A teacher's conference, pub talk and a contemporary art show!

Alright, so if I can develop a ritual to religiously keep track of expenses, I think I can develop a blog post ritual once every few days. Particularly since New York has been lots of fun so far and I want to remember it as much as I can! No to mention I think I have reached my physical limits of remember the names of the restaurants and bars that we've been to!

(Twitter style update for the last couple of months... and go! "Moved to NYC for work. It's really cold. Lots of volunteering... and getting old.")

Alright quick rundown...

On Friday and Saturday I attended the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference here in New York City (so strictly speaking I went to a teacher's conference). Most of the time was spent demoing Google Apps for teachers, principals and school IT professionals. And it was worth it to see the eyes of the people widen when we showed collaborative docs in action or when a form was created and sent in under two minutes. They loved it! There was a principal that I was talking to who wouldn't believe that I worked on the products that we were showing, "What? Shut up, you're like 11!" (I did forget to put on a tie...)

Also as part of the conference I got to hear Governor Patterson of New York speak. For those who don't know, he's blind and despite that runs one of the nation's most populated states housing of course the nation's largest city! And of course added onto that, he is an incredible speaker! And immediately following this, I got to see Charlie Rose interview Eric Schmidt live! Eric's a great speaker as well, able to convey technological vision and also of course deftly dodge those prying questions Charlie was throwing!

(Oh and as an aside: Have you ever seen a portable planetarium? It's pretty awesome. What does it look like? Well I would describe it as a mashup of a camping tent, an igloo and a bouncy castle. You laugh, but I actually crawled in and finally understood the whole point of the North Star...)

Friday night I finally went down to Chinatown to catch dinner (Mongolian) with Shelley and logically break down her relationship issues. Although I tried, you really can't argue with the statement, "I know it's wrong but I still do it!" What's left after that? That's like having two winners in a game, absolutely ridiculous! :-P

Fast forward to Saturday. David's done a good job of keeping in touch with me throughout the years since we were at Hitachi together. ("Hello Dave, what's going on?" "Oh nothing, just in a cab riding home, just wanted to call to see what's up?") And now that we're in the same city, he invited me out to hang with his Columbia MBA buddies. (Normal weekend warriors go camping and watch football, these guys spend their weekends getting an MBA; I feel like a slacker.) Then we went out to this great Japanese place in St. Marks called Kenka. A ridiculously long wait but great (and cheap!) food. Definitely a place to come back again to. Although this place had one more trick up its sleeve: a cotton candy machine! Shazam, what a great novelty!

Then I met up with Janet and her small group friends (oh and her new boyfriend too, I had to give my stamp of approval!) at David Copperfield's. They were great people, we had nearly 3 hours of hilarious, shocking and stomach-cramp-inducifying conversation. To vaguely list topics, jobs, ages, religion, philosophy, view on humanity, most disgusting thing seen by one member of the group (who was a nurse), and ended the night with a session where we compared our answers to "Would you prefer?" The worst part of this was discovering that Janet's new boyfriend would rather kill a puppy than a kitten! Seriously?!

And the fun didn't stop there, Sunday afternoon I finally pulled out my SLR and trekked to the New York Armory Show - which is quoted to be the best contemporary art show in the US. I'm not quite sure what that means but after coming from the show contemporary art basically means, "Anything goes!" I took a ton of pictures and will get those uploaded soon, but there some very creative pieces. Such as a large scultpure of bamboo poles that were seemingly to be scattered and stacked randomly in a 3 or 4 story hangar: the ultimate jungle gym! And amongst the contemporary art show there was the typical overuse of nudity, single piece of paper pasted on a blank wall, and random streaks of paint splattered on a canvas. I only criticize because I saw these more than a few times today. Oh and before I forget, the ultimate cliche is to write a profound statement about today's society in the form of a neon sign on a white wall. I swear I saw more than five booths with this...