The Zereps

Continuing my on-going series of touristy trips I’ve taken while Candice is at work (and is too cool to come with me on…)

Yesterday I took a trip down to the New York Aquarium–the only only (and therfore biggest, coolest, and greatest) aquarium in New York City. Talk about a long subway ride–it took me almost one-and-a-half hours to get from Astoria to Coney Island in Brooklyn, where the Aquarium is located. Luckily for me though, Coney Island is at the south end of the N Line track, where Ditmars Blvd. in Astoria is the last stop on the northern side. Although it was far away, I didn’t have to transfer to another train to get there, so that was nice.
Once again, in my continuing forgetful tradition, I forgot to bring any sort of camera along with me on my excursion. (d’oh!) I really, really need to get a cell phone with a camera built in to it.

Basically, for those of you in Sacramento, it was like a scaled-down, lamer, but still pretty fun and not as corporate, version of Marine World. There were ‘California Sea Lion’ shows, Penguins, Sea Otter and other outside exhibitions and shows, but the more interesting stuff to me was the actual aquarium fish in tanks.

The aquarium had a very wide variety of fish for viewing pleasure. One of their new exhibits is called ‘Alien Stingers‘, which highlighted sea animals such as anonomes, jellyfish, corels, and others such as eels, that protect themselves and catch prey using some sort of ‘stinger’ mechanism. I had to push and shove my way through droves of little kids running around, but that was pretty much expected. I only spent $20 the whole day for admission, transportation, and a snack, so I consider a Sunday-on-the-cheap well spent.

I’ve got a list of a couple other tourist spots I’d like to hit before moving… not sure which one will be next, maybe City Hall or the New York Library. Anybody got some suggestions?

here it is! my latest read, which i *just* now finished.

gregory maguire’s confessions of an ugly stepsister.

this, i’m merely speculating, is the book which maguire wrote after wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the west (which i loved *loved*, btw…). in ‘confessions’, like ‘wicked’, maguire takes a different view of your basic fairy tale. ‘confessions’ is told from the perspective of one of the ugly sisters and paints a more realistic picture of events.

the thing i like most about maguire’s books (the ones i’ve read, at least) is the raw edginess he gives the stories. he add the dirtiness of real life to these little ‘la de da da’ fairy tales and it’s a real kick in the pants. they’re *hardcore* fairy tales, man…i love ’em! 😀

in other book-y news, i’m eagerly anticipating the paperback-arrivals of both eldest by Christopher Paolini, and knife of dreams by robert jordan (it’s book 11 of the wheel of time series, and having read the previous 10 plus the prequel…i’m anxious to say the least).

however, the next book that i will be reading is gabriel garcia marquez’s one hundred years of solitude.

toodles!

i’m sure you’ve noticed the alarming uneventfulness of our blog lately…so have we…and since it’s summer there’s just not much to do (unless we put out large amounts of cash to escape the city, which we’re not likely to do). so i thought it might be nice to start blogging about the books i’ve read or am reading. now, i don’t read nearly as much as i’d like to, nor do i read all the books i would like, either, but i hardley ever read a bad one.

so….without further ado….the book i have just finished is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Here’s a small phrase from the book, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing–these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice…. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.”

i was surprised by how extraodinarily excellent this book is. i only picked it up from the book corner at work because i had finished another book, but after 3 pages i couldn’t put it down. i recommend it *very* highly. i actually had to take it home to read because it was way too heavy to read at work. so go out and buy it! i’m going to make eric read it, i think he would really like it. i generally don’t recommend books so highly, but this one deserves it…so go out and buy it!! (or get it from the library)

i’ve also finished a couple good reads in the last week or so that are worth mentioning.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a great book. i don’t know why i haven’t read it sooner, since it’s *the* book that defined a whole generation. i will definately read it again sometime in the future, too.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch was also an excellent book. it’s a supurb look at 19th century english provincial life. i throuroughly enjoyed it and look forward to reading more books by her.

OK, so that’s my lame soprano impersonation. Get it? 😉 The only reason I mention The Soprano’s (a show that I’ve never seen, by the way since I don’t have HBO at home) is because they were filming an episode right outside the building that I work in today. That was kind of cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the actual filming of the episode; I only saw the cranes, prop trucks, extras, set crew, makeup RVs, and a few actors in the vicinity of Broadway between Union Square and the Flat Iron building (right where I work) as they were setting up to shoot the episode later in the evening (after I was already back at home for the evening.) Oh well… Man, I need to get a camera phone. 😐

Greetings. Time for another weekend update to The Zereps (since we never find the time, nor the words to describe what we do during the work-week; and you’d probably not want to hear them anyway, even if we did.) 😉

Well, my one adventure that I have to write about this week is only to describe the trip that I took to the Guggenheim Museum, located in Manhattan’s upper-east side. Since we’re moving in a couple months, I figured I’d better get in some tourist spots before we move ’cause who knows when the next time we’ll be on the east coast, or even just New York City again. The Guggenheim was my tourist destination this weekend, hopefully I’ll be able to fit in something during the next couple weekends. (Where was Candice during my romp through the museum? She was at work, and doesn’t really like touristy stuff too much.)

Even though I’ve visited several times before and have lived in New York City for over a year, I had never managed to make it to the Guggenheim. The museum was designed by famed Architect Frank Lloyd Write and pened to the public in 1959. Once again, I forgot my camera, but didn’t scold myself too badly once I learned the photography was only allowed on the ground level, which basically includes the ticket line, a cafe, and the gift shop. The one shot that everbody gets from the ground level is one of the ceiling though; here are a couple lovingly stolen from other places on the net (with credit):

(buildingsrus.co.uk)

In the first one you can see the spiral design of the building. The whole inside of the cylindrical building is empty space, while the outer sides spiral seamlessly up all the way to the top from the ground. The main exhibit when I went was a showcase of the works of Zaha Hadid. I’d never heard of her before I saw the exhibits, but after walking through all her drawings, models, and seeing photographs of her finished buildings, I was amazed at the scope of her talents. She is the only woman to win the Pritzker Prize. One of her most buildings is the BMW Central Building, which I think is amazing. Here are some links to some other buildings she’s designed: 1 2 3.See, reading The Zereps can be fun AND informational. 😉

I spend pretty much the entire afternoon on Sunday at the museum; besides the main exhibit, featuring Zaha Hadid’s work, there was also the museum’s pernament collection of classical works and a pretty large exhibit of Jackson Pollock’s works on paper (versus canvas.) I’m glad I got to visit the Guggenheim, and now I can check that off my list of things to do in New York before I leave.

…Okay, so maybe not the kind of hope you were thinking of, but I digress. As you may have noticed if you’ve been following Candice’s posts lately is that we’ve been without (much) power at our place for a week now. Most electricity has been restored for us here, so we can at least run our refrigerator and AC now. Apparently there are also black-outs and record-breaking temperatures going on in California as well.

The type of HOPE I’m actually talking about was the Hackers On Planet Earth conference hosted by 2600. Basically I’ve been wanting to go since they first started in 1994, (when I was only 14 years old!) but never had the funds nor means of actually getting out here.

So living in New York City came in handy this time as it was just a hope, skip, and a jump on the subway to the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. Unfortunately, I had to work on Friday, so I missed most of that days meetings/speakers. I left work and headed straight over to the hotel that day.
Here’s a short summary of my exploits during the weekend (pun intended) and a list of workshops/talks that were held:
-Friday:

“Off The Hook” – The Indecent Version – Emmanual Goldstein and friends hosted a ‘live’ version of their weekely Off The Hook radio show. The rest of the time I spent on Friday was meandering around the conf grounds, talking to people, checking out the lockpicking demonstration, and looking what that various vendors had to offer. There were lockpicking kits, RFID-blocking wallets, TV-B-Gones, DIY electronics kits, wireless/warddriving antennas/cards/accessories, a 3-DVD BBS Documentary (which was the only thing I bought) and numerous other ‘warez.’
Between meetings, I had a nice little chat with the legendary Captain Crunch about the state of the phone industry and his thoughts on things like VoIP–that was pretty cool. The guy’s getting pretty old (and losing some teeth,) but he’s still pretty active in the telecommunications sector.
-Saturday:

I left the house around 10 and got to the hotel in time for the first meeting at 11, Wireless Security Flaws. After that I went to the Phone Phreaking 101 meeting, and then the Retrocomputing forum. After those, I was ‘meetinged’-out, so I just hung out around the mezzanine area for a while. It was pretty cool how they had it set up. The actual meetings were held in seperate areas on the 18th floor of the hotel, but on the mezzanine (2nd floor) level, they had projectors showing the different speakers in different areas, so you didn’t actually have to go upstairs to listen in. In the main area, past the vendors, they had a projector screen and in front of it about 30 hammocks where people were just hanging out, sleeping, chilling with their laptops, etc. That was a pretty nice little setup.

Kevin Mitnick was supposed to give 2 talks: Hackers in Prison and Kevin Mitnick Unplugged, but unfortunately he got sick and was in a hospital in London (or so I heard.) 🙁

-Sunday:

Sunday, I also left the house around 10 to make it to the 11am meeting: Urban Exploring. Two people shared their experiences exploring the areas around New York. They outlined the laws regarding tresspassing and what to do if you get caught. 😉 That was one of the more interesting talks I went to. After that I went to Basics of Forensic Recovery and Exploring your World with GIS, which were both kinda dry. The Social Engineering meeting was probably the most packed of any that I went to. Emmanual Goldstein and a few other notables led a talk on social engineering and talked of past exploits. The perfect situation played right into their hands for getting people to release information–the power outage in Queens, so they gave us a little demo. That was pretty interesting. After all those, I still managed to squeeze in 3 more meetings: Selfness-Copyfight: From Censorship to New Business Models, Comparison of WAN Routing Protocols (dry but I learned a lot,) and of course the closing ceremonies.

After 10 years of waiting, I was not disappointed. Hopefully sometime in the future I will be able to take a trip out here again for a weekend and make it to another HOPE Conference. I wish I had taken a camera with me, but alas, I forgot. You can probably find a good number of HOPE pictures here, though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hopenumbersix/. Enjoy!

gonna post really fast…the battery backups are having a tough time recharging on 100 volts.

nothin’ really new, just some pictures i took when i went back to the red cross emergency trucks.

here’s some of what we had to throw out (plus some really yummy tofutti icecream..we will miss you…):

here is a snap of our freezer with the conEd-supplied dry ice:

this photo is of the food line that stretches back up and around the corner. there were lots more people there than were pictured:

what does an emergency meal look and taste like? viola! rice, broccoli and chicken (jabba was a happy camper) it wasn’t bad with some soy sauce packets:

there’s still police everywhere and many conEd trucks. my theory is that the trucks are just parked there to give the appearance of more work being done. hopefully we’ll get power back up tomorrow or monday!

i’ve just been spurred on by the jakkit to write a post. 😀

right now we’re in our 4th day without power. well, technically, we have power, but only 80 volts out of 120, so everything but our energy efficient light bulbs and a heavily backed-up router is offline. we had to throw away everything in our fridge, but hopefully we’ll get reimbursed for it.

to give an accurate idea of what’s goin’ on here in astoria, i’ll give you several links…read ’em! 😉

this is a general idea of what it’s like, from a news station’s point of view.

ny1 top story

here’s an article talking about stores in our area.

local stores

and to get the real story of what we’re goin’ through, read the topic entitled brownout on astorians to get a good idea, go to pages 5-7…heh

eric brought home california pizza kitchen from manhattan for dinner, so i’m a happy camper now! 😀 he just hit the street again to scope us out some soda pop. yay! jabba and i are hangin’ low. thankfully the weather is quite nice or else we’d be riding the bus all day!

other than that, we’ve both just been workin’ and looking forward to our move. 😀 does sweating count? we’ve been sweating alot on our 15-20 minute walk to the subway….darn the humidity!

oh yeah, and alot of the daily show, the colbert report, and mind of mencia. funny. frickin’ funny.

[update!] day 5 and still no power! i’m online at work only today. maybe it will come back tonight! 😀

[update 2] it’s been a bad day. this is no longer funny. i got my lunch and dinner from a red cross disaster relief station truck. had to fight a mob to get a sandwhich, oranges, and dry ice. the severe lightening storms don’t help. this is honestly a disaster and should not be happening.