I'm listening to the Pretenders on my iPod singing the theme from the Living Daylights, which is a Bond movie I'm always torn about, because it has no sex and Timothy Dalton, but it has one of the best car scenes. I could use skiis, tire spikes, and a rocket motor on my Mustang...that would counter the rear wheel drive. You know what I just realized? Old men whose pants keep creeping up their torso as they get older aren't buying longer and longer pants...they're shrinking into the same size they've always worn. They're pulling 'em up that high so their 34" lengths aren't bunching up at the bottom. It's not so much a fashion problem as it is a posture and calcium deficiency issue. The Godfather theme is now playing. There's a really tall woman standing next to me...she must be 6'3". She's the tallest person in the car except for this one up front. If you're a guy who is really tall, it's like you got to some level in a videogame that no one else can get to. This woman is like the secret bonus level that all us normal sized guys can never get to. I was 5'11" at the end of my freshman year of high school...figured I'd get at least another two inches...nada. Didn't grow an inch after that. One more would have been nice. I was also 152 pounds. I don't remember feeling like a skinny guy, but I guess I must have been. I've always weighed myself. My grandmother has a bathroom scale that I would rush to everytime I got to her house. Kids love growing. I remember distinctly weighing 77 pounds, 85 pounds, 115... Right before I got to Union Square I was 192, but that was before I started biking to work and playing in all these leagues. By the end of that summer, I was down to 176, which I didn't like. Now I'm about 185. David Byrne playing My Fair Lady now. Canal St. Everytime I pass Canal, I think of how cool the ATTAP (Riffs) offices are. I need to move back into the city...and work right next door to my apt. I stopped to look around to find some thumbing inspiration... No one looks or is doing anything interesting at the moment. Actually, it's a really unremarkable subway crowd this morning. Lots of su doku and sleeping. Just caught the cover of the News...didn't some high school kid dress as Hitler last year. Don't we go through this every year? Didn't someone get eggshell in the eye or something more newsworthy?  Either way, whether he gets punished or not, the kid is an idiot and so are his parents.  Now, when you Google his name, forever, he'll be the Hitler kid.  Have fun getting a job, loser.  Its chilly in this car...the a/c is on. I'm excited to go to the gym...really love the NYSC on 35th and Madison.

Well, this is just bizzare...  A small "general aviation" plane flew into a building on 72nd and York.

A few apartments in the building are on fire...   details coming out.  Hope no one was home.

It’s as if your id had a typewriter. In a world where everything is
instant, the delaying and censoring mechanisms that contributed to a
civilized life are gone." - Maureen Dowd, NY Times, Oct. 7, 2006

(I don't subscribe to Times Select... or get the actual paper copy, God forbid... my friend Alicia sent this to me.)

The senior members of our team here at Oddcast are Israeli, so today, we got a little culture for the office related to the Jewish New Year...

Little kid and his dad at Pier 40 this morning...

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Here's the rest of what the WTC site is supposed to look like.  If we have to wait any longer, they'll have to retrofit parking on the roof for flying cars.

Two great comments by Gothamist readers:

"I, for one, welcome our new steel and glass monolithic overlords."

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Timeoutnewyork.tv is having a photo contest to have your NYC photos featured on the front page of their site.   Just tag your best NYC photos (horizontal only) timeoutnewyork.tv on Flickr and you're automatically entered.  There might be a free magazine subscription in there or something, too... not sure... the details aren't up yet.  Technically, it starts tomorrow, but here's your chance to get a head start.

Check out their site, too.... its pretty cool.

GothamGal has a though provoking post up about the insanity of carefully crafting over acheivers and getting kids into college today.  She says that we should drop the current system and look for a new way to screen students...  fewer tests, less pressure.

I do think that what is going on is insane, but anytime there's insanity, you don't have to get caught up in it.

When I was in high school, the average graduating SAT score for my class was 1350.  Now I hear its up over 1400...   average...  1400!   I was lucky because we all seemed to take a pretty healthy approach to it, but one could go nuts trying to test prep your way to a score like that.

If you need to take two test prep courses and hire a private tutor to get your kid to score a 1520, then, well, sorry, that kid just isn't a 1520 student.  I remember this guy in my freshmen year of college who used to study in the lounge about 10 hours a day to get a 3.7 and I just remember heading out the door with my baseball glove to have a catch and enjoy a nice day while he was studying.  If that was what it took to get the really high grades, well then I just wasn't going to be a great student... simple as that.

It was that kind of approach that I had in high school.  In hindsight, I probably could have worked harder, I admit, but it was where my head was at the time.  Pushing me wouldn't have helped.. .I had to push myself... which I did, big time, when I got to Fordham.   Yeah, so I went to Fordham, which was a good school, but it wasn't Harvard or Yale or Princeton.  However, I wouldn't be where I am today at another school.   Being at Fordham, close to the city, enabled me to intern at the GM pension fund during school.  It also meant that another Fordham grad who was at GM sort of took me under his wing, rather than the Harvard intern we had, because he felt like this guy would get everything he wanted anyway.  That led directly to my job in the private equity group, which led to Union Square Ventures, which led to Oddcast.   

If I was coming out of Harvard in '01, it wouldn't have been enough for me to just go to Harvard... I would have had to beat out all my own classmates for jobs.  When you go to a top school, you almost have to be the best there, too, because there will already be 5 or 6 Harvard resumes in for a job, and they're not going to interview all of you.

You don't have to go to a top ten school and you don't have to be a Goldman Sachs investment banker to be successful either.   Teach your kids to follow their own way at their own pace.  Of course, give them all the tools and encouragement to be their best, but don't push them to be more than they're mentally ready to handle.  I wasn't ready to take the lead in high school and I would have burned out very early had I tried.  I'm lucky that my parents were just happy I was in a good school and supportive of whatever I did.  They let me come around on my own terms.

Oh, and I wound up doing better than that kid who studied ten hours a day...  and I really do owe it mostly to my mental health.  In college, I really believe its really not about how hard you work, but more about how smart you work and how you handle stress.   Oh, and networking, too.  You'll never make good contacts in your field, which can take you a lot further than your GPA, if you're a big ball of stress that seems mentally unstable.

And then there were eight. 

Everything I learned in elementary school science seems to be a lie.   

Did you know there were more than three states of matter?   At first I learned about Plasma, making it four, but now it turns out there are a whole bunch of 'em.  That probably explains why if you leave ice cubes in the freezer long enough, they completely disappear.

I've been working really hard today, so I took a ten (err..  20...) minute break to make a Chuck Norris avatar for my sidebar.  More reasons to reorg the sidebar...    I gotta find a way to make him randomly repeat different Chuck Norris facts.

New York City snowfall tally as of this morning...   13 inches.  Dorean came by to play in the snow around 11 last night and we threw snow at each other like eight year olds and then went over to Carl Shulz Park.

Her dad built an igloo on 86th Street with his snowblower, and of course, I had to get in it.  The snow wasn't piled to high yet, as you can tell from my car, which we wrote on.  I think it continued through the night, though, and this is how things looked outside my window this morning.

____________________________________________________________________

I've posted about this before, but its come up again.  Last Election Day, I tried to doublecheck my polling place by e-mailing the NYC.gov website.  They finally got back to me in late January.

Well, today, they replied again, for good measure I suppose...

"SORRY FOR THE DELAY, YOUR POLL SITE IS:PS 290, LOCATED AT 311 E 82 ST."

And they want us to believe they'll figure out electronic voting without a hitch?

This would be funny if it wasn't true.   On Election Day, as I was walking out of my house, I wanted to doublecheck my polling place.  I was pretty sure I knew where it was, but it was my first time voting in my home district (no more trekking back to Brooklyn.)  Anyway, the NYC voting website had an e-mail address for location inquiries, so I e-mailed them.  Today, on January 26th, I finally received a response...

Curbed, the NYC real estate, etc blog posted an ethical question about some renter who wanted to get away with not paying his broker fee to a careless real estate agent.  Responses were requested and I submitted mine on the side of ethics and just treating people well overall.  It got posted.. wooo!   So, if you're a real estate agent, now you know I'm an ethical guy and the kind of guy you want to send listings of apartments for sale with reasonable maintainence south of 59th Street around 400k.  One bedrooms only, please.

Link: Curbed: The Curbed Ethicist (Part I): Pay The Guy Already.

Real estate brokers provide little else besides the knowledge of an open apartment, which he did here. Sure, he very haphazardly involved himself in the process, and you could probably get away with not paying him, but its not as if he didn’t do his job. You wouldn’t have known about the listing if he didn’t post it, and in my mind, he deserves payment for that... Trust me, screw people over and it will come back to haunt you. What you should do is pay him the fee, but explain to him that you didn’t have to and point out to him the err of his ways. Maybe he’s new and he’ll be so indebted, that in a few years when you move, he’ll find you a sweet deal.

Rooster paraphernalia?  There was a story in the news this morning about how cops broke up a cockfighting ring in the Bronx.  They confiscated a whole bunch of roosters, plus assorted "rooster paraphernalia."   I haven't the faintest idea what that could possibly mean.  Little tiny boxing gloves?  Beak guards?  Championship belts?

Link: The Mobile Andrew: November 2004.

Did you notice what's hilarious about this pic?

Andrew Anker has been moblogging for some time now, which basically means he has a camera phone that he takes pictures with, and e-mails them straight to his blog with a little note.  He works for Six Apart, which is the company behind Typepad, which powers my blog as well as my Find My Path career site. He snapped off the photo above at Six Apart's recent board meeting.  The picture is of the co-founder of the company, Mena Trott, but what really struck me was the two gentlemen in the backround.  One of them is someone I had the fortune to meet earlier this year, David Hornick, who is a VC from August Capital who funded the company recently.  The other guy... well... the other guy is HUGE... or at least appears that way in the picture.  So David wouldn't make the Sand Hill Road basketball team (which, by the way, would likely be dominated from the guys at ComVentures and John Hummer, who used to play in the NBA/ABA), but still...  this is just hilarious.   

I brought the pic to David's attention and he responded:

"Just clicked on your link.  That's hilarious.  The guy I was talking to was
a mere 6 foot 8.  Of course that seems pretty darn tall when you're 5 foot
4."   

At least he takes it in stride, no matter how short those strides may be.   Good luck guys!  I've enjoyed keeping up with this company.

Ok, so not really...  someone stuck this on me.  :)  Proud to support female blogging!

I know I'm going to have to reset my catagories.  I'm realizing that most of my blogs fit into like eight catagories and then I've also got both a "Friends and Outings" and "Outings and Friends" catagory.  I don't know how that happened.  So I'm at the airport now, shelling out another six bucks for 60 minutes of TMobile wireless.  Actually, I don't mind it, because I use it sparingly, since DTUT covers me pretty well in terms of wireless usage. 

I was reading apophenia and she commented on the nature of the blogger/audience interaction...

"For me, the plausible deniability invoked in blogging is strong. I can convince myself that i write for me and me alone ::wink:: and convince myself to be shocked when i receive feedback. I can check my stats, but those are just numbers - nameless, faceless people. Yet, here i am, speaking to nameless, faceless people, only i'm required by this situation to convince myself that you do really exist, even if i cannot see you. In this situation, i have the expectation that i am a face to you and you're just an assumption to me. It really brings life to the idea that i'm just a talking head."

She's actually studying the socialogy behind blogs and social networking over the web, among other things and she writes some really thoughtful stuff.  Her archives go back to 1997, making her the earliest blogger I know.

This trip was fantastic for me.  I feel reenergized.  Beware my next big project.  I hadn't actually taken a real non-family vacation since.... well, I can't actually remember.  Perhaps it dates all the way back to when Deirg and I went to Jill's wedding.  This vacation thing could be a good thing, even if I am enjoying my life.  Sometimes, its good to get a restart.

So, I'm looking at my fellow passengers waiting to get on.  These are all the cheap people, because there was a $200 difference between the red eye and the afternoon flight.  I'm debating what will make me sleep easier....  light food or a big turkey sandwich.  Either way, even if I don't get good sleep, I'm heading straight to the gym when I get into the city.  That will make me feel better.  I'm looking forward to that post-gym shower.  Ok, boarding soon.   I gotta figure out what zone I am.

Oh, PS...   Good for the Scott Peterson jury.  We all knew he was guilty.  Of course, I still can't figure out how, where, when, or why... but I suppose that doesn't matter.  You know some goofball will marry him while he's in prison, too.

Last night, I found a spot on the right side of the street for today, making it six consecutive days of alternate side parking that I have found a spot.  Four times, I found the spot in the morning on the day of, and twice the night before.  Manhattanites with cars will appreciate this.  Everyone else...  just trust me that this is truely a personal triumph.  :)

This just speaks for itself.  Classic male. 

"You wanna know what we're thinking?  I'll tell you what we're thinking...   Nothing.  We're not thinking anything.  We're just walkin' around, lookin' around.  Our minds are a complete blank."  -Seinfeld

This is photographic proof that if I went colorblind one day, dressing would not be a problem.  Think I have enough grey t-shirts?  What's that blue one doing in there?  That doesn't belong there.