HS Day 52: Empire State Building

Greta and I took the subway to Hacker School together. There’s a strict no-guests policy, so she spent the day wandering around Manhattan while I programmed.

I’ve started in to the Project Euler problems.  I’m (as of day 55) on problem number 24, at a rate of two or three a day. I did start on number 11 or so.

Greta and I met up and went to Getting Hungry for lunch. We invited Matt, but he slept in and wasn’t in by lunchtime. Greta and I chatted about our wedding, and hung out for a bit in the restaurant. It started to rain, hard. We left the restaurant and split up – I back to Hacker School, and Greta back home for a nap.

I attended the Monday night talk at ebay – a talk about networking by Jessica, who knows her stuff about networks. I’d actually given almost the same talk near the beginning of Hacker School, but it was a good refresher and the food was good – pasta instead of the usual pizza.

The whole time, though, I just wanted to get back to hanging out with Greta. We met at Union Square park (she actually got off at the wrong stop there, but it happened to be where I was walking to – serendipitous). We wandered north, discovering the Museum of Math, and various other shops and boutiques. We eventually found ourselves at the Empire State Building. We were going to go up to the observation deck, but were informed by the red-jacketed security guard that there was 0 visibility due to fog – so we went home to Brooklyn.

Stopped in to Pizza Town – a local pizzeria, for a calzone, then returned home. It was raining lightly, but we didn’t use our umbrellas.

HS Day 53: The Met

I went in to Hacker School a bit early, since Greta and I made plans to visit the Met over lunch. She met me around 11am, and with Matt, we ate lunch at Pret. Matt is freshly married, as of about 2 months ago, so he was interested in our wedding plans and was excellent company either way.

After lunch, we bade goodbye to Matt and took the train up to Central Park, which we walked across to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Central Park was nice, although we were accosted by men “giving away” their rap CD, which they signed, then asked for a donation. I gave them far too much since I was caught off guard, but one of them was quite persistent about getting a donation from Greta, so we gave him back his (already signed) CD, which he wan’t happy about. We weren’t in any danger, but it was just a strange (and very NYC) experience.

The Met was fantastic – what people had been telling me was true – you could spend an entire day there and only see a small portion of the exhibits. We saw:

– A photographic history of the Civil War, which was very personal – lots of pictures of people (since portraiture was big then) – and quite gruesome. Fascinating and revolting.

– A collection of Grecian statues, only some of which were replicas, yet you could get right up to them (no velvet ropes). It was very cool to stand in awe of Perseus holding Medusa’s head, larger than life, on a pedestal.

– Some 17th century furniture, very glitzy and ornate.

– A special exhibit on Punk Couture. Lots of plastic dresses. Everything was very creatively made. My favorite was a dress held together with massive brass staples.

– A large selection of modern art, of which I’m a fan. A couple of Jackson Pollocks, a few by Georgia O’Keefe, Rothko, etc. Very neat to see the paintings in person. I knew a lot more of the names than I should have. (Thanks Liberal Arts Education :D)

– Kenneth Price’s statues, which were amazing. Very simple shapes with holes cut into them, painted brightly and interestingly. Playful forms. A set of two enormous matte black kidney-bean shapes, which seemed the embodiment of softness. Probably my favorite exhibit.

I returned to Hacker School for the rest of the afternoon, and Greta hung out in a nearby Starbucks and continued to read The Hobbit.

We took the subway to Union Square and browsed various shops and museums there – eventually having dinner at a little american place right on the square. We sat outside – the weather was perfect – and chatted about our wedding. There’s a lot to plan and think about.

It took us a long time to get home because the N and R couldn’t make up their minds about being local or express.

HS Day 54: MoMath, Newsies

I went in to Hacker School on my own, and Greta stayed home for a while before heading in and meeting me at Union Square. From there, we went to the Museum of Math. The museum is awesome – if you’re at all mathematically inclined, or even if you’re not, you should consider checking it out. There are two floors of exhibits, all focusing on some neat aspect of math. My favorite exhibit was a large screen of LEDs on the floor, which displayed the Voronoi Regions of everyone standing on the screen. The museum is in somewhat of a beta state – a lot of the exhibits are under construction or don’t work quite perfectly, but the place is still very fun and educational. I’m heading back with my dad this Saturday to show him the place.

Afterward, Greta and I visited a gaming shop which we had discovered in our earlier wanderings near Union Square. The place was huge and packed with games. We had a great time wandering around. I bought some small gifts for my D&D group, which I’ll give them the next time we play.

Afterward, I returned to Hacker School and Greta went to Starbucks again for Tea and Hobbit. I worked on Project Euler problems, as well as my javascript game. There’s not much progress being made on that right now, and it’s kind of losing steam, but I’ve learned a LOT from working on it.

Greta and I grabbed dinner at Chipotle, then dropped our stuff off at Hacker School and caught the subway to Times Square, where we saw the show Newsies, on Broadway. Yay impulse buys? I’d never seen Newsies, the movie, so it was a first-time experience for me. Greta kept singing along with the songs, which was cute – she was very excited, since Newsies is one of her favorite Disney movies. The audience was super small – I don’t think there was a bad seat in the house – we sat about 10 rows back, on the ground level.

Afterward, we wandered Times Square for a bit, buying some clothes – a new green jersey dress for Greta, and a pair of shorts and a jacket for me. We hopped on the train to get home and realized that my keys – to home and to Hacker School – were at Hacker School. We went to the location and  – luckily for us, Simon and Alyssa were just hanging out super late at the place, so we were able to get in and retrieve our stuff and keys. Otherwise we would have had a really hard time getting in to the apartment.

HS Day 55: Grand Central Station

Greta and I slept in a bit, since we were exhausted from all the walking yesterday. Our next order of business was a visit to Grand Central Station – just to see the place. I was quite hungry when we arrived, so we checked out the main terminal for just a bit before heading downstairs to the food court – I got some Chinese food, and Greta had a savory crepe. The food was good and the terminal was beautiful.

We took the S  to the 1 to Hacker School. Greta went back to Brooklyn and got a manicure, and I worked with Mary on the engine for my Javascript game. I learned about Python generators from Pedro, and attended the Thursday presentations. Since I haven’t finished anything in the last two weeks, I didn’t have anything to share.

Immediately after, we met up with some other Hacker Schoolers and went to Hudson River Park to see “Foxygen and Thao & The Get Down Stay Down” with Ian, Alisa, Bella, Amandine, Mike, Alex, James, and a few others (apologies if I missed anyone / got the names wrong). The opener (???) and Thao & The Get Down Stay Down were good, but I wasn’t particularly into Foxygen – too weird for me. Greta and I ate from the Rickshaw Dumpling Co. Food Truck, which was delicious. I’d seen them around town a few times so I was excited to try them out. We left after Foxygen’s second song.

We walked all the way in to Times Square, since that’s where the best subway route to get home was, and visited a cake shop which Greta had seen on TV. Then we took the 2 home and went to sleep.

HS Day 56: Greta Gone

Not much to say today – We woke up, Greta Packed while I got us sandwiches from Zito’s – a favorite of mine. I dropped Greta off at the airport and she left. 🙁

My dad visits tomorrow, which will be fun.

I’ve been playing SC2 and working on various things all day, but in a kind of post-awesomeness sadness. Mono no aware.

Finally caught up on blogging, though. Should be back to daily now.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty