Our main IT office is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On average I spend about a week a month up here. It is a nice little town that is right on the coast - as you can guess from the name - Portsmouth - it has always been a working port kinda town. A lot of ships captains lived up this way back when being a Merchant Captain meant you got to wear incredibly fancy coats and were forced to eat the occasional cabin boy when supplies ran low.
Of course, being New England it also snows up here. And we are not talking the paltry "you can sort of ski on it" snow that you get in the Australian ski fields. We are talking serious, "my god won't it just plain go the hell away" kinda snow. The average snowfall according to the Internet - which as we know never lies - is 16inches. Sure, that is not in line with the astounding 70+ inches in Colorado (or 6 feet). But c'mon - 18 inches on average is just shy of 2 feet of incredibly cold, picturesque white stuff!
Something I have learnt about places that get a lot of snow - local residents never appreciate it when you tell them with a shit-eating grin that you love it when it snows because as an Australian, if you can survive the various life threatening creatures doing their best to shred muscles, inject venom or beat the living bejesus out of you, the Aussie climate is bloody bewdy mate - snow is just such a novelty! I strongly recommend against following up by saying that as an apartment dweller in New York you don't have to shovel anything when the snow hits. I especially don't recommend saying that to a colleague that just spent 2 hours digging themselves out of their house with a Snow Blower. As an aside, a Snow Blower bears no resemblance to a leaf blower - oh no, it is a vastly different creature. Imagine a 4 foot tall lawnmower that has caterpillar tracks instead of wheels and a truly vicious combination of spinning blades in a wide mouth at the front of this infernal device. Actually - for those of us descended from farming stock, imagine a self-propelled-personal-harvesting-device and you are getting there. As far as I can tell, the basic mode of operation entails starting the device, staying as far away as you possibly can from the gnashing-bone-crunching-end and manhandling it down the driveway so it can eat large quantities of snow and blow it out a side chimney thingie - hence the "blower" name. Personally I would have called it the snow-eater/body-disposal-device. The point being that I am given to understand that this is a particularly cold and limb jarring process - the sort of process that has you envisaging excruciating dinners at the in-laws as a nice reprieve - and engenders a near homicidal rage towards any idiotic Aussie in the office proclaiming how he loves snow.
Oh, whilst I remember - god dang is it cold out there. I have caught myself giving serious thought to taking a little nip of vodka post breakfast in order to brave the cold between the hotel door and the nice heated car - which is an absolutely ginormous truck with the ever important heated car seats courtesy of the lovely Karen Collins who is kind enough to pick me up in the mornings! Btw - I challenge any of you to laugh at the idea of heated seats... I tells ya - in this environment they are an essential. I am sure that I have been millimetres away from hypothermia before they kick in!
So, all in all, I love the snow! But my lord am I keeping it to myself from now on!
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
You make HOW MUCH?
You know those dodgy 1980's movies starring John Cusack and the never-ending fight of the underdogs versus the smarmy college sporting team? The movie where on a shoestring budget the underdogs come good and trounce the sneaky, dastardly and downright cheatin' big college team?
Well, whenever I was watching those movies I could never figure out why the big college team cared so much about winning. Sure team pride and all that, but really? That much?
And then in later years I never quite managed to figure out what the big deal was with getting a sports scholarship was. Sure - having the average cost of US$30k tuition for a 4 year degree paid is a big incentive. (source: Cnn Money Story) But I never quite managed to figure out why the college was offering such a deal on sports tuition - not to mention the reports of buying the college atheletes cars, helping them 'pass' their degrees and assorted shenanigans.
The cost in and of itself must be phenomenal when you consider the fact that, whilst you have 11 players on the field at any one point in time, the average college grid iron team has 125 players. Up to 85 of these players can be on a scholarship according to caps set in place by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association).
Why so many players? Rugby Union has 22 members in a team - with 15 of those on the pitch at any given point in time. Substitutions are supposed to be more of an injury thing - although that is changing with not a little bit of controversy - the usual rumblings of diluting the purity of the game played in heaven etc. I won't bore you with the details. In American Football you have much more of a play-by-play thing - with an offensive, neutral and defensive team. You set the play up, run it and then reform at the end of it all for another play. So you send in a different mix of 11 people per play depending upon which 'play' you are going to make. There is also a whole process of coordination - with coaches on the sidelines as well people at the top of the stadium watching a birds eye view and radioing down to the appropriate coach. And even (sacrilege) the coach being able to communicate by radio to the quarterback on the field.
So - where am I going with this? Well I found an article today that outlines just why colleges are willing to bear all the cost of this. According to (CNN: Money Story 2) the top 10 college teams raked in annual revenus ranging from US$25million to US$45million. Notre Dame earned US$9million from TV rights alone - and is 'worth' some US$101million. College football stadiums range in size from 60,000 to over 100,000 seat stadiums.
And there is the answer - sure professional football is big business as I always assumed it was - same deal in Australia. But what is different is that college football is also big business - not just a prestige thing for the college itself.
I promise that the next post will return to more geeky topics...
Well, whenever I was watching those movies I could never figure out why the big college team cared so much about winning. Sure team pride and all that, but really? That much?
And then in later years I never quite managed to figure out what the big deal was with getting a sports scholarship was. Sure - having the average cost of US$30k tuition for a 4 year degree paid is a big incentive. (source: Cnn Money Story) But I never quite managed to figure out why the college was offering such a deal on sports tuition - not to mention the reports of buying the college atheletes cars, helping them 'pass' their degrees and assorted shenanigans.
The cost in and of itself must be phenomenal when you consider the fact that, whilst you have 11 players on the field at any one point in time, the average college grid iron team has 125 players. Up to 85 of these players can be on a scholarship according to caps set in place by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association).
Why so many players? Rugby Union has 22 members in a team - with 15 of those on the pitch at any given point in time. Substitutions are supposed to be more of an injury thing - although that is changing with not a little bit of controversy - the usual rumblings of diluting the purity of the game played in heaven etc. I won't bore you with the details. In American Football you have much more of a play-by-play thing - with an offensive, neutral and defensive team. You set the play up, run it and then reform at the end of it all for another play. So you send in a different mix of 11 people per play depending upon which 'play' you are going to make. There is also a whole process of coordination - with coaches on the sidelines as well people at the top of the stadium watching a birds eye view and radioing down to the appropriate coach. And even (sacrilege) the coach being able to communicate by radio to the quarterback on the field.
So - where am I going with this? Well I found an article today that outlines just why colleges are willing to bear all the cost of this. According to (CNN: Money Story 2) the top 10 college teams raked in annual revenus ranging from US$25million to US$45million. Notre Dame earned US$9million from TV rights alone - and is 'worth' some US$101million. College football stadiums range in size from 60,000 to over 100,000 seat stadiums.
And there is the answer - sure professional football is big business as I always assumed it was - same deal in Australia. But what is different is that college football is also big business - not just a prestige thing for the college itself.
I promise that the next post will return to more geeky topics...
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Just How Big is NY Again?
So - the official stats first. According to Wikipedia the island of Manhattan is 21.6km long, 3.7km wide and has an area of 58.8km squared. Approximately 1.6million people live on Manhattan itself, a further 1.45million people commute to the island every day to come to work.
Why am I telling you this? Well, because where I live you don't actually feel that NY is huge. A lot of the streets are the same scale as the Sydney CBD - this is because the financial district follows the original layout of Manhattan when it was still New Amsterdam. You only hit the classic grid pattern when you get above 14th St. But every now and then I stumble across something that smacks you in the face and makes you realise how big this place is. "And what, pray tell, was the most recent event?" I hear you ask. This time it was the annual Inflate the Balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. "But surely!", I hear you cry, "You mean the actual parade?" No. I left that one bloody well alone after risking life and limbs the night before.
You see, it all went down somewhat like this. I was supposed to be flying out today for a couple of weeks in the London office. Unfortunately the project I am working on is delayed and the trip was cancelled. So I did a bit of a web spank to find out about the parade - coz hey, its just so gosh darn American and has featured in like EVERY sitcom that ever made it to Australia. In doing so I find a Q&A page that as the very last point mentions that they inflate the balloons the night before and that if you want you can go up and see it happen between 76th & 80th streets. Well says I, that sounds like much more fun than standing for hours on end waiting for a parade to wander past. So I hop onto the subway like a good little boy, visions of whacky cartoon character balloons gradually inflating and breaking the surly bonds of gravity spinning around my naive little head. Me, casually strolling around, taking the odd picture and composing a nice little blog entry about same.
Oh how quickly I forgot the lesson of Halloween. Oh yes, what a foolish mistake. (A tale for another time).
You see, the thing is, NY is a big city just chock full of people. It has the highest population density in America - almost 67,000 per sq mile. During regular days NY copes admirably with this number of people. Sure traffic can be harsh - but I survived Bangkok traffic. A place where the unwary has to cope not only with insane tourists hurtling around on death machines called Tuk Tuks, but also the occasional local driving an elephant through town. And the subway can get a little packed during peak hour - but I have survived the London Underground during the height of summer.
But when a special event is on - all hell breaks loose. Because every man and his dog is heading towards said special event. No, not just every man and his dog, but every man, his dog, the cat, the cats' extended family visiting from Russia and one of those weird pets that only boys seem to find appealing - you know, the kind that has more than 4 legs and can only eat something exotic.
I should have realised something was up when I had to queue to get off the subway platform and up the stairs. Aha thought I - obviously this was a small choke point and all would be remedied once the street opened up. (I can do a wonderful combination of blind optimism and stupidity). Having achieved ground level I attempted to orient myself and quickly realised I was in mortal danger! A rather determined looking woman with a stroller the size of a small SUV was bearing down on me hell for leather. It would appear that she had finally achieved some momentum in moving through the crowd and woe betide anyone who got in her way. This wasn't an ordinary stroller - no sirree! This was one of those "Jeep" models with the huge wheels and the children sitting side-by-side rather than one behind the other - for maximum street sweeping effectiveness no doubt. I frantically looked around for salvation. I couldn't turn and dive back down the subway stairs for safety as people were pressing at my back. To the left of me was a sheer granite wall in the form of a 15 storey apartment building. To the right of me was the press of the crowd. With an avenue of escape eluding me - and wheeled death approaching ever faster - I started sizing up whether or not the lamp post was sturdy enough to take my weight, not to mention whether I thought I had it in me to scale something so vertical. Luckily salvation came when the starboard wheel of the stroller (I had started to think of it in nautical terms as from this distance the thing resembled an ocean liner) struck a protruding bit of the fence line and they careened off in a slightly different direction. With the port wheel whizzing by at what must have been eye level my mind found a sudden burst of clarity. Flinging myself behind the contraption I followed in their wake until I could get to a relatively quiet bit of the street. Sitting off to the sidelines - idly wondering whether I could run for a city council & outlaw side-by-side strollers - I attempted to gather my wits and figure out just what the bloody hell was going on.
You see - if there is one thing that the NYPD know, its crowd control. You only have to think about having something at street level that involves more than 4 people and WHAM! The place is flooded with police and metal fences about waist high. It is actually pretty impressive if I am honest. So, unlike muggins here, the NYPD knew that the place would be packed and had responded by fencing off anything that looked like a person might walk along it. The Avenues in NY run North/South and are the biggest roads, the streets rune East/West and are generally smaller. They were inflating the balloons in 5 of the streets between the avenues of Central Park West and Columbus. The NYPD had fenced off the sidewalks and basically were funnelling people into the worlds biggest rat maze. You walked about 800 metres up the left hand side of the avenue, crossed over, and then criss crossed the streets watching the balloons being inflated, before being spat out at the other end to menace innocent Australians popping out of the subway. No doubt having covered 8km of ground!
I had read the other day that there has been a 35% increase in children living on the island since 2000. Tonight I could believe it. Untold millions of the little tykes all over the place. Of course what the article had failed to mention was that the island had adapted. You see, you can't swing a cat in NY without hitting some kind of street stall selling something. Hordes of people set up a couple of planks of wood on top of milk crates and sell everything from NY themed hoodies to dodgy versions of DVD's for movies that you swear they only finished filming last week. At times like this they devote themselves to all things flashing, pointy and slightly dangerous for children. I turned the corner and spotted the entrance to this massive maze, a horde of people with what appeared to be a ratio of 76 children per adult - with all of the children waving pointy swords with coloured lights, flashing hair band thingies and what can only be described as a truly bizarre combination of a flashing spinning top encased in a clear plastic cover errr... thingie. Combine this with the never ending flash of cameras and it looked uncannily like a shiny, happy, disco version of the zombie apocalypse.
I managed to find a convenient mail box to shelter behind to watch said spectacle. Trying to decide whether I wanted to fling myself into the crush, I suddenly had a vision of reaching the half way mark surrounded by a rather truculent bunch of children armed to the teeth with flashing swords - a horde of children tired of walking and giving some thought towards harnessing any beast of burden that was handy aka the nearest convenient adult. Having read Lord of the Flies I decided that wandering into the midst of heavily armed children was too great a danger and beat a hasty retreat to the subway. Quite a tense journey I can assure you - what with one wary eye peeled for rogue strollers and the other for sugar hyped kids waving flashing swords around their head and intent on recreating an epic scene from Lord of the Rings!
The end result of the evening? A new found terror of strollers, a couple of blurry shots of the crowd and a glimpse of a balloon being inflated. Oh and a strong need for a stiff shot of whisky to steady my trembling nerves.
Why am I telling you this? Well, because where I live you don't actually feel that NY is huge. A lot of the streets are the same scale as the Sydney CBD - this is because the financial district follows the original layout of Manhattan when it was still New Amsterdam. You only hit the classic grid pattern when you get above 14th St. But every now and then I stumble across something that smacks you in the face and makes you realise how big this place is. "And what, pray tell, was the most recent event?" I hear you ask. This time it was the annual Inflate the Balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. "But surely!", I hear you cry, "You mean the actual parade?" No. I left that one bloody well alone after risking life and limbs the night before.
You see, it all went down somewhat like this. I was supposed to be flying out today for a couple of weeks in the London office. Unfortunately the project I am working on is delayed and the trip was cancelled. So I did a bit of a web spank to find out about the parade - coz hey, its just so gosh darn American and has featured in like EVERY sitcom that ever made it to Australia. In doing so I find a Q&A page that as the very last point mentions that they inflate the balloons the night before and that if you want you can go up and see it happen between 76th & 80th streets. Well says I, that sounds like much more fun than standing for hours on end waiting for a parade to wander past. So I hop onto the subway like a good little boy, visions of whacky cartoon character balloons gradually inflating and breaking the surly bonds of gravity spinning around my naive little head. Me, casually strolling around, taking the odd picture and composing a nice little blog entry about same.
Oh how quickly I forgot the lesson of Halloween. Oh yes, what a foolish mistake. (A tale for another time).
You see, the thing is, NY is a big city just chock full of people. It has the highest population density in America - almost 67,000 per sq mile. During regular days NY copes admirably with this number of people. Sure traffic can be harsh - but I survived Bangkok traffic. A place where the unwary has to cope not only with insane tourists hurtling around on death machines called Tuk Tuks, but also the occasional local driving an elephant through town. And the subway can get a little packed during peak hour - but I have survived the London Underground during the height of summer.
But when a special event is on - all hell breaks loose. Because every man and his dog is heading towards said special event. No, not just every man and his dog, but every man, his dog, the cat, the cats' extended family visiting from Russia and one of those weird pets that only boys seem to find appealing - you know, the kind that has more than 4 legs and can only eat something exotic.
I should have realised something was up when I had to queue to get off the subway platform and up the stairs. Aha thought I - obviously this was a small choke point and all would be remedied once the street opened up. (I can do a wonderful combination of blind optimism and stupidity). Having achieved ground level I attempted to orient myself and quickly realised I was in mortal danger! A rather determined looking woman with a stroller the size of a small SUV was bearing down on me hell for leather. It would appear that she had finally achieved some momentum in moving through the crowd and woe betide anyone who got in her way. This wasn't an ordinary stroller - no sirree! This was one of those "Jeep" models with the huge wheels and the children sitting side-by-side rather than one behind the other - for maximum street sweeping effectiveness no doubt. I frantically looked around for salvation. I couldn't turn and dive back down the subway stairs for safety as people were pressing at my back. To the left of me was a sheer granite wall in the form of a 15 storey apartment building. To the right of me was the press of the crowd. With an avenue of escape eluding me - and wheeled death approaching ever faster - I started sizing up whether or not the lamp post was sturdy enough to take my weight, not to mention whether I thought I had it in me to scale something so vertical. Luckily salvation came when the starboard wheel of the stroller (I had started to think of it in nautical terms as from this distance the thing resembled an ocean liner) struck a protruding bit of the fence line and they careened off in a slightly different direction. With the port wheel whizzing by at what must have been eye level my mind found a sudden burst of clarity. Flinging myself behind the contraption I followed in their wake until I could get to a relatively quiet bit of the street. Sitting off to the sidelines - idly wondering whether I could run for a city council & outlaw side-by-side strollers - I attempted to gather my wits and figure out just what the bloody hell was going on.
You see - if there is one thing that the NYPD know, its crowd control. You only have to think about having something at street level that involves more than 4 people and WHAM! The place is flooded with police and metal fences about waist high. It is actually pretty impressive if I am honest. So, unlike muggins here, the NYPD knew that the place would be packed and had responded by fencing off anything that looked like a person might walk along it. The Avenues in NY run North/South and are the biggest roads, the streets rune East/West and are generally smaller. They were inflating the balloons in 5 of the streets between the avenues of Central Park West and Columbus. The NYPD had fenced off the sidewalks and basically were funnelling people into the worlds biggest rat maze. You walked about 800 metres up the left hand side of the avenue, crossed over, and then criss crossed the streets watching the balloons being inflated, before being spat out at the other end to menace innocent Australians popping out of the subway. No doubt having covered 8km of ground!
I had read the other day that there has been a 35% increase in children living on the island since 2000. Tonight I could believe it. Untold millions of the little tykes all over the place. Of course what the article had failed to mention was that the island had adapted. You see, you can't swing a cat in NY without hitting some kind of street stall selling something. Hordes of people set up a couple of planks of wood on top of milk crates and sell everything from NY themed hoodies to dodgy versions of DVD's for movies that you swear they only finished filming last week. At times like this they devote themselves to all things flashing, pointy and slightly dangerous for children. I turned the corner and spotted the entrance to this massive maze, a horde of people with what appeared to be a ratio of 76 children per adult - with all of the children waving pointy swords with coloured lights, flashing hair band thingies and what can only be described as a truly bizarre combination of a flashing spinning top encased in a clear plastic cover errr... thingie. Combine this with the never ending flash of cameras and it looked uncannily like a shiny, happy, disco version of the zombie apocalypse.
I managed to find a convenient mail box to shelter behind to watch said spectacle. Trying to decide whether I wanted to fling myself into the crush, I suddenly had a vision of reaching the half way mark surrounded by a rather truculent bunch of children armed to the teeth with flashing swords - a horde of children tired of walking and giving some thought towards harnessing any beast of burden that was handy aka the nearest convenient adult. Having read Lord of the Flies I decided that wandering into the midst of heavily armed children was too great a danger and beat a hasty retreat to the subway. Quite a tense journey I can assure you - what with one wary eye peeled for rogue strollers and the other for sugar hyped kids waving flashing swords around their head and intent on recreating an epic scene from Lord of the Rings!
The end result of the evening? A new found terror of strollers, a couple of blurry shots of the crowd and a glimpse of a balloon being inflated. Oh and a strong need for a stiff shot of whisky to steady my trembling nerves.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Las Vegas Pt I – Is Anything Real?
My parents came over to the Impressions of
- Aladdin, a
-
-
- Excalibur, an authentic King Arthur castle with 4,000 rooms, a moat & a fiberglass keep
-
- The Venetian,
As you can tell, subtlety is obviously the overarching motto of
Needless to say that if you were an engineer in this town you would have a marvelous old time building the sort of things that used to be built by the more eccentric branch of the British Royal Family. Of course everything is made out of steel frames and what appears to be fiberglass or chipboard. This results in an insane urge to reach out and touch everything – I imagine that the closest you can get to this experience outside of
What supports this excess? Well consider the following stats for 2006,
- Number of visitors: 38,914,889
- Visitor Contribution: US$39,419,205,580
- Hotel Rooms: 132,605
- Government Gaming Revenue: US$10,643,206,000
So you can imagine that the great state of
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Weird Stuff in NY: How Much of a Pervert Are You?
Wandering around NY you come across all kinds of weird things - I fully intend these weird things to be a common feature of this blog. So today I wandered down the road to Battery Park and took a picture of a sculpture that is in the park. A sculpture that I think enables us all to gauge just how much of a 'prevert' (to quote Stanley Kubrick) we all are. What is the first thought that enters your mind when you see the image to your right?
If you were thinking of a different part of the human anatomy than 'eyeballs' you are a filthy pervert who shouldn't be allowed to look at art. I have been given to understand that they actually rotated the right errr... eyeball so that it was looking in a different direction than the left one in an attempt to minimise the number of children asking the awkward "Mummy - what are those?" questions. That or the artist comes from the deep south where that particular alignment of eyeballs is more common than we would like to think.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Where the hell do I live again?
So - after 6 months of living like a nomad - albeit of the 5 star hotel kind - I finally landed for real in New York last December. After spending a month living uptown on 50th & 8th in a company apartment, I finally obtained the nirvana that is my own apartment. After 6 months I can assure you I was cartwheeling down the corridor. Well, actually, mentally I was cartwheeling down the corridor. Trust me - in my place you don't have that much space for such physical exertions!
So - I figured that I would try to give y'all and understanding as to where it is that I actually live. I am way downtown - in fact you can only go abou 500 metres further downtown. The picture above shows the southern tip of Manhattan. The blue arrow is the World Trade Centre site, the yellow arrow is my apartment building. I am on the 9th floor out of 28 - with just on 500 apartments in the entire building. It is pretty handy to the office - I have to walk all of 100 metres from the front door of my building to the front door of the office. We also have 24 hour doormen, a valet and dry cleaning service and a massive gym. Which disturbingly enough I am starting to use.
It is amazing how quicky I have adapted to the NY way of life - tiny, tiny apartment with the ability to have anything delivered within about 5 minutes. Within a 200 metre radius of my place there are 4 bottle shops that deliver. Not to mention directly opposite my apartment is a deli that is open 24hours a day just in case you need to duck out at 3 in the morning and get some more milk!
Over the next couple of weeks I hope to be fairly active on here - trying to get a feel for what you can put on this thing and how - but hopefully I can give regular updates of the plain weird stuff you get to see in this city. What kind of weird? The other day I got on a subway train and there was a guy in a 3 piece business suit (delightful shirt and tie combination by the way) holding a leather attache case in one hand and a kayak paddle in the other hand. And that is probably one of the less surreal things that I have seen in the last few months.
Work is its usual hectic mess - am spending about 1 week a month up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A delightful little seaside town - just not NY - and lets face it, if you do have to live in America NY is the place to be! You get to blend in with the rest of the weirdos...
What was that phrase - oh yeah - Let There Be Light... or something
So - after a dedicated 6 year absence from the internet it would appear that I am being sucked into the world of blogs... as always - more to come...
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