Time should be given a ticket for speeding. Another weekend went by, much too fast.
Saturday: learning about projectzero web aplication development framework and the dojo javascript toolkit for a new blitz task that I got at work. Pretty interesting stuff (although seaside is still the best), and it’s cool to see that if you have a question about something you can invite for a coffee another one of the interns who is an expert in the domain (e.g., Florian Rosenberg and projectzero). In the evening we went to the rooftop garden at 230 fifth for the goodbye party of Maik. It was my second time there and I really like it - especially the possibility of looking the Empire State Building in the eye. After we went to another club with cool music which had the most powerful bass ever - my hair would move to the rhytm of the music :)
Sunday: In the morning, I felt like visiting Harlem so there I went. I like the place for the same reason I like manhattan: life is frantic there. The difference is that in Harlem you see kids and old people, which is not the case in Manhattan. I actually don’t recall seing children in the subway in Manhattan. It seems that there are only professionals. Another thing is that Harlem is full of churches. I visited the Greater Refuge Temple, a church which had a gospel service along the lines of Blues Brothers (thanks marco for the suggestion). Just the percussion was much louder! Oh, and some of those people can dance!
Then I decided that I want to go and visit Princeton for the joy of driving and for seing the famous university town as well as reading in its public library. What a difference between the Harlem of the morning and the Princeton of the evening! I’d say it’s something like the difference between Chemical Brothers and silence but I would probably be exagerating(it’s more like CB vs. Bach). Unfortunately I arrived late and after visiting the campus I found the library closed. However, but I found a great coffeeshop “Small World Cafe” - a place which really felt like it was designed by men for men - warm and cozy and social but in the same time offering you privacy. Ah, I should not write about architecture again!
On my way back I discovered that one can enjoy staying 25 minutes in a trafic jam. Surely, you never enjoy a trafic jam per se. You need the right story, but that’s easy when you are subscribed to Escape Pod because usually every story is a good one. This time it was “Niels Bohr and The Sleeping Dane” by Johnaton Sullivan with a nice intro by Stephen Eeley about religion and science. In fact I so much enjoyed the story that I eventually did something I never did before: I made my first donation online. Long live escape pod! Hmm, in fact it just occured to me that I would like to see a joint project between Escape Pod and the other podcast I like to listen to: the seminars of The Long Now Foundation. Escape pod is comitted to pushing out a short sf story every week. The Long Now Foundation is comitted to fostering very long term thinking. The resulting project would ensure that there would be an episode of escape pod available every week for the next 10.000 years. Oh, how I would make another donation for that :)