Category Archives: NYC

My Valentines / Music Hack Day NYC app!

-or-
Why I wasn’t around this weekend.

I was at NYC Music Hack Day!

You can try out the idea here in our valentune.es beta. We send love and music over wires and wireless to your special sweetheart.

You put in your sweetheart’s Name & cellphone, a couple of key words about your them and then ask the app to get busy.

It goes out to the MusixMatch lyrics service – finds lyrics that describe your sweetheart and then gives you a list of songs we can find streaming full mp3s online for. You choose what you don’t want in the play list and hit send.

We call your sweetheart up using the Twilio API , give them your sweet message and then play them your custom made mixtape over the phone! Yes, my lovely wife Sam was the first non-developer to get a call from the valentun.es robot.

Getting SongsPick songs on the iPhone!

Don’t have a web browser handy? Surely you jest! If you’ve got an iPhone you can use the iPhone app.

If not, the website is mobile compliant and works great on Android phones. The website uses CSS3 and WebFonts for style, but degrades well to older browsers. How old? IT WORKS ON LYNX!in case you need web 3.0 from a terminal

So all of this was accomplished by 6 talented and dedicated people over the course of 24 hours in NYC. The whole team was positive and awesome. I’m really proud of what we did so quickly. It’s got bugs 1 , but it works. I didn’t sleep the whole 24 hour hack session and I worked on a lot of the bits.

  • The Musixmatch call to find lyrics that talk about your sweetheart.
  • The Skreemr call to find playable songs with those lyrics
  • Adapting Jeff’s web mockups to Django templates
  • Calling into Alex’s Twilio wrapper
  • Pitching the idea and the vision and recruiting the group
  • Helping design the process flow and settling on using Django with Nate
  • Helping coordinate who would do what and figuring out the pitch with Jeff
  • Presenting the whole thing in 2 minutes to over 300 people with Anna and Nate

It was a busy 24 hours!

  1. the Title element has the wrong spelling of valentunes and the message doesn’t always go through and the songs sometimes take a long time to play, etc…   (back)

Lets all go to the drive in

Hey, NYC friends,
Grand opening drive in.

Lets pick a night and go see a drive in movie at grand opening. This car seats six -maybe a triple date?

From their website:

Cruise downtown and park yourself at DRV-IN—Manhattan’s only drive-in cinema. Seven days a week, twice a night, passengers are transported
to another time and place. Under starry skies and the foliage of a potted oak tree, guests watch classic films in a one-of-a-kind 1965 Ford Falcon convertible. With seating for six and a full concession stand, this unique theater setting is one of the Lower East Side’s most intimate experiences. Starting with films from 1960 and progressing chronologically each night, DRV-IN speeds through four decades of cinematic achievement.

Any takers?

pV=nRT

The Ideal Gas Law.
Pressure and volume are inversely related. Temperature is related to both. This means that the more stuff you have, you either are putting it in a bigger space or putting it under greater pressure. This is why rockets, guns, cars and jets work. If you increase the pressure on your stuff but don’t change the volume, you are going to see an increase in temperature. This is why pressure cookers work.

I really enjoy Manhattan Special. It is carbonated, sweetened coffee and it tastes heavenly. Though it is called Manhattan Special, it’s very hard to find in Manhattan and very easy to find in Brooklyn. I recommend it highly, except for one caveat. When you buy a warm bottle of Manhattan Special, do not, however much you want to, drink it. Stick it in the fridge. Let it cool. Because the Ideal Gas Law applies very heavily to Manhattan Special. If you try to open it warm, the bottle will fizz and spit and shoot everywhere quickly. This is not because you shook it up or because this one bottle was extra fizzy. This will happen every time you try to open a warm bottle of Manhattan Special.

A chilled bottle will behave nicely and will not overflow. Chilled, temperature T is much lower, and correspondingly, there is less pressure p in the bottle of constant volume V. Opening the bottle, the delicious beverage will not try to expand to occupy as much space and you will not be covered in brown liquid, cleaning up your kitchen. This fact is brought to you by me paying attention in physics class.

Books: Will Eisner’s New York

Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City: New York, The Building, City People Notebook, Invisible People (Will Eisner Library)

Wednesday night, Sam brought home “Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City” and I’ve been flipping through it. It is a collection of 3 previous books by Eisner about NYC – mostly 1 or 2 page graphic layouts.

It’s a perfect little snapshot of the NYC that used to be. Some of the stories are still true because they are about what happens when so many people are crammed in together in one place. You develop defense mechanisms to save time and trouble. Sam and I were out with some friends last night and a woman came up to beg. While I always am overly polite and listen to the whole spiel before politely refusing, Sam cut the whole thing short.

“I can’t have this conversation right now.”

“Okay,” said the woman, and wandered off. Saved her time and us too.
Life’s full of little gray areas like this. Will Eisner’s New York is full of little gray areas like this. Stories intersect and diverge and intersect again. Eisner’s stories are all little stories of little people, following them through the pathos and heroics that surround us every day.

Lost Photos of NYC

Sam works for the New York City Store now as Marketing Manager.

There is a book signing tonight at the City Store that I’m going to go to. Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer of NYC bridges for thirty years at the beginning of the 20th century. His work was carefully filed away in the archives and forgotten about. Recently, Michael Lorenzini found 20,000 glass plates of Eugene’s and published them in “New York Rises – The Photographs of Eugene de Salignac“.

I suggested to Sam that she tell the Dead Programmer about the signing and he’s coming! I’m excited – Michael’s writing is some of my favorite – it’s always a pleasure when he updates and I see something new in my feed reader.