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In honor of the Spelling Bee last night, here’s the greatest clip from spelling bee history

After riding on a real public transit system for a few days, it makes me more upset at the disaster that is MARTA.  It can’t make money, they don’t service places people want to be, they apparently refuse to expand, etc.  Honestly the only times we ever use it is to go to Hawks or Thrashers games, because that is the ONE useful stop on the whole system.

Meanwhile, New York is putting in a new subway line, set to open in 2015.  If it’s possible to put a new line underground in a city as full and busy as NYC, it should be possible to make MARTA actually useful to Atlantans.

Please excuse the lack of updating post-New York move, but the place I’m staying right now has no internet access (or cable tv for that matter).  I know, ridiculous.  Anyway, I’m getting settled in now that I have a coffee shop with free wifi I can access when I need email, and I start work tomorrow.

Despite the lack of usual distractions, I have managed to keep busy so far.  I’ve done a lot of walking around the West Village, down through SoHo and the Financial District and surrounding areas.  I’m pretty comfortable with the area now, which is useless since I’ll be moving again in a couple weeks max.  Oh well, still plenty of good stuff to see.

I went to my first Yankees game ever on Friday after getting in.  The stadium is pretty nice, but since the game was between the two teams I hate more than anything (Yanks and Phillies) I was kinda distracted from enjoying it as much as I should’ve.  AJ Burnett torpedoing my fantasy team didn’t help either.  I guess the highlight of the whole experience was seeing Steven Weber on the subway ride over.  He looked like he had just crawled out from under a pile of dead hookers.  Yikes Steve, get some sleep man.

Today is my test-run of the route I’ll have to take tomorrow to get to work, and then after that I think I’m going to check out one of the free (well, donation requested) museums so that I can feel like I did something cultured in my time here.

I want to go to there

I knew I liked this guy.

CNN Story

Screw it. I bet ten dollars on the horse to win. But I kept looking at the horse. The more I looked at this horse, the more I liked it. So I bet exactas. I bet Lady Forli on top of every other horse and below every other horse. Now I had what’s called a wheel.

I kept looking at the horse. Wait a minute, I told myself, I’ve got four dollars left. I have a pack of cigarettes. I’ve gotta give the valet two bucks. That still leaves me with money to bet a trifecta.

My birthday is November 19. Lady Forli was number 11. So I bet 11 to win, 1 to place, and 9 to show.

Now I had bets in for 11 on top, 11 on bottom, and 11 to win. And I had a trifecta — 11-1-9.

When the race began, I had two dollars left to my name — and that was for the valet.

Nice. And of course, the reason he’s telling this story…

The 11 won by five lengths. The 1 was three lengths ahead of the 9. I had every winning ticket. I had it to win. I had the exacta. I had the trifecta. I collected nearly eight thousand dollars. Eight thousand dollars!

I got back late last night from a 4 day beach vacation with some friends, and now I have to get ready to go back to work for the first time in almost a year.

At some point this week, between Thursday and Saturday, I’m going to fly up to NYC and then I’ll be up there for the rest of the summer.  I’ve pretty much got a place locked down on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and then I’ll be commuting up north of the city to work.

The company I’ll be working for is actually one that I mentioned about two months ago on here as being one that I really liked.  Starting next Tuesday I’ll be working with Flat World Knowledge up in Nyack, NY and working on a variety of projects with them.  I hesitated to post about this earlier because, well, I didn’t want to get all excited and then not get it, but the interview was awesome and now I’m set.

As for what I’ll be doing there, since it’s a start up there are a ton of projects that need to be done.  Initially I’ll be using my logistics background to help with some vendor integrations.  Not the most exciting project for me, but it should give me a great opportunity to contribute quickly and significantly.  The next two projects we talked about deal with social media campaigns and working with the product manager.  Both of these will involve working in new fields for me, but I’ve got some resources I’ve been reading and studying and I’m very excited to get the chance to get in to these arenas since that’s what I hope to end up doing.

It’s going to be some hard work and I’m going to get to (and have to) learn a lot.  Plus I’ll get to work with some very smart and energetic people, a couple of whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet already and some, like Fast Company’s 78th Most Creative Person in Business David Wiley, I hope to get some interaction with over the course of the summer.

But yeah, getting all this set up and going on vacation is why I haven’t been around much in the last week and a half.  I haven’t even been reading much on my google reader lately, so I still can’t do another link post yet.  I’ll do better soon, and I’ll try to start integrating more pictures I’ve taken or cooking stuff to add a little different flavor to the blog.

Since David Bowie could have filmed his fabulous movie, Labyrinth, at my apartment building, I decided to send out a little map I made of how to get here.  You can always call me on my cell if you get lost, but I think it’s much easier to see it than to try to explain it in words.

See you tonight!

Amazing scene from Hurley on this week’s Lost

Dr. Chang: So you fought in the Korean War?
Hurley: There’s…no such thing
Miles (disbelief face)
Jin (disappointed face)

So, I’m not going to write up a big deal about what I did (other than get a job for the summer, boo yah!) but I’ll dish out some quick stories with some google map pictures of where I walked.

Day 1

I got in to my hotel at 35th and 6th around noon, met up with Alexis for lunch on 42nd and 2nd, walked through Times Square up to Central Park, explored the park for a little bit, headed south all the way down to Union Square, and then doubled back to my hotel.  Nice little exploration and 8.28 miles according to gmap-pedometer.

That night I met up with Alexis again and her boyfriend Dave and we went to a bar called McSorley‘s, which is the oldest Irish pub in NYC.  Any order you make must involve multiple glasses of beer, there are only two options (light and dark) and it’s surprisingly cheap.  Also, if you’re as lucky as we were, you walk in at the right time, sit with a guy who used to frequent the place 30 years ago and knows the bartenders, and drink for free while hearing stories about Barbara Walters throwing up all over an elevator at Trump Towers.  First random NYer interaction: overwhelmingly positive.

Dave and Alex had to pack it in early for work the next morning, so I texted my other Manhattan friend Reena and went to hang out with her down near NYU.  That also turned out to be pretty awesome.  I met her friend Rachel from school and Rachel’s friend Dave from Michigan, and then we went to a basement bar with tabletop shuffleboard (best bar game ever), ping pong tables, and only beer or Korean liquor to drink.  Needless to say we took shots of that liquor and all ended up regretting it.  I called it a night about 4am and headed back to the hotel.

Day 2

Much more walking today.  I checked out at 11am and left my bag there while I did some more exploring.  Down to 34th street and over to Herald Square, through Chelsea, into SoHo, meet up with Reena for lunch at Caliente Cab Co., over to the Hudson, up to Chelsea Piers, back down the river, through Battery Park, over to Wall Street, and then up a combination of Broadway, Park Avenue and 5th to get back to the hotel.  Total damage: 12.5 miles.

Everything below my waist hurts right now since I only packed one pair of shoes, and they aren’t necessarily the best for walking 20 miles in 2 days in.  But I had a lot of fun, and now since I have a job I’ll have to find some place to live.  Expect the blog updates this summer to be a lot more about me finding cool stuff to do in NYC, and hopefully I can make it back a few times this summer for things like Gouda and Amy’s engagement celebration.

I just got back from NY and have a lot of good stuff to write about, but I’m very tired so instead I’m gonna turn on some Hulu and crash for the night.  However, before I do that I would like to teach you an interesting fact about porn and furries (people who dress up in animal costumes to have sex) that I learned today.

Source (2+2, not an actual porn site, and yes, he can be believed)

Strange fun porn fact. Furries screw up all sorts of bestiality laws for Visa rules and regulations. Technically the cross species sexual intercourse is against the visa rules, whether real or not. So, a furries porn site requires that both furries be of the same species to meet Visa regulations. Person dressed up as Tiger having sex with person dressed up as Dog, not ok. Two people dressed up as dogs, ok.