Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • I Love Dumbo

    I know I say this all the time, but Dumbo just cracks me up. I’m going to my office and there’s some sort of New Orleans style brass band warming up right across the street.

    Sure enough, by the time I’m in my office, they’ve started marching up and down the streets of Dumbo playing away. Why? Who knows? It’s Dumbo, stuff like this happens all the time. Brass band marching around at 8:30 in the morning. Why not? Probably making some kind of crazy video.

    And for the record, they are pretty good.

    This is a lousy picture, but it’s the view from my office window:

    20121101_084813

    If you want to know exactly where this is, here’s the Google Map.

  • Sandy and Amazon

    Amazon gets all the press when something goes wrong, because they are the biggest cloud provider.

    A couple of alternative cloud providers, PEER 1 and Internap actually tweeted hints that Sandy might cause an Amazon outage. Both providers are located way downtown in Manhattan.

    You can guess what happened. Amazon, with East Coast data centers in the DC area (Virginia primarily), survived Sandy without a glitch. PEER 1 and Internap were completely flooded in the storm and totally went down.

    Bottom line, Amazon is still the best.

  • More Famous People Among Us

    Well, perhaps kind of famous is more accurate. A while back I mentioned that the co-creator of The Daily Show lived in our building and I had no idea who she was.

    Today I discovered that our neighbor two doors down is a twice Grammy nominated musician. I knew she was a musician, but I mainly thought of her as the nice woman with two black labs.

    Truthfully, I don’t know her music, but this was apparently her biggest hit:

  • NYC Subway Map 11/1/2012

    With everything that happened, and the fact that there’s pretty much no power in Manhattan below 34th street, this amount of subway service (pdf) is pretty impressive.

  • Lamp Post Charge

    This is amusing. I hope people don’t start unscrewing the bases of lamp posts everywhere…

  • Sandy Update–Feeling Fortunate

    Tuesday 7:50 am

    We made it through the night with power and our cable/internet came back so we feel like the lucky ones. NYC looks to be hit hard but hopefully the worst is over.

  • Sandy–Update 4

    Monday 9:00 PM

    Our cable went out taking the internet with it (what would we do without smart phones?). It’s getting pretty crazy in Brooklyn. Check out this picture of the carousel at Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo.

    For perspective, the carousel is in the back right of this picture:

    20121005_150606

  • Sandy Update 3

    Monday, 9:30 am:

    My wife, who is running a half marathon in two weeks, and who is only slightly crazy, went for a run across the Brooklyn Bridge. Other than one crazy gust at the top of the bridge, she said it wasn’t bad.

    BrooklynBridge

    The Holland and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels are being shut down at 2PM today.

  • Sandy–Update 2

    Red Hook Brooklyn, about 1.5 miles from us, is flooded as expected…

  • Sandy–Update 1: Croissants

    Monday, 8:30am.

    Sandy may have shut down every Starbucks in the area, but the guy who runs the French Pastry place next door swore he’d be open this morning and he was good to his word.

    It’s not bad out yet. A drizzle and some mild gusts.

    And some yummy croissants for breakfast…