i haven’t been here in a while. coffee shop on northern blvd at 38th st. there is never any half and half and there are never any stirrers when i am here. this time, however, i am pleased to report that i got a chair with a cushion. so luxurious. i appreciate the cushiony soft experience offered to me by the fine folks at coffeed. i appreciate that as millions starve and suffer through caffeine deprivation on hard benches throughout the world i am fortunate enough to ingest fine coffee (and a banana) on a soft and comfortable surface.

i discovered today that the city has, for some reason, re-released the payphone locations dataset that i requested twice last year. i was surprised when they released it, and now i am surprised to see that it is back after being removed a month or so ago. i was unsure about using the dataset for anything after the city removed it, but since it’s back i guess it’s fair game again. i wrestled with some mapping software to render the shapefile, but i find that i am out of my league with that stuff. there are plenty of software packages out there, though, so i’m sure i’ll find a way to comprehend one of them. i did learn today that New York is in UTM Zone 18, so i’m getting somewhere with this stuff.

yesterday was a shitshow of hangover and headache monstrosity. even this morning when i woke up i felt some afterglow/afterburn of the previous day. i feel like a toxic sponge, emanating poisons through every pore.

i am nursing what i think is a funny idea for a review of a bar. “This place is a smartphone bar. This is where New York City’s smartphone elite come to sit at the bar, order a drink, and conduct serious business on their smartphones. Stepping into this place is like stepping into smartphone heaven. Here you will find highly sophisticated, highly important people using iPhones, Android Devices, Windows Phones, even tablets and hybrid devices to send text messages, browse the web, send and receive e-mail, and even conduct telephone conversations. There’s even a back room for Blackberry- and Treo-using curmudgeons who like to use old school smartphones from earlier generations. And hey, if you don’t have a smartphone, that’s OK. You can come here just to watch the smartphone elite. These guys love it when you watch them play Angry Birds, or when you listen in on their telephone conversations.”

…..

Looking out the window now I just saw another delivery guy on a motorcycle just mow right through a red light. Man, those guys are scary. I never used to notice them so much but it’s become a menace.

…..

I learned a few interesting things the past couple of days. The ad program I depend on for beer money generated $6.5 billion worth of income for its publishers. On that account I guess I have no reason to fear that the program will go away any time soon. I also learned that 60 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Holy crap, that’s unfathomable to me. I have heard stats in the past about how many e-mails get sent, how many IMs get sent per second, how many terabytes per second of data gush forth from data centers around the world. Those numbers don’t impress me much but for some reason the hours of video pouring into YouTube every freakin’ minute dumbfounded me. It makes me contemplate how much human experience really occurs every second, and how much and what type of resource would be needed to store it if,  somehow, it was possible to capture the ephemeral reality of existence. I’ve been working on a story about that, about someone who

wants to index air and atmosphere, to capture the unquenchably persistent reality of existence and make it searchable.

…..

the payphone buskers thing could use some attention. i realize now that the idea is not new, but that someone who attempted such a project in 2008 appears to have abandoned it without ever actually collecting or sharing anything. i’m going to make attempts tomorrow, when i’m in midtown, to get more and better captures. there are some pretty good bands that play down there, and their sound could be kind of haunting and hunting when squeezed through the monochrome soundworld of a landline phone.

…..

OK, then, I’m restless and going for more walkage.