Category: NYC

Monty Python

I went into New York today, and saw a couple of Monty Python films, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. I saw Life of Brian (which I hadn’t seen in many years) and The Meaning of Live, which is a new documentary, mostly about the final Python live shows from last year.

Life of Brian had a Q&A afterward with John Cleese and Terry Jones, and Meaning of Live had a Q&A with Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin. So, now I’ve seen all of the (surviving) Pythons, except for Terry Gilliam.

It would have been fun to go to the Holy Grail screening last night too, but that one was pretty expensive. The Q&A for that one had all the Pythons, though, plus John Oliver, so that would have been awesome!

Seeing these films has made me think about the value of humor, and realize that I’m really not getting enough of it lately. On my way home, I picked up the Weird Al guest-edited issue of Mad Magazine, so that should help restore some balance. (It’s been many years since I picked up an issue of Mad.)

A nice day

We finally had a nice day with moderate temperatures yesterday, so I took the opportunity to make another NYC museum-hopping visit, and also did some walking. (It’s funny how my definition of “nice day” has been downwardly adjusted by this harsh winter. It was overcast yesterday, and the streets were full of melting grey slush. But it was above freezing!)

I first went to MoMA. I’m curious about their Björk exhibit, but I didn’t bother trying to get in to that. There are actually multiple parts to the exhibit; the centerpiece, I guess, is the “Songlines” exhibit, “an interactive, location-based audio experience”, which required timed-entry tickets, even for members. So, if I decide that I’m really interested in that, I’ll come back on a day when I can go in early. I’m not sure I care about a Björk exhibit that much. It seems like mostly just a novelty exhibit. But I guess stuff like that helps pay for the more interesting, less popular, exhibits, like the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit that’s coming to an end soon.

After MoMA, I went to the Met. While I had no particular agenda for that visit, when I got there I realized there was a members preview of the Plains Indians exhibit going on, so I went in and took a look around. It’s actually really interesting and well-done.

To get some additional exercise, I walked from the Met back to Penn Station, making a quick stop at Kinokuniya. I don’t think I’d ever been in this particular Kinokuniya location before. I was surprised at how many English-language books and comics they had. They have a really good selection of American and European graphic novels on the second floor.

So it was a good day, overall. I’m looking forward to an even nicer day when all the snow is melted and the Met roof garden is open, so I can spend a little time in the sun up there, maybe enjoying a beer or coffee.

SharePoint and more

Just a quick follow-up on Saturday’s adventures with SharePoint: On Sunday morning, after letting my VM chug through 100+ Windows updates, and increasing the amount of RAM allocated to it from 1 GB to 2 GB, I eventually found myself with a barely-operational SharePoint install.

But I decided I didn’t want to spend the whole day staring at my laptop, alone in my apartment, so I turned it off and hopped on the train into New York, and spent some time at the Metropolitan Museum. Overall, I think that was a better use of my time than banging away at my SharePoint VM all day.

I spent some time this morning reading various blog posts about SharePoint development environments, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never be able to get a useful one up and running on my current hardware. With only 4 GB of RAM on my ThinkPad, there’s no way I can allocate enough to the VM. Most of the advice I’ve seen recommends 8 GB minimum for the VM, so I’d really need a laptop with at least 12 GB of actual RAM. (And some blogs indicate that 24 GB is really the reasonable minimum for SharePoint development.)

I’ve also looked at a few options for running a VM in the cloud. The one no-cost option is to sign up for a free Azure trial, and set up a VM in Azure. That might be interesting, but I don’t think the trial would be long enough to be really useful.

So I think I’m going to have to give up on the idea of setting up a SharePoint environment on my own, and wait for my new project at work to firm up a bit more. At that point, I’ll know enough about exactly what I need to do that I can make specific requests related to a specific project, and hopefully get the software/hardware I need to get up and running. Until then, I’m just going to have to settle for reading books and using my imagination!

Art Museum Web Sites

The New York Times ran an article recently on art museum web sites. There are, indeed, some really good ones out there. The Met and MoMA both have really good sites.

I’ve occasionally tried to find work in the IT department of an art museum, or at a company that did contract work on a museum web site or mobile app. It’s the kind of thing I think I would really enjoy working on. Alas, I’ve never gotten a response to any of the resumes I’ve sent out. I did get a callback about a volunteer opportunity at a museum once, but they only wanted people available on weekdays, during normal business hours. And I once knew a guy who was responsible for servicing the phone system at the Museum of Natural History, but I don’t think that’s going to help me.

Thanksgiving weekend

I spent Thanksgiving day with a friend’s family. It was a good day, but pretty loud and chaotic, which is to be expected when you put sixteen people (including three small children) together in a house on Thanksgiving.

I spent Black Friday home alone, working on some personal organization. I almost managed to update the map on my TomTom GPS, but hit a snag when the new map was too large to copy to the device. That led me on a wild goose chase that ended when I found a notice on the TomTom site that said they were aware of the problem and working on a solution. But it was a fair amount of wasted time. (I’d thought, at one point, that maybe they’d purposely made the new map file just a little too large, to force people with older devices to upgrade to newer ones, but apparently it was an honest mistake.)

I also continued my work on getting stuff out of Backpack and into Evernote. I’m almost done there, and I should be able to close down the Backpack account soon. I’m getting enough stuff into Evernote now that I’m starting to think about how I’m organizing things, and what kind of adjustments I should make. I read the book Evernote Essentials yesterday, and also listened to a podcast with a lot of Evernote tips, so I could hopefully stimulate my brain a bit and come up with some good ideas on how to best use Evernote. I found both the book and the podcast helpful, though there weren’t any earth-shattering revelations in either of them.

I had a page in Backpack titled “GTD”, and I was using it to keep, basically, GTD-related lists, like a “someday/maybe” list, a “waiting for” list, project lists, and stuff like that. But I stopped doing anything resembling a weekly review quite some time ago, and I haven’t really been keeping up the lists. So, for instance, one list item was to use a $10 Best Buy Reward Zone certificate before it expired… in 2011. So I’m not entirely sure how best to clean up and re-structure those lists in such a way that I’ll be more likely to use them.

I really like the general idea of consolidating as much stuff as I can in Evernote, and cutting down on complexity a lot, eliminating OneNote, Backpack,  DevonThink, and whatever else I can. But I also noticed that Things for iPhone and iPad is free this weekend, and the Mac version is 30% off. So maybe keeping my GTD stuff in Things would be a good idea, while using Evernote for reference material and archives. But Things doesn’t have a PC version, or a web version, so I’d only be able to access it on the Mac and iOS. Which probably isn’t really a problem, given the way I’m using my computers these days. (Also, “Things” is a horrible product name, and tends to produce a lot of irrelevant (but amusing) results when Googled.) I’ve already downloaded the iPhone and iPad versions, and have played around a bit, and like what I see. I’m planning on downloading the trial version of the Mac software today, so I can see if it’s going to work for me or not.

Meanwhile, I just ordered two 500GB Samsung SSDs, for $189 each, with the general idea of replacing the old-fashioned drives in my MacBook and ThinkPad. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, and I kept putting it off. But I keep hearing, over and over, from friends and random internet sources, about how much difference an SSD will make, so I finally had to go ahead and do it. So next weekend’s project will likely be replacing either the MacBook or ThinkPad drive. Or possibly both, if I have enough time.

I’m also thinking about going to NYC to see The Imitation Game, the new movie about Alan Turing. I don’t think I’ll talk myself into doing that today, given how cold it is outside right now. But maybe tomorrow, if it’s a little warmer.

NYC trip today – The Met and MoMA

I took a trip into NYC today to visit the Met and MoMA. It worked out pretty well. I got to the Met right around 10am, just after they opened. It wasn’t crowded at all, so I had a nice time casually strolling around and enjoying a nice quiet Sunday visit. I went to MoMA after lunch, and spent a little time there, but not too long. It was a lot more crowded at MoMA, but still manageable. And I finally managed to visit the Monet water lily room, which I blogged about back in June. I got caught up in some Brazilian street festival while walking back to the train station, but managed to extricate myself and get to my train in one piece. So, all in all, a good Sunday in NYC.

New York Comic Con

I had pretty much decided not to go to NYCC this year. I wasn’t really that enthusiastic about it earlier this year, so I didn’t get around to checking on tickets until after they’d sold out on every day except Thursday. So I said “oh well” and forgot about it. But then a friend at work mentioned recently that he might be able to get me a free ticket, so that got me interested again. Well, that didn’t work out either, but I noticed that tickets would be going on sale at some comic books stores today, so I thought I’d give that a try.

I headed over to The Fallout Shelter in Highland Park today at lunch time to see if I could get tickets. They open at noon, and I got there just after noon, maybe 12:02. There was a long line out the door and down the street. Apparently, a number of people got there early and lined up! I didn’t really want to get in line, so I decided to wander around a bit, then come back. Highland Park had a farmers market going on, so I stopped by there and got some fresh peaches and bread, then went back to the comic shop. I got back there at 12:10. The line was gone, but they’d just sold out on tickets! So I picked up Sandman Overture #1-3 and headed back to work.

So I’m still not going to NYCC, and I probably missed my last chance to get tickets, but I’ve got a few good comics, and a handful of fresh peaches and fresh bread, so it wasn’t a wasted trip!

WordCamp NYC notes

I just got back home, after attending WordCamp NYC this weekend. Overall, it was pretty good. The presentations were mixed, with a couple of really good ones, and a few that weren’t really useful to me (but might have been to others). I’m kind of surprised at how much they were able to do for only a $40 registration fee. Free t-shirt, and free breakfast and lunch on Saturday. And all in a nice hotel. (I guess a lot of the cost is borne by the corporate sponsors?)

I was going to write up a long post with links to some of the more interesting topics that came up, but I think I’m too tired to do that now. I’ll just link to two things that I’d like to look into a bit further: Piklist and WP-CLI. Maybe I’ll post more detail later, if I can find the energy.

 

Monet’s Water Lilies at MoMA

I don’t watch NYC-ARTS on channel 13 regularly, but I catch a bit of it here and there. There was a short segment on tonight’s episode about the Monet Water Lilies triptych that is on display at MoMA. I’ve been to MoMA a few times this year, but I don’t remember seeing this, and I really love Monet. (I’ve mostly been heading straight for whatever special exhibits pique my interest, and maybe stopping to look at Starry Night or some Jackson Pollock.)

I have actually been seeking out the Monet stuff at the Met, the last couple of times I’ve been there, so I don’t know why it hasn’t occured to me to seek him out at MoMA. I need to make a point of looking for Monet the next time I go! (Which might be this weekend or next.)