Tag Archives: NYC

Magical Clouds of Central Park

It’s a beautiful misty spring morning and I climb the stairs out of the Q train. I look up and see one of those magical New York sights. The clouds are hanging so low that I can see them actually flow through the trees of Central Park.

Beautiful low clouds flowing through Central Park
I’m struck still. This is so rare and beautiful.  I’ve got to share a picture of it with you. You need to see these low clouds hanging out in the park, slowly ambling by.

Of course, then I turn around and look behind me, because who can trust beauty to just be simple and perfect.
Clouds clearly coming out of a steam pipe in the road

Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy is raising funds to create a new public cabinet of curiosity within a 3-floor, 4,200 square foot building in Brooklyn, New York.

via BoingBoing!.

I wandered into Morbid Anatomy while roaming around the Gowanus and it was a wonderfully weird moment. I love this place.

The NYC Government IT has given up.

My buddy Ian has a great post about his experience trying to find out if he had to move his car. Seems the DOT updates this info on Twitter rather than putting it out on their own website.

Retweet by DOT of 311's tweet that parking rules are suspended

Now that’s just crazy, but I know why. Sam used to work for the city and I’ve heard some stories about trying to get things done there.   The municipal IT department is paid below average wages, there are no negative incentives like being let go, and they are given no positive incentives like promotions or bonuses.  IT at the city seems to be a job that you take and show up for until you collect your pension.

So it isn’t that this is a bad strategy, it’s just that the city is so completely incompetent at IT that they can’t even put in a CMS. Therefore, private sources have built really good communication tools that are actually working. It sucks that the city can’t do IT, but it is good that they are doing what it takes to help people know. Twitter is a single point of failure, it falls over all the time, but at least it has RSS feeds and it’s open for anyone to read. I think the city should do better, I just don’t know that they can.