New York, New York

Did they finally fix up Blogger so that it would use the rich syntax highlighting that was missing like forever?

I'm typing my first blog on my new Macbook. It's pretty sweet, though the laptop is heavier than I expected. I suppose it's not so bad that it's sitting on my lap. I just got in on Friday, but due to me rushing off to the Jonathan Coulton music thing Friday night, then having to wake up and head to the Amtrak to catch a (rather expensive) train ride up to NYC, then having dinner at a Southern style "soul food" restaurant where I ate pig's feet (turns out I used to eat this as a kid, Chinese style--who would have thought this was a Southern delicacy?).

Two things. Pig's feet are a pain to eat. It's like cartilage or fat wrapped around unseemly bone. There's just no polite way to eat it. Second, you probably couldn't convince a non-Southerner (or non-Chinese, since we'll eat anything) to come within ten feet of this concoction. It's probably repellent enough to ward away all but the most brave.

I wasn't able to set up my Macbook until I reached New York, and then, not until Sunday, the second day I was there. I'm now completing this entry a week later, which is unusual, because I often don't get back to doing this stuff ever.

Sunday was spent walking all around eternity. To be honest, I have no idea where I was in NYC most of the times. I was on the subway. I was on the bus. I was walking. We passed by H&H, which is apparently the most famous bagelry in NYC. We were walking around Chinatown, SoHo, the upper West side.

Although I joked about going there, we did not go to the Statue of Liberty. And apparently, we weren't near the former site of the twin towers. I was apparently in the subway underneath Fog Creek somewhere.

One of the first things I noticed about the subways in New York is that it's far more cramped than DC. When you get off the subway, you could almost fall forward and hit the wall--that's how close up they are. The walls have these tile like patterns that resemble tidier tiles than bathroom tiles. Subways also reek of urine, though not as bad as some places I've been.

Because New York is bigger and the subway system older, their subway system is correspondingly bigger, and, to me, not as well laid out as the DC Metro. However, they do have express trains, which would be nice in DC.

For whatever reason, subways in NYC also have musicians and performers where DC metro does not, at least, not inside. There may be a few hanging outside the MCI, er Verizon, Center, but not within the facility itself.

Most people seem to use a Metro card, which is this thin flimsy plastic thing. Unlike the DC metro, the NYC subway is one fare to all destinations, payable on entry. That's neat too, as I find waiting in line to exit something of a pain.

The nice thing about Chinatown is how cheap the stuff is. I suppose you'd go there to get two things: Peking duck and pork buns. But we didn't get the duck, but did get the buns. As 85 cents, they're cheap. Throughout Chinatown, there are people outside hawking their goods. I don't know if I've ever seen lychee that often, nor people willing to paint my name (which I didn't get done) in Chinese-style calligraphy.

I also went to Dean and DeLuca for the first time where I had beef stew, some kind of knish, and some kind of diet cherry soda. I know, some combination. I also had iced coffee.

On the Saturday, (the day before all this walking), before Saturday night soul food, I ate at an Italian deli, where New York rudeness was at hand. I wanted ice coffee, and they asked how I wanted it. This is odd. Every other place would give me ice coffee, and I'd figure out what to do with it. The woman wanted me to decide between cream and milk, sugar and sugar substitute. Rather than say it in a cherry voice, she, of course, had to be pissed off. New York impatience is heralded throughout, and you know what, these people don't care.

That evening, we went to the soul food place where I had pig's feet, as I mentioned before, as well as collard greens and macaroni. Not exactly healthy food, but that's fine.

I had wanted to go to the Apple Store, which had just opened up in NYC. It stays open 24 hours a day. I had thought about getting a backpack there, but once we got there, even though it looked significantly cool (the cube structure and the floating white apple), the actual store was eh.

Really, what the NYC Apple Store ought to do, though they'd be so deluged, is to discount stuff, say, between the hours of 1-3 AM by 20%. Heck, if they always discounted it around the clock, people would really pile in there, and it would make it a kind of mini-Mecca, as the place to go if you want to buy your Apple stuff cheap. But no, it cost the same there as any other Apple store.

I was disappointed with the backpack selection. They could have had more to pick from, and had significantly less inventory than expected. We wandered inside for maybe an hour, if that.

Sunday was spent foot walking and on public transportation. Saturday was in a car. Chris drove around, and I discovered the true New York pastime which everyone participates in. No, not Yankess baseball--many folks don't care about that. Not Knicks basketball (especially not Knicks basketball). It's route planning.

Suppose I want to go to Montgomery Mall, which is just outside DC. I'd take the beltway, then up 270, on Democracy, and voila, I'm there. I'm not sure there are many variations that are worth their while.

However, in New York, there are plenty of ways to get where you want to go. Since it's so large, most people don't remember optimal paths, so any time there's more than two New Yorkers in the same car, there has to be prodigious discussion about how best to get where you're going. You can cut across that street and head down. No, you can come under. No, I was planning on going this other way, doesn't that work?

I had hoped to get to Fog Creek on Monday, but Monday was Memorial Day, and just as I had it off, so did the Fog Creek cognoscenti. Maybe that was a good thing as I would have had to decipher the train system or something to get there and get back.

I had wanted to go to a real coffeehouse, but alas, the closest thing was Starbuck's at a Barnes and Noble. That's culture in the Bronx for you. Even there, every seat was taken up. These places assume that people will share a spot but most people were set up one to a table, and planning to sit for a while. We headed back to Chris's which was good as I forgot to pick up the bagels (there's bad news about that--I forgot to eat it, and had to get rid of it---sad).

Didn't do much on Monday except talk, mostly about ideas about how to go teaching, as Chris has said that he feels he needs to reach out to his students more, given the lack of real programming skills they seem to have, and the fear the department has in actually failing anyone.

I don't want to sound cruel, but from the sounds of it, if these kids weren't much further along, they wouldn't have real careers in programming. You need some proficiency writing loops in programming, and it's almost the equivalent of being able to dribble in basketball. These kids aren't short of making 360 windmill dunks, they're short of being able to play the game at all.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that they lack the knowledge of where they need to go. They're not used to the idea that they need to code frequently, and spend hours in front of the computer, and really, get things to work. This can be frightfully tedious. I recall one kid who said he spent twenty minutes looking for an error. Any serious coder would laugh at that, many who've spent days trying to track down a bug, only to have been on the wrong trail.

As teachers, we need to imbue a sense of what it takes to program. Some of it is time. Some of it is knowing what to look up. Some of it is reading and tracing code.

I've always thought it would be good to provide sports analogies. Gilbert Arenas is the star player for the Wizards. He's known as something of a gym rat. After games, he's often practicing an hour, two hours, or more. The biggest difference in basketball and programming is that, at some level, it's obvious what to work on. The goal (partly) is to get the ball in the basket. Sure, there's other things, like footwork, knowing the basic rules, knowing basic strategy, and so forth. Those are all important too, but it's not exactly a secret.

Take any class in programming, and you'll see how little time is spent debugging code. We just don't know how to teach it. But it's time we figure that out if students are going to be any good.

Anyway, to get the sports analogy, I'd tell students if they thought, say, Michael Jordan got as good as he did without spending hours at the basketball court. Yet, how often do they spend programming each day? It's true that new programmers need more guidance, and so we need more drills for new programmers.

I have a bunch of obvious ideas when it comes to teaching intro programming, and I suppose I should blog on it sometime.

Anyway, my train was scheduled to leave NYC at 3ish, so I was dropped off at the train station. I hadn't taken the train in maybe 6-7 years, probably since the last time I visited Chris, which was when he was at Yale. We were heading off to Alex's wedding in Toronto, and I was going to drive with him from Yale there. That was a longish drive, taking about 12 hours one way.

When I got on the train Saturday around 10:30, I had left my place at 9:30. I then thought I might miss the train. I live near one end of the Green Line, and the train sits there for quite a few minutes before leaving. It didn't move until 9:40. I could have taken a long way to get there, by staying on the Green Line for many stops, then switching to the Red. That seems absurd, but I was wondering how often the red line picks up at Fort Totten vs. the other spot I would have picked it up (most likely Metro Center).

But I figured that long way was at least 6 stops longer, so I got off at Fort Totten, and two minutes later, got on the red line. I was at Union Station at a few minutes after 10, for a 10:20 trip. At first, I thought I had to get in line, because the kiosk, which look like ATMs, appear to be for buying tickets. Turns out, you can pick them up there too. Fortunately, I asked, and a few minutes later, I picked up the tickets.

Ah, tickets.

These thing suck, especially on trains, but even airplanes. First, you get this large stub, which the ticket taker takes, and leaves you a tiny stub, which I'd imagine would be easy to lose. I'd rather have the large one.

Trains still use this old-timey way of checking tickets. For example, only when I got aboard did sorta check IDs. And then, they have this narrow slip of paper, which they punch a hole out of, and place in the metal wedge just above where I'm seated. The slip of paper has a bunch of three letter codes, that I have to guess at. Apparently, on the way up, RYE, refers to New Rochelle, despite not having a "Y".

I'm surprised what an outdated system they use.

First, the tickets use same sized fonts. This means the train you get on is written as some other useless information.

There's two pieces of information you need. When to get on the train, and which gate to get on, and I suppose the train number. These should be prominent numbers. They are not. You have to hunt and peck to finds these numbers. It's amazing they don't use a nicer printed that can put important things in big print.

They should have a bar code scanner for these things too. And they should ditch the slip of paper. Instead, they should scan your ticket, which should then print up a new slip, with your name and destination on it.

The only nice thing about taking the train is that there's no security, so there's no long waiting. The one place we had to wait for a while was at New York Penn Station (which is, alas, one stop from Newark Penn Station--thus, one should change their name, since it's awful...call it Newark Jersey Station, or something else, for heaven's sake).

Riding the Amtrak a second time, I realized that these are nearly as expensive as airplanes, but there are two things that make it somewhat tolerable. First, Memorial Day traffic is supposed to be bad, so I could easily add two hours to the trip if I got caught in traffic. Furthermore, I'd have to pay attention the whole time, where I could sorta sleep on the train. Second, the overheard of getting to and from the airport tends to make it more painful as it adds time that I simply don't care for.

I got back to my place around 8ish. Dave came and picked me up. Our house was hosting our annual Memorial Day cookout (something that's likely to end this year, as no one else is likely to be up for the cookout). By the time I got back, the party was sort of finishing up. It lasted maybe another hour longer, but some people were leaving, and I was kinda tired, and wanted to play a bit with my new Mac.

I don't know what I think about New York. It has a different vibe to it than DC (or more properly, DC suburbs). I can see, given the way the subway system works, why people walk so much (since all trips on the subway cost the same, it's only worth going on there when you have to go very far).