Like Sunday Morning

The Thing To Do On The Internet: 20120101

Do a twitter search for Michael Bloomberg’s American Flag Sweater. Here, I did it for you

Ever Again?

Brushing this off for a few thoughts on Steve Jobs. Between work, home, friends and relatives, I’ve actively lobbied people into dropping, collectively, $40K to $50K into apple in the last 8 years. Given Apple’s stock price, I’m guessing I’m not the only one.

I’m a “switcher”. As a kid, a teenager, and a college student I was not an Apple Person. Who knows why I switched. But here’s the story.

Winter, January 2003. Wifi was “a thing” now, I stopped playing quake X (thanks Halo), and I was doing more productive things than ever with my computer. I didn’t know how to program, but for some reason, at that point it time, I decided that if I was going to sit in front of a computer all day, it should be a beautiful fucking computer. And the white ibook, 12”, was a beautiful fucking computer.

But I didn’t want to drop $1500. On anything. So it was MacWorld 2003, some new powerbook was announced, and craigslist was flooded with used ibooks for $700.

$700 was still fucking expensive (I had bought my last three computers for $700 combined (not even including Diante’s computer which I got for $40 worth of gamecube stuff). But oh god the want. So I put a bid in, and some dude in the Richmond told me to come by.

When I was halfway there he said someone offered him $750, would I match that or beat it. And I was like, “No!” and hung up. I flipped a bitch in SF and was heading back for the bridge when he called me back, apologized for the bad karma. I met him and bought it.

I wasn’t planning on selling my PC(s), particularly given that the computer was slow and couldn’t easily run half the software I needed to run. But 2 weeks later I sold all my PC’s. I was done with that. Two weeks after that I flipped the iBook for a powerbook Ti I bought from some guy that did stunts on a 1000 cc road bike for a living.

I use computers more and more every year, somehow. I love to program now, and I still, everyday, when I sit down to one of my 3 macs (one that I’ve had since 2005), I think, wow, this is a fantastic machine. Nevermind my iThings.

So yes. Steve Jobs, whom I’ve never met, has created objects that I spend over 50% of my waking hours using to do just about everything I do. Crazy. Absolutely nuts, really.

Can someone that I’ll never meet have more tangible, beneficial impact on my day to day life? It’s hard to imagine.

Thanks.

Check out this podcast episode

Check out the ‘Groove Salad Taste of the Week’ podcast. I was listening to the episode ‘The Launch of Space Shuttle Discovery’ and thought you might enjoy it

An Open Letter to NYC Media

Dear NYC radio and print news outlets (and Bob Steel):

There are four research/engineering institutions in NYC.

1) CCNY/CUNY 2) Cooper Union 3) Columbia University 4) NYU/Poly

1,3, and 4 grant PhDs. 1 and 3 have received some of the most competitive energy grants in the country. See here and here. Columbia leads an EFRC on nanomaterials, and CCNY/CUNY just landed an NSF IURC on metamaterials. That’s right. Invisibility cloaks.

This is a drop in the bucket. This is just over the last two years. You are looking at $40,000,000+ in funding. There are at least 10 companies either spun off or spinning off from these efforts alone.

There are also all sorts of cool companies. To name a few.

Plainly put: there is engineering in NYC. Despite the fact that NYC is a very, very hard to place to make anything new.

Rent really is too damn high. Any engineering student ought to be good at math: and until 2008 they would look at what engineers made ($60K to $150K) vs. law, medicine or finance ($200K+ and no hands in acid). So now you do the math. What makes more sense when a pizza pie can cost $25 and real estate averages $900 sq/ft?

So please get your facts straight about the engineering schools. We’re not Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, or Cornell but we’re doing a lot more than you realize. Please come see our labs. Please talk to us about the the pros and cons of doing engineering here.

We really love the city, and the ability to be engineers in the city. Please work with us, not against us, to make it even more appealing to a wider audience.