A day in the life: Coffee & Lunch. But wait. This is cool. I promise.

New action shots! Of fairly slow moving things!

Joe Coffee (aka Joe the Art of Coffee) is something of an establishment in New York City. I even recall seeing bags of their beans on the store shelves back home. If you see really plain bags of coffee with just “Joe” on them, you're in the right place.

Joe just opened a new location in a market immediately outside one of the two subway stops I take to get to school (depending on the weather, I take different ways in). But here's the thing. This is no ordinary market. This is newly opened DeKalb Market (just outside DeKalb station). The whole market is made of salvaged shipping containers! It's like ½ farmer's market + ½ artist commune + ½ mini-mall. Yes. I know that adds up to more than 1 — that's what happens when you have this much awesome. Incidentally, if those picnic tables look like they'd be less than comfortable in direct sun, that's because the giant tent covering the courtyard was not yet back up after hurricane Irene at the time of the photo. I've since added a photo to show what the center of the market looks life for real.

The other shot in the gallery is of MetroTech Commons. I ate lunch there outside in the nice air yesterday. My school NYU•Poly is a part of MetroTech Center, a 20 year old educational and business center campus formed to help revitalize downtown Brooklyn. It worked. Obviously, the Commons is a nice green space — I even get to see it through the windows of my lab. It also hosts art installations and events. I've not yet experienced any of these events that I've read about. I have, however, been startled several times by a very life-like scultpture of a seeing eye dog in the middle of the sidewalk. Dogs aren't allowed on the Commons so it stands out. Gotten me every time too.

First an earthquake, then a hurricane. Next up... meteorite impact and volcano.

In the span of my first full week in New York, I've done the jitterbug with an earthquake and battened down the hatches with hurricane Irene.

In case you were wondering, yes, I'm safe and sound. Irene's real storming started pounding us last night at about 9 p.m. The worst of it was over this morning. We still have some strong gusts right now, but the sun made an appearance for the first time. All in all, Irene's impact was less than everyone feared. Still, I've been holed up in my apartment all weekend.

The majority of public transit is shut down until an unspecified time in the coming day(s). The trees were really bending last night and this morning; there's lots of branches and leaves and other debris strewn about. Various mudslides, floods, and downed power lines are keeping the trains and buses in their stations. That said, we never lost power at the apartment. Thank God there were no deaths in the city due to the storm — just light damange, inconvenient flooding, and power outages.

The photo above is Irene's aftermath tonight as seen from the roof of my building. Yes, Mom, this involved climbing up the fire escape, and it was still quite windy. It's fine.

The semester doesn't start until the week of Labor Day. I'm still juggling getting registered for classes. Lots of hoops to jump through and questions to get answered. My days (except perhaps for tomorrow) now consist of going to school and setting up a base of operations at my desk at my lab for school paperwork, remaining moving to-do's, orientation events, meeting people, reading, and preparing for classes.

I hope to get lots of reading done in the coming days as well as a little sightseeing. In particular, I'm looking at visiting the Sony Wonder Technology Lab and Federal Hall. New York City is like paradise for a technology geek and history nerd like myself.

Attention, Mad Scientists. This is my lab. Mwuuuhahaha!

Behold, the Game Innovation Lab. My adviser's baby and my new home for my research and project work. I have a desk. With great big monitors. And my beloved leg lamp (it's a major award). We have a soundproof testing lab and floofy-but-firm things to sit on.

My first day in the lab was yesterday. I finally got to meet Chrystanaa Brown. She's our lab manager. We are going to get along famously. I also met Widget, our resident techy geek support guy extraordinaire. Judging by their hats, you can tell that I've fallen hopelessly in love with them both.

Sadly, at the time of these photos, the massive media wall outside the lab was on the fritz. So no massive media. Just a wall.

For the record, I intend my research area to focus on unstructured play rather than games, but this is a great place to play around nonetheless, don't you think?

An earth shaking move

I come to New York and the earth moves. I'm not kidding. As you may have heard, there was an earthquake in Virginia on Tuesday. We felt it here. Actually, people on the ground didn't feel it here. People up in buildings felt it here. Like me. On the 4th floor. In my apartment. As it did the Cha-cha-cha. My beloved desk-and-bunk-bed had a nice rhythm going — must have been manufactured in a latin country with that Salsa vibe it had going.

A friend, Jonah, and his family from back home are on the East Coast visiting friends in New Jersey. This means I got to see them too. When the quake hit, Jonah was with me and thought it was the subway from the nearby station. I was fairly certain it was an earthquake. The radio in the car back at ground level told the story. Everything in New York, myself and Jonah and his family included, is fine. However, Washington, D.C. did not fare nearly so well.

After the excitement, we all headed over to the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Jonah and Heather and their friends took their kids. I went in the name of research. My findings are in the gallery.

After the museum I headed over to Manhattan to meet Alison Bryant, founder of Play Science Lab. Hilariously, Alison and I rode the metro right next to one another on our way to our appointed meeting place; she figured it out after we officially met (we were pointed different directions on the train — Alison saw me but I didn't see her). We had drinks and conversation at the wood and leather Library Bar at the Gild Hall Hotel.

On the walk to the subway on the Brooklyn side, I got to see some amazing Brooklyn neighborhoods. On the Manhattan side, on my way to meet Alison, I got to wind down through the very narrow, very cool, very old streets of lower Manhattan (upper Manhattan is the original, newfangled, grid system poster child of city planning).

After meeting Alison, I headed up to the Bronx to meet Jonah and Jésus again for a Yankees game. On the subway ride there, I got to ride next to documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. The Yankees are at the top of the division but managed to lose to the Oakland A's. That said, the game was totally worth the ticket price. The Yanks were asleep for most of the game but then woke up for an exciting last two innings. The game came down to a full count and a home run that wanted to be but just couldn't make it.

I keep getting asked which team I'm rooting for. The Yankees or the Mets. This is a big deal — like Michigan versus Michigan State back home. A defining pick. My joking retort of “that New York team” is not winning me fans of my own. I'm really taken with the history and tradition of the Yankees but not their uppity air. It's a tough call. Choosing poorly could rock my world worse than that earthquake.

Who is my neighbor?

I moved into my new Brooklyn apartment yesterday evening. Photos of my building, room, subway stop, and neighborhood are all in the gallery. When I arrived some of the Mexican families in the building were feasting out in the courtyard. I definitely plan to to get to know these people. They know how to live. I was immediately reminded of the Mexican family I know back home. I've had the opportunity to attend a birthday party with real piñatas, and I've had homemade beef tongue tacos (it may sound disgusting, but those things are amazing). Maybe I'll get to have something similar with these people right here in my building.

I only have with me what I could carry in two bags. I'm thankful that there's furniture courtesy my new roommate. And, yes, I'm a grown man now sleeping in a dorm room style bunk bed.

Today was my first day at school. Classes don't begin for a couple weeks. It's all orientation now. A young Masters student, probably from Pakistan, sought me out today as I sat in a session. Honestly, I found him to be quite annoying. All questions at all inopportune moments. It didn't dawn on me until much later what had happened. He sincerely was looking for guidance (even if he went about it in a way that felt rude to my cultural context). Somehow or another he came to think that I could help him and had answers for him. How he came to this opinion is beyond me, but here we are. Maybe I should hurry up and become accustomed to such things. I have a feeling more of this is going to come my way. Perhaps I should try being gracious in such circumstances in the future, and view these as opportunities to serve and come to know these people around me.

As I suspected, I'm one of the oldest students around. I found it humorous how the orientation leaders kept reminding all the students that we are all now adults. If suspect that if we were really all adults, we wouldn't need to be reminded of it. I'm a minority in so many ways — age, height, and whiteness. A security guard was visibly surprised to learn that I was a student.

I ran an errand after orientation — I went into Manhattan to pick up the card that will let me use ZipCar's super cool short term car rental service when I need it. When I popped up out of the subway, I was standing just a few blocks from the base of the Empire State Building. After picking up my ZipCard, I grabbed something to eat in a little cafe that has second floor seating. I watched the foot traffic on Broadway Ave pass down below me. The diversity of New York is amazing. Just today I learned that the entering class of graduate students at NYU•Poly numbers 1,000 souls from 53 countries. After my dinner I dropped down into Greeley Square Park just across the street to have frozen yogurt and people watch. So many people. So many neighbors.