robzand.com

lower manhattan III, originally uploaded by robzand.

we spent the afternoon in williamsburg and walked back to manhattan across the williamsburg bridge just in time to catch sundown. the view made dodging bikes worthwhile.

self, originally uploaded by robzand.

i’d been eyeing this building at 57th and the WSH this summer and headed over today. it was too bright when i went out, but i didn’t find anything super spectacular anyway.

brooklyn bridge wedding: rob zand and kate shanley

when i navigated to this dilbert cartoon, i wasn’t expecting an experience lesson, but i got one anyway. linkedin has cornered the ux market on providing incentive to further site activity by telling the user what is not yet complete in their profile. the dilbert carton site i’ve captured above uses boilerplate content to show what a logged in user will be able to do once they create an account with their service. clever.

UPDATE: nope!

while walking the dog tonight I noticed what I thought was a new sign at the local starbucks - 52nd & 8th - promoting att wifi at starbucks. said dog didn’t permit extensive testing (the old guy goes without a leash these days and he was a bit ahead) but I did connect to something called “attwifi” and capture the following pics. we’re out of coffee in the house, so maybe I’ll give it a more thorough run through in the morning.

i tried to go shopping for a suit today, and i’m not ashamed to admit i’m not at all cut out for shopping. @analoguekate is going to help, but thanks to those who offered assistance. i took these photos on the walk home along the westside highway beginning in battery park city.

set | slideshow

my aunt and uncle, leo and elizabeth kellerman - are pictured in the city room blog. they’ve apparently found their fountain of youth. says my aunt, “This is our fountain of youth — it’s what’s kept us healthy all these years.” for the record, i’ve only swam in little neck bay once, and that was 28 years ago.

UPDATE: this story actually ran on B1 in today’s paper and included a second picture.

recently the new york times began displaying the date and page number for articles which they post online. since noticing this, i’ve been playing with why such a strategy would be employed and what it hopes to accomplish.

the simplest explanation is reconciling the dates for which an article was published online and when it appeared in the physical paper; yet, because many online articles appear before their print versions, the explanation is dissatisfying to me. i’ll explain.

published date: august 8

in the cases i saw today, the published date is “August 8″, while the date it appears in the physical paper is “August 10″. i may be picking nits, but the wording at the bottom of the article reads “appeared in print”, past-tense, so therefore it is somewhat misleading if i read the article online on august 8, or august 9 to then read at the conclusion of the article that it appeared in print on “August 10″. what’s worse, in my eyes, is that in showing the published date versus the publication date, the irrelevance of the printed media is revealed. why would i ever read the physical paper when in fact by its website’s own admission it is printing old news?

the second case i see for displaying when the article appeared in print is to give the online article credibility. in a case where ideas are being teased out online and the printed form represents the culmination of the “winning” ideas strung together as a complete thought, this makes perfect sense. this is what some book authors and bloggers do; they throw ideas out in public, get a community reaction, mull them over, and refine them over time. for someone reading old posts, it might be useful to know that the idea they were reading was incorporated into a book or article published on x date. but clearly the times is not doing this either, as the online text is an exact match of the printed article. moreover, the times has blogs where presumably this floating ideas exercise takes place. (coincidentally, the philadelphia inquirer has recently frowned on this practice.)

the last use case i can think of involves two people reading the times together, where one person stands firmly in the analog realm and the other individual is in the digital realm. such a case happened to me last sunday when my girlfriend and i got coffee and read the “paper” together outside. kate picked up a physical paper, while i read from my iphone. in such a scenario, the digital person can turn to their analog partner and say, “hey, did you see the piece on internet trolls? no? you should read it, it’s on c4.” as more individuals read media in digital form, this scenario may increase over the near term, but it sure seems like a loser in the long run.

those are the scenarios i come up with quickly on a sunday morning. what am i missing?

UPDATE: just to belabor my point, here’s an article available online today (August 10, 2008 at 5:39 pm), to be printed tomorrow. “who cares?”, i ask.

i’ve been playing with fireEagle tonight. fireEagle brokers location information between internet applications and i was testing sharing location between outside.in radar, fireEagle, and brightkite. here’s what i did, and the subsquent results. the thing is, the radar news changes based on where fireEagle thinks you are. so, being at “9th Ave, New York, NY, US” is somewhat different than “0.01km from W 52nd St & 9th Ave, New York, NY 10019, United States”.

fireEagle settings

enter geo-coordinates in brightkite: 40.764694,-73.987995

enter geo-coordinates in fireEagle: 40.764694,-73.987995

enter geo-coordinates in radar: 40.764694,-73.987995

after refresh…

boneheaded move

earlier tonight i was able to enter geo-coordinates in fireEagle and radar. doing so now gives me the following errors: extraneous space in cut-n-paste.

watch this video then explain the parking rules to me, and to be safe, don’t park on 39th between sixth and broadway.

and yes, i’m the amateur that took this in portrait mode.