NVinNYC

A great NYC story waiting for the subway late at night with a bunch of strangers:

After a few minutes a very tall girl with long brown hair [...] broke social convention, turned to her fellow benchmates, and said, “My God, wasn’t today beautiful.” At first she just got a few quiet affirmations,”yeah, gorgeous”, “best day yet” etc, but then a young woman in a business suit again broke social convention and revealed personal information: “It was so nice, when I woke up I decided I didn’t want to feel miserable about anything, and broke up with my boyfriend. I ditched him at 7:30 in the morning. He didn’t know what hit him.”

I miss a lot about NYC; particularly riding the subways and how there are still lots of interesting people out at all hours of the night.

(Link via Kottke, post title inspired by LCD Soundsystem.)

Google Maps now shows nifty dimetric projections of city buildings when you zoom in to the highest two zoom levels. This data is obviously based on the 3D buildings that are available in Google Earth. Furthermore, in New York City (and perhaps other metro areas too?) they’ve added markers for subway (both MTA and PATH) stops.

Check it out these maps of Union Square, New York City and Portland, OR for examples.

It’s great to see Google continuing to develop this tool.

Update (2/20/07): I beat Kottke to the punch but he confirms that stops for the T in Boston and the L in Chicago are also featured on the maps.

PS: Wow, 200th post!  Yay for blogging!

Prewalking: walking to a specific point on the subway platform so that when one exits the train, he/she is close to the desired exit or transfer.

I do this all the time, especially for the 1,2,3 to the N,R,W,Q at Time Square.

(Via Kottke.)

The new NYC TJ’s opens today. I’d totally go the first day; but I just spent way too much at Whole Foods. Damn it.

Apparently, yesterday was King Kong Day in NYC. To celebrate they put up a full-size, realistic sculpture of the giant ape in the center of Times Square. I happened to see this scupture as I was leaving the Goldfrapp concert (more on that in a later post). At the time it was lightly snowing, and I’m coming out of the concert to see a giant gorilla surrounded by billboards and huge video screens all over the place. It was a very surreal experience. Anyway there’s couple good pics of the thing on the page linked above but here’s my personal favorite: