Secours, a Catholic health care system based in Marriottsville, Md., bought St. Mary Hospital in 2000. In 2001, Bon Secours formed a partnership with Canterbury Health, the company that owns Christ Hospital in Jersey City.
But that doomed union dissolved on Dec. 31, 2004 after Canterbury alleged the Bon Secours did not disclose the true financial health of St. Francis in Jersey City and St. Mary.
According to the Star-Ledger:
A deal between UMDNJ and Bon Secours — which had been in the works for more than a year — fell flat after a federal monitor was appointed to oversee UMDNJ, where trustees admitted defrauding Medicare and Medicaid of more than $4.9 million.
So the company that was going to take over the hospital had some of its own troubles. But the story is made more interesting in that Bon Secours had also bought St. Francis Hospital in Jersey City, which has already been sold off to a condo developer. I heard from talking to some Hoboken natives that all the trouble started when St. Mary’s got into a financial partnership with another hospital in Jersey City but got tangled into their financial mess and got dragged down. So it could be that a single bad business decision doomed the Hoboken landmark.
MyStickies Goes Live
Sticky notes for the web! MyStickies let’s you put sticky notes on a web page and loads them back up when you come back to the page.
You can also tag your notes, change note colors, and manage all your notes from the free on-line account at mystickies.com.
Future features include sharing notes with friends and creating public notes.
Now Reading
I have added a new part to the site, a nifty WordPress plugin from Rob Miller called Now Reading.
Not too much exciting material since it is mostly business books for my MBA, but should grow over time.
You can also find the Now Reading page from the nav.
Web Beacons
It’s interesting that Google got so much bad press for doing contextual ads in Google Mail, but Yahoo’s Web Beacons don’t seem to raise much of a stink. As far as I know, Google does not track users beyond its sites.
A bit of description from the wiki for web bugs:
A Web beacon is an object that is embedded in a Web page or email and is usually invisible to the user but allows tracing the browsing behaviour of the user. Alternative names are Web bug, tracking bug, pixel tag, and clear gif.
Think of them as very small web images, and according to Yahoo’s privacy policy, Yahoo includes web beacons / bugs in Yahoo Mail and Yahoo owned sites and doesn’t limit its reach there. About .com has some more info, and of course they only track “none personally identifiable information”.
Outside the Yahoo! Network
* Yahoo! uses web beacons to conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes.
* Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners. This aggregate information may include demographic and usage information. No personally identifiable information about you is shared with partners from this research.
* When conducting research Yahoo!’s practice is to require our partners to disclose the presence of these web beacons on their pages in their privacy policies and state what choices are available to users regarding the collection and use of this information. You may choose to opt-out of Yahoo! using this information for this research. Please click here to opt-out.Note: This opt-out applies to a specific browser rather than a specific user. Therefore you will have to opt-out separately from each computer or browser that you use.
So you have to click on the Yahoo opt-out link on each computer AND browser you use… which is not very friendly but probably due to technical reasons. Note: you only have to click on the link, once you load the page, clicking on the button that is on the confirmation page will cancel your opt-out, which seems sneaky IMHO. So another reason to not load HTML graphics in your email.
Podcasts
Part of what I have always enjoyed is researching new products or technology. So I have been playing around with recording a Podcast.
The most common approach is to record yourself, on the high end with either a recording studio type of setup with mixer and high quality microphone, or on the low end with a computer microphone and free software.
I was very surprised with the ease and quality of the recording, which was not what I was expecting.
So the quick and dirty end of the spectrum is documented very well by Jake Ludington.
I just installed and setup the software, plugged in the mic and clicked record, that was it. Audacity makes editing easy and I exported as mp3. I found the quality to be fairly good and much better than much of the echo-y hollow sound I have heard elsewhere.
I also hope to checkout recording vendors at some point, but this was very easy and worked better than I thought.
ACK deux
As a follow-up to my first ACK post, it seems I left a few ACK’s out. It’s getting a bit thick in here… so I will try and keep my self indulgance to a dull mummer… but thought it might be nice to give the other ack’s credit.
From the ACK wiki:
ACK is a three-letter abbreviation with multiple meanings, as described below:
* a packet used in the Transmission Control Protocol to acknowledge receipt of a packet, and the basis of TCP’s reliability.
* the “Acknowledge” control character (code 0×06) in the C0 control code set used in ASCII.
* an abbreviation used in Hacker slang, see the corresponding entry in the Jargon File Wiki.
* the IATA airport code for Nantucket Memorial Airport (after “Ackerly Field”).
* an interjection made popular in the U.S. by Bill the Cat from Bloom County.
* the National Rail code for Acklington railway station, United Kingdom.
Always did like that cat from Bloom County.
