On a few occasions, I found myself somewhere between the 14th St/8th&nbsb;Ave subway stop and the Hudson river.
One of the first things I did when I got to NYC was visit the new-to-me High Line Park. It lived up to the hype: putting a park onto a former elevated rail line actually turns out to create something interesting. Better photographers than I have taken better photos than this, but I still like this photo. See that light? On the right side of the photo, on the bridge that's covered with grass, there's a light. It's on in this photo, but it wasn't on all the time. That was part of a motion-activated light+noise maker. When rail cars went along that bridge, that thing would tell folks in that building there to look out for a car entering their building. But now it just went off every time the wind blew the grass. So obnoxious. But interesting: the folks making the park decided to leave that device there.
Before the boat tour, I strolled a bit in Hudson Park. This statue caught my eye. Because I spend so much time working with secret codes, I wanted the windows on this thing's surface to spell something out, a message on a bottle. If there was a message, I couldn't winkle it out. The windows might have just been placed for the comfort of folks inside the bottle.
On the boat tour, I noticed this interesting building. When I was on land, I snapped a better photo of it. Better yet, I found out that it was Pier 34, a searchable phrase so I could find more about it on the internets. It's a vent for the Holland Tunnel. That explains why there's a similar building on the opposite side of the Hudson.
I was on vacation, but this was a rare chance to visit some of my New York co-workers, so I stopped in at the office. David W. and Josh C. filled me in on writerly things. Michael C., Titus W, and I talked about C++, human folly, and their intersection. Mike Bland and I talked about how to teach people (or fail to teach people) the nuanced judgement necessary for useful code maintenance. Sorry, do those topics sound dull? Trust me, if you're talking about them with someone pretty knowledgeable, they can get into some interesting territory. OK, here's something interesting: David W let me know that our company had another office across the street from our regular office. And this other office had a slide, better than the slide in the San Francisco office. So I went and tried it out. It was better than the San Francisco slide. Also, the local mailroom clerk used it to deliver packages while I was there.
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