Wandering NYC

Friday, final day in NYC (flying out at noon on Saturday) so I got to make the most out of this day. After a long Thursday night drinking and watching the Mavs-Heat game I slept until 9:30; as soon as the alarm woke me up I was off to the races to do everything I wanted to do.

At 10:15 I’m out of the room and hopping onto line A up to 59th street. Boy it is hot and humid, I’d say it’s around 90 degrees and 50-60% humidity. A quick 7 minute trip and I get to my first destination, the Apple Store at 5th avenue; as a geek this place was like heaven to me. Just from the outside the place is beautiful, check out the pic

The big cube is just the outside, right in the middle you get to the stairs down to the store. Inside you can find any thing Apple, from all Macbooks, iMacs, iPods, iPads and a ton of docks for playing digital music. The place is just awesome, yet I could not find the iPad cover/case I was looking for (odd that I didn’t find it at the Apple Store yet I found one at a Brookstone in the Newark Airport next day). After Geek Paradise it was off to next door to FAO Schwarz.

If you’ve seen Home Alone this is the toy store they base Duncan’s Toy Chest on, FAO Schwarz has any toy you could imagine. You find the Harry Potter section, the action figure section, this huge piano you can dance on and the keys will light up (you can take it home for the nice price of $250,000 dollars)

Also you have this huge Lego section with some sculptures made entirely of lego such as a Indiana Jones and this Statue of Liberty

Got a gift for her and also for my Godson, a little Red Sox puff and a Cars 2 toy for each one.

Right across the street from both store is the SE corner of Central Park, so it’s time to walk like crazy in this beautiful place. Need I remind you by now it must be over 95 degrees and humid as hell so to say I was sweating is an understatement. Walked all around the park but the place I really wanted to hit was Strawberry Fields -a small section of the park dedicated to John Lennon-, if you read my blog you now I’m a big Beatles fan so this was a must. Why the place is modest it just has this great aura and was so worth the long ass walk.

Just a nice place to visit; this is up around 72nd street, so I’m about 13 blocks off the subway stop I need to take back down to Times Square. By now it’s almost 1 PM so I’m starving, on the way down I decide the eatery of choice will be the Hard Rock Cafe on 44th, smack dab in the heart of Times Square. A house salad, Baby Back Ribs and a couple of Sam Adams later I got my tank filled up so it’s off to wander around a bit more.

The next stop is the Hershey’s Store a couple of blocks away to get some chocolates for her and for the office. Just the smell of the place is off the hook, chocolate all around. They’ve got these great boxes with a Times Square image and has an assortment of miniature chocolates.

Souvenir shopping, gotta get some things for friends and a final gift for her. A quick walk down on 7th to 36th to get to the World’s Largest Store, Macy’s to get some clothes. To say the store is huge is an understatement, it must be 8 or 10 floors high; I got a new wallet on the street level, two shirts on the second floor, a pair of shoes and two pants on the 4th. It’s around 5:30 and I’m sweaty and dead tired, time to hit the hotel to rest a little and shower before the show at 8.

After the pitstop it’s time to head up to Radio City Music Hall to watch the second show ever of Cirque De Soleil’s Zarkana. Had a couple of drinks before the show, those 15 dollar scotch & soda’s were pretty darn good.

I’ve always wanted to see a show at Radio City so this was a great opportunity, the show was OK but in no way was it better than that O show I saw in Vegas in April or The Beatles: Love. Also the fact that it was the second show ever show with lots of production quirks that need to be worked out. Not the best show I’ve seen, actually the worst of the 3 I caught this trip (Rain: tribute to the Beatles and Stomp were the other 3) but was pretty entertaining.

10:30 PM and a quick subway trip takes me back to the hotel. My legs are dead, I’m hungry and I need to get my bags packed for the trip back home. Got a couple of pizza slices which were great; NYC has got to have the best pizza around, maybe I’ve got to go to Chicago to see if the theory is right. Dined, packed and off to sleep. Long trip back home tomorrow, for now…

Mr Khakbaz out!!!

Red Sox vs Yankees at yankee stadium

So I’ve been looking for a Red Sox Adrian Gonzalez #28 jersey or t-shirt since I arrived in NYC on Saturday, no luck whatsoever; I had to get a Red Sox cap, a huge selection at Lids. With some Sox gear on, I’m on my way.

Took the C Subway line across the street at Penn Station and right from the getgo had some fun interactions with Yankee fans; nothing rough, just lots of fun. After 4 stops I transfer to the D line which, about 15 minutes later drops me off right at Yankee Stadium.

While I’m not a Bronk Bomber fan I’m a big fan of baseball history so being at this stadium is just a wet dream for me. Say what you want, but this stadium is fucking amazing; just from outside seeing the YANKEE STADIUM sign right behind home plate is a awesome.

I walked around the outside a couple of minutes and then made my way inside, quick pat down and I’m in. To say I had chills upon entering is an understatement; just FYI watching a Red Sox vs Yankees at the Bronx is now something I can cross off the bucket list.

Just as I enter I find the Yankees Pro Shop, go in and find a HUGE amount of cool team memorabilia; they have these cool “lockers” for each player where you can find all sorts of merchandise for that specific player. Seriously, no one like American sports teams can come up with so much crap to sell. Got a shot glass for dad and a magnet for mom.

I keep walking along the concourse and find this store kind of what the Mets have at Citi Field; a ton of historic memorabilia. Signed balls, game used bas and bases, parts of old Yankee Stadium, jerseys and other cool stuff. Just great stuff you have seen in famous pictures -like that “thank God you are a Yankee” sign signed by the man who said this himseld Joe DiMaggio. It’s awesome to see so many pieces of historic baseball stuff; I may sound like a Yankee fan, no I’m not, just a fan of baseball history and this IS history.

Keep walking along and taking tons of pics, which you can see here. At Center Field you can go into Monument Park, another wet dream for any baseball fan. Needless to say I’m just in awe at everything there is to see in the area; again tons of pics.

By this time its about 615 so it’s time to start making my way up, up, up to my seat. While my seat was at the highest lever, I was in the first row and right behind home plate which is so much better than the left field seats from Citi Field. Got this awesome hot sausage dog with a ice cold Stella Artois, all for the low price (as sarastic as can be) of 17 bucks.

At my seat my neighbors are a tipical New York guy with his Asian girlfriend who is just an asshole (her, him not so much). She keeps bitching and moaning about everything going on, from the sun, the heat, the noise, the seats, the fart David Ortiz just took in the clubhouse, and any other thing going on. When the game started John Lester hit a couple of Yankee hitters, shenkeep bitching he should be thrown out; and kept going and going. So you have to runners on and you on purpose hit someone? What kind of dumb, ignorant person are you? If you don’t know about something, shut up and learn.

There are a couple of Sox fans around me so I don’t feel like my life is in danger for the next 3 to 4 hours. So, it’s game time and right off the bat we get a Jacoby Ellsbury HR to lead off the game which makes us Sox fans pop big and you hear a couple if boo birds by yankee fans. Next Pedroia get a walk and A-Gon hits a triple to right-center to give Boston a 2-0 lead before they make an out. Youkilis follows with a sacrifice fly for a 3 run lead after 1 out. Yankees get the bases load but only 1 run across, so after 1 inning it’s 3-1 Boston; also Mark Teixeira got hit right on the knee and had to come out of the game. Another Sox run to start the second and that’s it for Yankees started Feddy Garcia.

We are 4-1 into the 5th were Adrian Gonzalez gets a walk and two hitters later Big Papi David Ortiz crushes a ball to the right field seats to give the Boston a 6-1 lead. By now the boo birds are out on full force; we (sox fans’) are having a blast. NY gets both runs back in the bottom of the 5th for a 6-3 defficit.

After the 6th inning my neighbors leave which is good news for me. Boston started Lester didn’t have his best stuff but battled and gave his team 6 runs of 3 run ball which was pretty good. 3 relievers work the 7th and 8th (Bobby Jenks came out after only 3 pitches, we’ll see the extent of his injury).

Pappelbon comes in to pitch the ninth and get the save. It was not without drama as NY was able to get one more run on a single by Jorge Posada (who came in to play 1B for Teixeira). So with 2 outs, the tying run comes to the plate in the form of Akex Rodriguez, I’m nervous and the people left in the stands are really excited. It all ends in 5 pitches with a strikeout to seal the win for the Boston Red Sox by a score of 6-4.

All in all it was an awesome experience. Only a rivalry like this can get a sellout on a Tuesday night, last more than 3 and a half hours and have a playoff feel right at the beggining of June. Only a Red Sox- Yankees.
Got a chance to see 2 Jeter hits as he now only needs 12 for 3000. Had a couple of assholes beside me, but its part of the whole experience. I was surprised how quickly the crowd goes dead after just one or two pitches.

The subway ride back was so fun. Got to talk with some pretty cool yankee fans also with a girl from austin who was going to be in he city for only 22 hours so she had gone, lierally, everywere and not slept at all. As I was getting off the subway I passed a bar near the hotel where they had on the Mavs-Heat game so I went in, had a beer and watched the final 3 minutes of the game; a nice way to end a damn near perfect day.

For Wednesday I have nothing scheduled for after the conference, could this mean another trip to Yankee Stadium? Or dinner somewhere nice to catch hs game? We’ll see. The current plan is to go out to learn as much as possible and make some contacts that will help out in the neat future, but for now…

Mr Khakbaz out!!!

NY blog, monday

Bare with me, I wrote this on my ipad and most pics are on my camera so I’ll be uploading them on Sunday when I get home

Wake up in the morning feeling… Wait a moment, no shitty songs in my blog.
Alarm off at 8, time for a shower and off to the Convention Center for a 10am kick off. I’m on 33rd and 7th so I’ve got to get up to 34th then down to 11. Seems like a quick walk but those blocks from 7 to 11 are looooong.

Got to the convention center which is huge and right by the Hudson river. About 3 or 4 conventions are going on simultaneously, so you can imagine its pretty big. Quick check in and into the Cloud Computing Bootcamp to get a general knowlede on the topic. The official keynote is until 1pm but this was a good way to get acquainted with the event.

After this had 1 hour for lunch, so I had a chance to get to White Castle again… That shit is addictive. BTW I find it amazing that there is no free web access at an IT conention, SysCon (event organizer) will hear abou this. Also a real bad thing of all IT events is that most of the attendees are male, almost no women and those few are mmm well not to attractive.

At 1 we get the keynote speech by Seve Shmuckenbrock from Dell, it even included a welcome video from Michael Dell. A nice keynote speech, got us into the groove of the event. He talked about the cloud, benefits, challenges and how the business is focused on the “yes, now!” idea. Yes we want it, we want it now. That is the main foundation and motivation of cloud computing as a whole. I liked he talked from a Dell perspective yet he didn’t try to push it a a sales presentation.
The second part of the keynote was by Bill Zack of Microsoft. Right from the start lots of people left, that speaks loads of how the public sees Microsoft. This was boring as hell and nothing more than a platform to push the Azure service.

The next presentation was by Jill Singer who is the CIO of the NRO. This actually was a great presentation, she talked about how she and the NRO has planned the migration to a cloud, her recommendation for any enterprise doing this and some best practices they are using. A real insightful presenation.

The next one was War on the Cloud, a boring sales presentation. It was so boring that midway throught the presentation half the people had; also there were 5 minutes left for q&a, not a single question, you know no one cares when there is not a single question.

A presentation on Entreprise Private Cloud was next. A pretty good presentation with the experiences of 2 companies – abiquo and roundarch. These experiences were pretty insightful, yet i still dont have an idea on how to start implementing could with my customers in Mexico, maybe later at the demo floor I will get some more insight.

Had a couple of more presentations, nothing to write home about but was able to hit the floor and see what the vendors had to offer. I found some interesting things mostly for storage and for x86 servers, not much for UNIX (AIX specifically); still some good offerings from which I hope to get more info to offer tu my customers and see what happens.

While I thought there should have been snacks and drinks during the day for us to take in between sessions, there were some great drinks and snacks to have during the opening of the floor; the thing was that by this time it was around 8:30 and I hadn’t had any food since 12 so my stomach was pretty empty and the scotch and beers got to me. Time for me to hit the road.
Made the 15 minute walk towards the hotel, grabbed some pizza and headed up to the room. Was able to catch some of WWE Raw on tv and winded the day down. Some might say I should take advantage of NYC but I must rest as tomorrow is a long day and, after all, I’m here to work. Hoping for some better presentations tomorrow and a great trip to Yankee Stadium to catch RedSox vs Yankees, for now…

Mr Khakbaz out!!!