Yesterday morning I was scheduled to head to Long Island for a meeting, but over night a snow storm blew in and things shut down for the most part so the meeting was cancelled. As I looked outside I could not resist the urge to take the next couple hours and go and take some photo’s. I did a pretty simple walk from my place down to central park, across the park to the corner of Columbus circle and then headed back as I did have work to do. I missed some areas of the city that I thought would have been neat but hopefully we will get dumped on a few more times this winter and I can some more pics.

A couple stories from my walk:

• I helped a cabbie out who got stuck on a normal flat street.. I am not sure how and he was trying to push his car on his own with no-one in the drivers seat, just leaving it in drive. I figured I could help this one man show so I headed over, and let him know it might be more effective if he was in the car. The streets were slick and I was able to put one foot on the car he almost slid into and the other on his bumper and slide the car sideways and give it a little push….. at which point he pinned it and soaked me from the waist down in slushy dirty snow from the rooster tail off his spinning tires. Nice, thanks bud.

  The other fun part of this story is that the cab was blocking the street and there was a line of 8-12 cars being held up by him. In Calgary or most parts I’m guessing a couple people would have gotten out of their cars as they could now not go forward or backwards and were stuck waiting for the cab to get unstuck. Not here - they all just honked their horns - in fact the suv behind us was on it constantly for 15 second intervals with a short 1 - 2 second break to rest his hand. Now to be fair if that happened in Calgary I would have gone over and punched the guy or at least given him a piece of my mind; here I just laughed.

• As I walked through Central Park I came upon a ‘black car’ (limo style but not stretched) that had spun out and there were 3 guys looking confused and clear haven’t been stuck very often, so I offered a hand and we were able to get the car out… the concept of rocking the car back and forth and the driver working with the people pushing was new to these folks so after a quick little lesson, the car was out. They really just wanted to make one big push with the driver hard on the gas.
• In the slide show you will see some pictures of dogs playing in central park, as I was taking the photo’s a gentleman came up to me and asked if I was selling the pictures and if he could get one. I let him know that he could just have them if he gave me his email address. I love NYC everything has a cost.. nothing is assumed to be free

I will grab a couple of my favorites and pull them out and post them directly on the site but here is the full collection.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE SLIDE SHOW.

Warning: There is some puppy porn in the show

A while back, when it was still fall/summer here in NYC, Douglas and Ali came up for a great weekend. While we did get mistaken for homeless people on night after several drinks, we also managed to do some other non-conventional ‘fun stuff’.

A definite highlight of their visit was when we rented a plane and Douglas flew over New York City. The flight path was out over eastern New Jersey onto the Hudson River north of the Bronx and then south on the Hudson to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We then did a 180 around the lady and flew back north up the Hudson past the George Washington bridge and back to the airport in Jersey.

Here are some of the photo’s from the flight:

Starting out on the flight, Douglas at the controls and NYC skyline out the front of the plane:

Central Park, the reservoir:

My favorite shot, and my favorite buildings in NYC; The Empire State building taking its proud stance as NYC tallest building:

The footprint of the former World Trade Center:

Looks at the southern tip of Manhattan, our new office is in the white building in the bottom left of the picture:

Looking out the back of the plane, enjoy the smog (Calgarians - if you think our wonderful city it immune I wish I had my camera when I was driving back this October coming back from Banff):

Statue of Liberty face on, we were at 500 feet at this point:

Doing a turn around the lady’s skirt:

Neat little light house north of NYC on the Hudson:

Earlier I posted how I was excited that I was able to watch NBC Nightly News, the real prize would have been my favorite show available online…. Well, during another dork activity I stumbled upon something I needed to research.

While driving out to Peter Lougheed for a day of x-country skiing NAN! and I were listening to the Vinyl Cafe, which just happened to be when they were announcing the winner of the Christmas concert - which is usually quite entertaining. The winner this year lived in China with his Gecko and in passing he mentioned that he watches the National online. This intrigued me….

This evening I decided to see what this Canadian in China was on to…

JACKPOT!

National website

and the link to the nightly news directly

Direct link to the video stream

(I’ll try and post something more exciting shortly)