Happy Birthday Jitba!
disclaimer: This post absurdly overdue
It was my first ever jiminthebigapple dot com party. Amy did an amazing job and pulled off a complete surprise. She even had her parents there all the way from switzerland! At least thats what I tell myself they were in town for. The event was the 4 year marker of the launch of this website which also makes it my 4th year in NYC.
Having city birthdays might seem strange to some, but as I found out July 31st, it is a totally normal occurrence here in the big apple. I felt kind of bad at first having everyone there for a silly city birthday, but then I came to grips and realized everyone is just looking for the next excuse to have some fun. I was happy to be that excuse. Thanks amy for an awesome night!
Click here to see the photos that survived the night.
Random Cam
Goto the random cam page here OR look to the right sidebar for the four newest photos in the gallery.I recently bought a new pocket camera (kodak 1033) and have decided to start carrying it around with me. There are lots of neat things going on in NYC and I rarely have a capable camera on hand.
More Madison Ave
Just playing with an old camera I found in the closet.
Quick Updates
This past weekend I pushed out “Quick Updates” on the side column of this site. I am using twitter (@bowlerjim for those who want to follow the full twitter stream) to push the latest 5 updates to my sidebar. I am doing this for a few reasons.
- Keep fresh content on the site
- Document some of the smaller things that are going on with me. Instead of queuing up for a long post or just ignoring all together
- Aside from the on jitba benefits - it alerts friends what is going on and potentially spurring meetups or of hip happenings
I still have to do a bit of styling but nonetheless it is a new feature of the site that I hope you will like and get into the habit of looking at when you stumble here.
update: not sure if you are seeing the same error message I am - but for some reason the updates stopped coming in. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t going to work out as well as I had thought. It is no secret that twitter isn’t an overly reliable service.
A long time ago!
I know its been pretty stale around here lately… check out this photo of when I first moved into my NYC Apartment. 
New books
Just a quick update… I have added a handful of new books to the “I can read” section on the right hand toolbar. I also started including Amazon links, for those interested in learning more about the books. I will also do a “view all rated books” page for those interested… as I only display the last 8 in the sidebar.
work in progress
I’m still cleaning and tightening up the code for this new version, but I was tired of sitting on it. Let me know your feedback.
error?
Sorry to those who were experiencing errors over the past few hours/day - all seems to be fixed now. It appears that it was an error with the RSS parser that displayed the “currently reading” section.
happy new year
I hope everyone out there has a great New Year’s Eve and an even better 2006, from the entire staff at JITBA - Happy New Year!
Being the last day of the year I wanted to go out and snap a few photos of the neighborhood, all of which you can find on my last photos of 2005 flickr photoset.
merry christmas
Best wishes and happy holidays to all!
new design
Things are a bit broken for the time being, but I wanted to move forward with the new design. More to come.
M I A
What is going on? Ill tell you - end of the year work crazyiness! Here is a quick rundown of what has happened since we last spoke...
Thanksgiving - happened
I went to some weird underground casino on bleeker street
I went to my recepetionist’s 61st birthday party in Harlem (hours of party: 11pm to 3am).
Good news to those who still make it here every now and then - The design update is almost done - maybe a week away? I have put in some dynamic content (news feeds and things) to keep it fresh. So please don’t stop checking in, it will be look different soon.
birthday surprise
As some of you know ... I had a birthday yesterday (oct 3). Also you might know that I am not normally up for a bunch of birthday hoopla nonsense. A normal bday would consist of me having dinner with family and a couple close friends - thats all I want… good company and some good food. Well I thought yesterday was going to be more of the same (less family, since you guys all live thousands of miles away). But instead amy decided to get some friends and do a little surprise on me. It almost worked out, but I caught on at the end of yesterday and foiled the surprise… but I played along for the most part. I did throw some wrenches in her plan just to be difficult.
All that being said I really appreciated all the trouble she and my friends went through to show me a good time on my birthday. Thanks to those who came ALL THE WAY up to the upper east side.
amy took other pictures that you can view at her flickr account
call me a name
So, it was 12:48am eastern time. Jason and I sat at a coffee shop/bar type thing that has couches, beer, and free wifi during the day. I say during the day to setup my story. Jason and I decided to get out of my apartment and come to this coffee shop to click around and maybe grab a drink (me a beer and jason some weird fruit juice junk). We got here and the coffee shop turned trendy bar in a matter of hours. Whatever—we thought. Found a seat, sat down, powered up our laptops, and searched for internet. To our surprise we found none. Jason quickly got up and asked the worker what the story was… “Umm.... the internet is shut off here at 8pm” - jason comes back and gives me the story. I sat here and searched some more. All the while, jason has packed up his newly purchased ibook. All of a sudden a lightbulb BLEW UP in my head and I told jason to fire his daddy back up. “dude, what are you talking about - we don’t have any signal in this spot” - come on man, just fire her back up. So he did and I told him to connect to my powerbook. You see, what has happened is wireless geek magic. I remembered that I could connect to my treo 650 via bluetooth (wireless) and use the internet service that it has natively, I then shared out my bluetooth internet connection to my wireless internet card to jason’s laptop. So there we were, me pulling an internet connection from my phone in my coat pocket and re-broadcasting it to jason wirelessly who was sitting 2 feet away. The connection was slow, but we sure showed them when the damn internet shuts off in this place.
Filed under apple / mac • everyday • friends • jitba • tech • (PermaLink)
feeds.links.things
There are few more things I would like to add to the site here before I officially take her off of “beta” status. I know you are all missing the links that keep you in touch with all of your internet celebrities, so I will get that up as soon as possible. Also I will be putting up a navigation bar at the top of the screen to help people not only get back to the main page once into another section but also be a gateway for archives and other goodies. The completion of those two items will mark the end of 2.0 beta.
One of the other things I am going to start working on is a bowling tracker to display my latest bowling scores and to track the teams progress. Hopefully I can pull some time together to work on this soon, as it is something I am excited about. Another thing to look for down the road is the possible unveiling of the digital broadcast of mike of digitalbohn.com and joe the coder of agencyfool. The only thing holding us back is a good recording mechanism… ideally we would have somewhere where we could physically call in and have it record a .wav or .mp3 for us. Almost exactly like audio blogger except without the 5 minute limitation, so that is out of the question. If you have any ideas contact me.