VACAAAAAAATION!!!

At the request of a few, I have decided to post a few pics from my recent post-Christmas / pre-New Year's runs into New York City.

Just after Christmas (the Saturday following) I drove into the city to spend the day with friends up by Columbia University. I brought my PlayStation 3 along for the ride because we had planned for a few people to get together and watch our way through a few fun "Earth versus the Flying Saucers" type films in High Definition and at the moment I was the only one in the group that has a Blu-ray HD DVD player (though my friends by Columbia have a home theater to DIE for... seriously, it is better than going to the movies.) I didn't bother to to bring any of my cameras because, well, I knew I was going to be indoors nearly the whole time and, well, making the run into the city is getting a little old-hat, and while it is always a good time, I don't always want to drag a bunch of stuff around.

After I setup with my friend for "movie time" we quickly realized I forgot to bring along a fiber-optic audio cable... OOPS! That's half the experience, so I pulled out my iPhone, GPSed the nearest Radio Shack and after calling to confirm they had what I was looking for, I ran out the door to walk the 10 New York blocks down to the store. It was actually a fairly nice day and lots of folks were out for a walk. Now, since the store was a few blocks over on Broadway, typically I would have walked down Amsterdam, across the Columbia campus and on down Broadway, but as I was walking I decided, "Hey, I have never taken the time to walk very far (or drive for that matter) down Amsterdam!" so I decided to go ahead and walk as far down Amsterdam as I could, before turning toward the store. That is where I ran into St. Luke's church in these pictures here. It was huge and recently restored. I didn't take the time to go inside, but I did happen to remember that my iPhone had a camera so i grabbed a few quick shots of the church and this wacky sculpture sitting outside in the garden next to it.











Then a few days later, my cousin Jay along with wife Lisa and toddler Zoe got back from a week's get-away vacation and Jay had a spontaneous desire to make a run into the city again. So now it is Sunday evening and we've made plans to hit, a bookstore, some comic book stores, do some people watching and take in a nice lunch and dinner. We headed to Newark where we hopped on the PATH train and rode all the way to 33rd St and then rode up and down on the "6" train to various locations of interest. This time I brought my little pocket camera to grab some "city" shots and so here they are! We walked a bit, listened to college kids excitedly meet up with friends in Union Park, watch a busking band play for change in the subway, went into stores, talked to people (I met a 6'4" Japanese - Egyptian Photographer in the checkout line at The Strand bookstore... neat guy!), ate at a neat Korean restaurant and had fun flirting with a waitress at a Japanese karaoke-bar in the evening ... it was a fun relaxing time.

My First NYC Parking Ticket... ouch!

Tickets are no fun. Even if you are out having fun a good solid costly parking ticket can taint the evening. When I was living in Wisconsin, parking in a parking ramp could sometimes be more expensive than a ticket out on the street, so taking your chances was often the most fiscally responsible choice. That is definitely not the case in New York City. Take the following example:





Appleton has basically two parking ramps and a number of coin opperated street parking locations. The ramps cost a few bucks to park in, and a quarter on the street will get you like, 15 minutes, but most importantly the parking ticket only costs $5 (the last time I got one.)

Now, let's talk about New York City. Average parking ramp seems to be around $30 +/- $10 for a few hours of parking. Coin Ops are out there, but as I have learned, they are really just for suckers. By that I mean, if you are enough of a magician to be able to plug the meeter with enough change to generate enough time to actually go do something and correctly estimate how soon you will get back to your car... well, then you are fine. But in my case, I put about $0.75 in the coin op and that gave me a foolish 30 minutes in the financial district one saturday morning. I thought to myself, "What an amazing deal," until 35 minutes later I was walking up to my car noticing that the additional poorly estimated 5 minutes cost me an addition $65, for a grand total of $65.75 to park downtown for 35 minutes. At that point I seriously contemplates consulting a cop to see if I now had paid for hte right to live in that spot the remainder of the day. Rather, I got in my car and drove up by Columbia University to hang out with friends (did I mention I drove around for about 20 minutes to find the right best spot this time?)

Ugh! Never again. So, thanks to NYC and the NYC.gov website, I was conveniently able to pay the unexpected expense online, which leaves me with this beatifully designed momento in viewable form in the top most picture of this blog entry. But this brings me to my final comment on this most interesting experience: paying your parking tickets online!

So, there was this goofy moment after I located my online ticket on the website. The page asked me if I wanted to "add anything else to my basket" -- as in Shopping basket? I figured they were using some cheap e-commerce software and someone simply neglected to rework those interfaces so they would say something more appropriate, like "Do you want to pay another ticket?" or "would you like to add to you credit for future parking violations?" ... you know, something more helpful, like that. But they obviously didn't take the time, nor were they likely too worried about my "user experience" when paying my parking ticket. Finally, once I was certain I didn't want to add anything to my "basket" it asked me if I was "ready to checkout"...

...

... to which my reply could only be, "Yes. I am all stocked up on parking tickets and am not in need of another thing. Thanks for asking. Let's ... checkout!"