Getting Out of the City
My wife wants to go for a drive in the country? Well, grab a car and let's go! The air in the Catskills is crisp, the trees are changing colour... Hey, wait a minute, what's that sign? "Premium Outlet Mall"? Curses, I've been tricked!
Well, okay, it wasn't exactly like that. In fact, I'm the one who went home with a new suit and thee pairs of shoes. But some time soon we're going to have to book a B&B and come back for a weekend, with only part of it spent shopping.
Kathleen Grace
We have friends from Toronto, C&E, visiting New York this week. They are in town to celebrate E's milestone birthday, and to see E's sister perform. The sister,
Kathleen Grace, is a jazz singer who lives in Los Angeles and is on a small East coast tour with her band. Last night we went to see her sing at
The Living Room, a small but reputable club in the Lower East Side. The set was short, but long enough to take the measure of her considerable talent. C&E are earnestly proud of little sister, with good reason.
Stamford
I had a meeting yesterday with a recruiter in Stamford, Connecticut. It was about an hour's journey on the train, but a pleasant enough town once I got there. Since 9/11 the core of Manhattan became slightly less
de rigeur for big financial services companies, and many have moved at least some of their offices out of the city. Small towns like this have been the beneficial recipients of such relocations. As it happens the job for which the recruiter wishes to champion me is in White Plains, NY - quite a different place, but also one that has singularly benefited from the business diaspora.
Taxis Protest
The taxi drivers in New York have been up in arms over the last couple of months concerning new equipment that is being installed in all New York cabs. At issue is a GPS system that shows a little map of the car's route, takes credit cards payment for the fare, displays other content like local news and weather, and a flashes up a lot of advertising. The drivers are against it for a number or reasons, but chief among them, as I understand it, is that the cost of the system is being passed on to the drivers, yet they receive no direct benefit. There also seems to be some belief that the GPS can be used to track them, and there are concerns about credit cards which I guess they fear will result in reduced tips.
Apparently we live near the taxi commission offices, because yesterday they held a demonstration on West Street, readily visible from our apartment. The loudspeakers blasted impassioned speeches for most of the afternoon. There was a lot of cheering, sign-waving, and fists brandished at passing taxi-drivers, who presumably were resisting the call to solidarity.
We asked a couple of drivers, but none were able to explain the role of the giant rat.
XBRL for Breakfast
This morning I attended a breakfast presentation uptown. The presentation was on the subject of
XBRL (and was hosted by
Edgar Online, my attendance facilitated by a friend of Janet's who works there), an XML standard for financial documents. Not something you care about unless you're an accountant or a company officer; but since regulators worldwide are embracing it, including a little belatedly the SEC, if you are one of those things, you're going to start caring about it quite a bit. I was there partly for networking, but mostly because it's an interesting XML standard that has the potential to precipitate significant changes to the way things are done in public companies. I got interested in the area in 2002, but it was almost too early to be working with it then; now the standard is so mature and the tools getting so complete that it may already be too late for the innovative work.
It was held at the University Club, at 5th Ave. and 54th St., a very nice neighbourhood, near the Park and the Upper East Side. I've always liked the University Club in Toronto, but the New York version made ours look like a mud hut.
New York Neighbourhoods
We have been continuing our purposeful wanderings through the
city's neighbourhoods each weekend. We have meandered through Midtown, the Flatiron district, Chelsea, Soho, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Williamsburg and Brooklyn Heights. Two weeks ago we went to Central Park, and then strolled through the Upper West Side. We know the area around Union Square fairly well now too, since it has a Whole Foods, a farmers market on the weekend, and is just North of
NYU where we are both taking Continuing Ed. classes. Today Janet and I had lunch in Greenwich Village after our Arabic lesson, and then I walked down through Soho, thronged on a warm Saturday afternoon, along the barer sidewalks of Tribeca, and home to Battery Park.
This sculpture of the famous photo is actually just an attention-getter for the smaller copies on sale to the tourists.
These circumnavigations may turn out to have a practical end. I visited the building of the under-construction apartment we've rented in the financial district. Considering that we were originally proposed to move into the place on October 1st, the progress on our floor is dismaying. The walls are up, but nothing is completed. Bare wires protrude from switchplates and there is no finished hardwood, tile, carpet, wallpaper or paint on the entire floor, much less appliances and window coverings. Our lease contains a clause that lets us out 45 days after the 1st, and it's still possible that it could be habitable by then - but I saw only one workman in the whole site, and he was on the phone. So we may have to reflect on our explorations and give some serious thought to where we should focus a renewed house hunt.
World's Largest Fondue
There we were in Switzerland just a few months ago, with hardly a fondue to be found. I guess all the best cheese leaves the country to tour, because Janet stumbled across this spectacle in the mall of the World Financial Center (the grandiosely named office complex next door to the World Trade Center, the world's most visited construction site).
