Today started out okay but ended up excellent. I intended to go to a tech talk in DUMBO, which is in north Brooklyn, but ended up sleeping through my alarm. I was supposed to be at Hacker School at noon to run a D&D campaign, but missed my stop on the subway and ended up about three stops north of where I was supposed to be. So, I called an Uber (which took 10 minutes to arrive), and then got stuck in traffic. What was supposed to be a 25-minute subway ride ended up taking an hour and a half.

I ended up not playing D&D anyway, since there was only one person – Matt – at Hacker School who wanted to play. Ian showed up a bit later, but at that point we had pretty much given up on playing anyway and rescheduled for next Friday… which I just realized I won’t be here for, so I guess the Friday after next is when we’ll start?

Joe came over and helped me out with a weird bug I was having with my Node.js multiplayer tag game. I’m really hoping to implement collision detection on Monday and get that project done and over with so I can get back to Budgeted. I really don’t want to have any projects that I start and abandon at Hacker School. Since I have the time, resources, help, and energy to actually complete things here, no excuses.

A while ago, I mentioned that I was going to see The Postal Service – today was that day. I left my backpack at work and took the E to the C into Brooklyn to Barclays Center, where the show was going to be.

Turns out my friend from Conserve, Chris, was also going to the show along with his Girlfriend, Haley. I met up with them at Barclays Center, and we quickly found that there were very few places where we could get dinner. We ended up going to Applebees, which was packed but not overflowing with people like a lot of the other places we tried. We chatted about Conserve and reminisced for a while, ate our food, and arrived at the show about halfway through the opening act, which was a husband and wife synthpop band. I said goodbye to Chris and Haley there and met up with Amandine, who was the other person who had purchased tickets from Yael.

Amandine and I talked about Hacker School and physics and stuff for a while, then turned our attention to the stage as The Postal Service came on.

I’m not going to say any of the things that were wrong with the concert, because I’d much rather focus on the amazingly cool things about it.

“Hi Brooklyn” – Ben

“Hi Ben” – Brooklyn

The Postal Service has not released an album in ten years. The lead singer – Ben Gibbards, is the lead singer of one of my other favorite bands – Death Cab for Cutie. I love the lyrics of both groups, and of the 32 albums I keep on my phone, 9 of them have Ben Gibbards as the lead. To be able to sing along with him was really cool.

My favorites were  Recycled Air, We Will Become Silhouettes, and of course, Such Great Heights. The crowd all stood for that last one, and we danced and sang along. Ben acknowledged how amazing it was that he was on a sold-out tour for a ten-year-old album. I will reiterate that this is one of the 32 albums I keep on my phone. It’s one of the most meaningful and self-relevant albums I own.

They ended with Natural Anthem, which breaks down into noise, and finishes with a kind of catharsis, which was a great choice. The crowd cheered for a full five minutes, and then they came back on for an encore with a new song as well as Brand New Colony, which ends with them repeating “Everything Will Change”, which the crowd sang along with. A sold-out crowd. They only have one album which came out long ago so everyone knew the lyrics.

It was awesome.

I looked into getting tickets to see Vampire Weekend or Phoenix, but I won’t be in NYC for either of the dates. Sad day. Definitely going to go to more shows in Boulder/Denver.

Realized that I was actually about 10 blocks from home, and that I should have brought my backpack with me and dropped it at the apartment. Sigh. Took the subway into Manhattan and picked up my stuff at Hacker School and headed home – learned that I had been taking the slow train this whole time (since the slow train wasn’t running I had to take the fast train) so hopefully that will speed up my commute a lot from now on. I just have a bit longer of a walk, but home is 3 stops instead of 10.

Drank a beer and surfed the internet until about 3am, at which point I fell asleep without an alarm set because I had nothing to do tomorrow. Yeah.

From Brooklyn,

Erty