…running to the airport with a bag over your shoulder and having Wen casually remark that the bag is on its last legs. And at that exact moment the strap snaps and everything goes tumbling into the streets. If it wasn’t so funny I might have been frustrated.
Today Wen and I went for dinner on the LES. When we were done I made her go over to 27 Eldridge. It’s home to an unremarkable Chinese restaurant called Sheng Wan. We weren’t there for the food, rather because I’m reading Richard Price’s Lush Life right now and it revolves around a shooting that happens at that address.
It’s a fantastic book (and a lucid observation of how the LES is changing); I highly recommend it. It’s also interesting as Price has changed the names and nature of many things in the neigbourhood, yet still captures a feel for the place. For instance, 27 Eldridge is in a Chinese area, but in the book it’s Hispanic. Similarly, there is talk of ‘88 Forsyth House’-which sounds sneakily like the Tenement Museum.
And not to switch topics, but check out the unfortunate name of Sheng Wan’s neighbour:
I always get a kick out of stock analysts. It’s a weird job: you’re paid a lot of money to talk about an industry you’ve never worked in and model the future profits of companies you have no inside knowledge of. And on top of it all you have a profound impact on the companies’ share prices (having worked at two publicly traded corporations I can tell you that our CEO’s cared what the analysts said).
Most of the time it’s nothing new with these guys; they tend to exhibit herd behaviour. However, sometimes I’m surprised by what they say. Check out this recent article in the New York Times on Verizon. It’s all about the FiOS program (running fiber optic cable to houses to replace copper and provide practically limitless data transmission speeds) and whether it’s a good or bad idea.
The numbers thrown around are pretty substantial: Verizon’s spending $23 billion to roll this thing out, so lots of analysts are trying to figure out if it will make money. One of them states:
“If I were an auto dealer and I wanted to give people a Maserati for the price of a Volkswagen, I’d have some seriously happy customers,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “My problem would be whether I could earn a decent return doing it.”
Moreover, he figures they’ll be $6 billion in the hole at the end of the day. But who cares if Verizon loses money on this? They’ve already sunk four and half years of costs into this thing (the roll out started in 2003), so if you’re investing now, you stand to make a good return. This isn’t lost on Craig’s peers at Bank of America:
“If you are an investor today thinking about what the prospects of FiOS are tomorrow, you don’t look at what has been spent. You look at what needs to be spent,” Mr. Barden said. “The 2008 investors owe the 2003 investors a debt of gratitude because the 2008 Verizon is in a vastly better competitive position than it otherwise would be.”
So there you have it. Two analysts looking at the same stock. One saying it’s a waste of cash as it’ll never break even and the other saying that all the costs are sunk so it’s worth a lot more than people think.
Like I said, I always get a kick out of stock analysts.
It’s pretty much impossible to predict the future - particularly for something as fast moving as the Internet. However, as part of Mozilla’s Concept Series, Adaptive Path has created a few videos (bonus: watch ‘em in HD) on what the future of the browser might be.
Essentially, the browser is the web - and your computer. Everything is happening in the cloud and the browser is the container for all applications (whether communication, search, etc.) to occur. One of the interesting aspects is that it involves web services seamlessly transferring data from one to another.
This has been the holy grail for folks for years, but it continually seems to get blocked (mainly due to a lack of standards or a proliferation of competing standards by large incumbents with entrenched interests). However, it’s starting to occur.
Here’s an interesting example. I work at WebMD and we have a partnership with Yahoo to serve you ads on Yahoo properties based upon your browsing history at WebMD. This means that we share our data with them (although they don’t actually know what you saw; they just receive the ad). Recently, I was testing out WebMD’s Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) Health Check - and when I went to Yahoo News, check out the ad on the right hand side:
This is just a baby step, but I’m looking forward to the day when web services are constantly sharing data. Things are going to get very interesting. Hopefully it won’t create Skynet.
Try this with your friends at work:
I live in New York City, where you can’t go more than about 150 feet without hitting a road. I’m from Canada where you can go up to the North and there are no roads for at least a hundred kilometers (see my earlier post on the ice fields in Auyuittuq park). So what about the U.S.? How far can you go before you hit a road?
Turns out, not that far. According to this article, the farthest you can go in landlocked America is 20 miles, and it’s in the southeastern corner of Yellowstone:
Apparently in Louisiana there are some swamps that preclude road building and it’s the part of the country where technically you can get the furthest from a road:
I was waiting for the subway in the (overheated) 1st Ave L train station when I saw this ad:
Yes, it’s been totally defaced, but honestly, I like the new version much better than the original. In fact, one of the pleasures of living in NYC is the quality of graffiti - particularly people who deface ads. Through some odd coincidence, we not only have the best copywriters and graphic designers in the country, we also seem to have people who just know perfectly how to turn an ad into a source of ridicule. Wait, maybe it’s not a coincidence…
My dad recently sent me this article:
It’s about how a recent flood in Auyuittuq National Park has caused it’s closing; the flood was brought on by climate change. Auyuittuq park is basically a giant icefield, so if the water melts, the park is toast. This flood wiped out the only bridge in the park, meaning that you can no longer get up to the heart of the park. It may sound strange, but this park is totally inaccessible without that bridge. I know, because I was there in 2002. Here’s a photo of me on the bridge (I’m the yellow speck in the middle):
Notice all the giant rocks that are there-and how they’re all gone in the image above. Must have been one hell of a flood. Here’s another shot with dad on the bridge:
[As an aside, a few years later my dad found himself hiking in Bolivia - where they had exactly the same bridge. It turned out it was a gift from Parks Canada]
The fact that the park is closed is a true tragedy. It’s one of the most rugged and beautiful places I’ve ever been. And sadly, now it’s closed indefinitely. Here are a few shots of it; they’re the closest you’re going to get any time soon:
That’s dad in the middle with Mount Thor in the background (the sheer face). To get up this far, you need to hike through a meandering valley:
Part of the charm of the park is that there are glaciers everywhere:
They’re the fringes of an icefield that is a few hundred square kilometers in size. It would literally stretch from Oakville to Oshawa and Aurora to Lake Ontario. Here’s a shot from Google Maps; the “A” is Pangnirtung. It’s over an hour’s boat ride from the entrance to the park:
Here’s one last shot. Let’s hope that the park opens again soon - I, for one, want to go back.
We all make mistakes, but this one (on 8th street) was particularly egregious.
The photo below is the corridor I walk down every day to get to work. I work in the Port Authority building; it’s a massive edifice that fills a block between 8/9th and 15/6th. I have no idea what used to be in the building, but now it’s got more bandwidth than Africa (honestly, that’s one reason why Google’s also in the building).
Our offices are on 8th, but I like taking the 9th street entrance as I get to walk down the corridor. Walking past the freight elevators, down the painted brick corridors and underneath the miles of metal tubes holding fiber optics harkens back to a building and New York that no longer exist. It’s a priceless way to start the day.
