Dave the Web Guy

This holiday weekend I decided to actually try and be on-scene for real fireworks in the city.  Last year I enjoyed them with family in Wilkes-Barre, PA's new Riverwalk, but inasmuch as this year's overall plans were not settled until the last minute, I decided to enjoy my new hometown's rendition. 

After some work on Headline Prophet, I got in to gear about 2 PM.

On my way to beat the crowds and get comfortabe (at exactly the same time as the crowd no doubt).

It seems that almost the entire West Side running along the Hudson is devoted to the event.  I only knew, loosely, that I wanted to get near the piers and that doing so would take pretty much the whole afternoon if not the whole day.  I had an idea that this would be a lot like my attempts to be in Times Square for New Years which, in both cases, I aborted because it’s just so damn cold and crowded, and I never get there early enough.

I got off the subway in Bryant Park and walked the entire length westward on 42nd Street until ultimately reaching a comfortable viewing point just South of the Intrepid.  I was part of a super flow of people that would be rivaled hours later going the other direction.

Crowds taking up position with chairs blankets and their own water from home (smart move).

Parched.

The show begins.

Me looking rather jolly about the whole thing.

Show aftermath.  Crowd streams back up 42nd Street, taking over street for many blocks.

Waiting for the 7 Train home, exhausted!

Thankfully the crowd, even at its peak, allowed for enough room for a single guy to stand comfortably.  The biggest problem I had was the heat and lack of water vendors inside the parametered viewing area (which should not be confused with the problem of my lack of foresight to actually bring my own water).  One of the restaurants was selling food and drinks just a block outside the parameter.  Initially I walked past it to get in but once in place and standing for 10 minutes I realized I really needed to stock up on the aqua. When I tried to get back and buy some, police were warning anyone, including anyone who just wanted to buy from the vendor standing just feet from them, they wouldn't be allowed back in. It became a choice between drying up or re-situating somewhere up or down New York 9A, which would have been tantamount to leaving all together by that point.  Luckily, the restaurant had situated its triage against the parameter.  Standing at the end of the adjoining business's wheelchair ramp, one could reach over the railing and transact.  With hundreds of people in the same predicament as I, a line quickly formed on this ramp as the police fenced up with metal barriers.

The show was pretty good, though, I probably spent more time than I should have trying to take and Tweet the few pictures I took rather than simply enjoying the show! :P

I'm looking through usenet today to see who or what still posts there.  I think it might be a great venue for distributing information on my various projects (like Headline Prophet), but in checking it out it seems like the entire venue has been abandoned.  Nobody is using it.  Last posts trail, in the best cases, into 2009 while anything at all from 2010 is rare.  Of what does exist, much of it appears to be spam. 

I'm trying to imagine what happened.  It's not so much that I don't get that web forums pretty much replaced this odd far-fetched usenet protocol for conversation.  That's certainly a large part of it, sure.  But even when the web was starting to take off and this migration from usenet was just beginning, I figured it wouldn't matter all that much in the end.  There was after all a "core" of usenet conversationalists that existed before the consumer web.  I thought that after the population of new users swelled and retracted, that core would remain and usenet would thus stay interesting.  In looking at the various news groups today, I find that hasn't happened.  Everyone is gone, tech and casual users alike. 

Oddly, the one active usenet group (which perhaps serves as best motivation to continue looking for others), is my old hangout alt.misc.transport.urban-transit.  I can't figure out why this group among so many remains active except for the possibility that there has been a never-ending debate between pro and anti public transit foes that has gone on for over 15 years.  I don't think parties on either side are willing to leave the group until they've definitively trounced the opposition.  It's just that heated an issue.

I'm continuing to scope things out.  I understand that, for all this emptiness, usenet is still the preferred method for large binary files like music and -- other things, which I have no real interest in.   I'm just looking for some of that good ol' fire of debate in the form of plain old text, in the classic format that is easy to organize and assimilate.   Google Groups, after all, effectively provides an interface to the "old" usenet.  But to me it is clumsy and convoluted.  They've taken their Google Group community and integrated it with usenet, all while using its usenet archive library (purchased from a service called DeJa News some years ago) as some sort of foundation for both.  Trying to access a classic newsgroup through this cacophony is overly complicated and strangely hit and miss.  I'm not really sure Google is into it nor wants anyone else to be.  After all, they are kind of touting "groups" as the managed and thus preferred alternative to the non-moderated newsgroups they otherwise allow access to.  Sadly, while Google's interface could have served as some sort of savior for mainstream newsgroup access, it clearly does not.

For my nostalgia and exploration, I've signed up with GigaNews and am trolling around to see what's up.  Two bucks a month for some old time fun seems about right.

For the past month or so I've been working feverishly to bring to life an idea I've had for some time.  I have a lot of ideas but this one just had me brimming with excitement.  Wouldn't it be cool if there were a website where you could somehow discuss the news before it happened?   Where satire in the form of predictions could play out and where people could use their inside knowledge, imagination, or just plain old common sense to foresee what few others might?

Octavio, myself, and picture-taker Fernando, hail the birth of Headline Prophet, June 13, 2010

I did some checking around and found nothing "quite" like it in Google (rest assured they are there, but none came up as a top hit in searches like "predict the news" or "news prophecy", etc.).  Next I checked the domains and found one that spoke to exactly what I wanted to create still available!  I registered it for a pittance through Go Daddy, dawned my best beginner-PHP cap (along with W3 Schools which is always great when you need a standby tutor to walk you through new syntax and functions inherent to any language -- I've used it faithfully for years), and, for no less than 4 weekends and many weeknights, toiled to get this up and running in viable form.   No kidding, I actually cashed in the gym for 2 weeks for this.

The final result? 

www.headlineprophet.com

Yep.  As my increasingly favorite tagline for this project touts, "Many sites let you discuss current news, only Headline Prophet exists to specifically discuss future news."

Last Sunday a little before midnight, I emerged from my bedroom after another intense 2-day coding marathon and announced to my roommates, my project was complete (enough).  I was ready to make Headline Prophet visible to the world!  With their help and with ingrediants from around the apartment, I whipped up a goofy picture of me hovering over a crystal ball appearing to predict the future to use as a make-do logo.  I'm wearing a carpet as a robe no less.

Headline Prophet, first showing!  June 13, 2010.

The first public showing was to these roommates who high-fived and celebrated.  I'm including 2 pictures from this "celebration". 

Now, of course I can't really say the website is "finished", there are way too many features I need to shore up, including some pretty basic functionalities.  However, it's open enough if you want to pop in and see what's going on, and maybe even log a prophecy or two.  If everything goes well, they will even stick.

Wow I really need to blog more.  The problem these days, aside from time, is a general realization that I can't convey much without running into some kind of liability.  Oh, I mean, I could talk about what everyone else does like the weather or what I thought of my latest Netflix rental.  And, sure, this blog's very theme suggests that I'll be blabbing about web technology and so forth, which occasionally I do.  It's just that being that generic seems to take all the fun out of it. 

But what is there then?  The real stuff happening to me, from the outrageous to the victorious to the sublime, happens at work each day.  However, they got all kinds of corporate policies and legal trip-wires against disclosure that would probably not be hard to avoid but I would not want to test.   It's not like I'm without rant about outrageous going-ons there, believe you me.  I'm just a wussy blogger who enjoys employment.  And really, any drama aside, most of that time is spent, well, just working.  Working on hours upon hours in the most mundane of sense.  If it isn't too thorny to type about, it's too dull.  Ergo, because the largest block of my time aside from time spent sleeping is basically working, that doesn't leave much else.  

They warned me New York City would be like this.

I could write about personal relationships but I've decided it's best not to connect the dots between the people I know with my public opinions about them.  A path between the ladies of my life (yes I have a history with a few) to compare notes would be insufferable.  I mean, what if they start comparing things that I...that we....when I....oh, gads!  I have to put up with critique and shame enough in person when dealing with intimates.  I can only imagine the inadvertent setting up of an online community that reveled in disgust, revulsion, and anger towards me, were I to blab about dating.  I dabbled in that once online and it didn't go so well.  Frankly, I don't know how the kids of today put up with it.

Politics, science?  Well -- believe it or not, I'm really not that bright.  I rant enough politically at a very superficial level.  But I don't have the noggin' for keeping myself engaging about anything in depth or multi-dimensional.  The days of anyone believing their opinions are novel because they can blog about them ended around 2001 or so.  I think people are now seeking true online value and the sea of online writers is beginning to part, finally, between the average and the engaging. 

I long to do something crazy again like start a political party online or find a new abstract cause that while completely valid, is just unique enough to make me feel like I'm making a fresh point and thus interesting.  And not that I rule this out, of course, but the reality is, I'd rather do something a little more tangible.  

So I dunno what to write about here, but, I guess for the moment, this contemplation left me enough to write about in this piece.  Yay!

I haven't addressed the progress of my transition to New York City living in awhile.  I think since porting my activities to "Dave the Web Guy" I've mainly concentrated on being some sort of expert on online stuff rather than keeping my buds and family appraised of what's going on. 

As a step to bringing everyone up to speed, here's my latest Flickr stream which I call Camp Sunnyside.  The pics below are just two from the growing set, so you'll have to actually visit the link to see them all and keep up with any additions. 

The Courtyard Pub - An Occasional Hangout

The current living situation (in terms of my apartment, not the city) is likely to change in the next several months now that the real estate market is heating back up and our landlord is gung-ho to sell the place.  If that happens my goal is to stay in Sunnyside because, well, for one thing it was just rated as the third best place to live in all of New York City or one of its boroughs, and, I happen to agree with that.  I also have two great roommates and so far it seems like we'd just as soon keep ourselves going as such which should make finding a replacement apartment around here easy.  If you're thinking about pulling off an NYC move yourself, you'd best realize quick that good roommates are as gold as closet space.

Regurgitated Text From the Flickr Set

My first year "in" New York City is actually spent living in Sunnyside Queens.  Here are shots of my life in the apartment and the Sunnyside neighborhood in general.  Initially I didn't expect to be living under the Sunnyside arrangement for longer than 3 months.  I was just holding over to gain my footing and eventually to get my own pad someplace else.  But even though 3 months has turned into over a year now, I still refer to my arrangement as living in "Camp Sunnyside", owing to that original expectation. 

Tramping through one of 2010's blizzards on way to work.

I now realize that  living with a roommate team and never quite being certain where you'll be next month *is* the way of living here (at least for folks with a salary and spending habits like mine).  But I still refer to this era of my residency as Camp Sunnyside because I find it catchy and, for the most part, continue to live only a little better out of my suitcase.

See the complete set here.