When I lived in Bloomsbury, I had a favorite Sunday morning ritual which I’d perform every couple of months.  It worked best when the weather was dank and gray – when you didn’t miss being outside.  I’d walk over to the British Museum, go look at the Egyptian Mummies and the Rosetta Stone, getting lost in the age of it all.  When you move cities, you make new rituals.  Today I headed to the UES for my New York City gray day favorite.

Picking up the Sunday Times and taking the 5 train from Wall Street to 86th Street, I walked over towards the Park.  On the corner of 5th Avenue and 86th is the Neue Galerie.  Inside the Neue Galerie is the bustling yet incredibly calm wood-paneled Cafe Sabarksky.  Along with the Week in Review, Main, and Books sections of the Times, a huge piece of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (chocolate cherry cake) was demolished with a Milchkaffee too.  Actually, I also ate two Bratwurst Mit Sauerkraut and Röstkartoffeln and an Austrian lager in addition to my Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Milchkaffee. If you’ve been on a diet for six days of the week, it’s a smart idea to give it a rest on the seventh…

Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Sunday Times

The Neue Galerie is a favorite as it has something in there I love just as much as the Egyptian Mummies in the British Museum.  Her name is Adele Bloch-Bauer and she was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907.  Her face is so delicate, and the whole painting radiates a soft golden light.  It’s one of my favorite pieces of art in New York City.

The Galerie had a special exhibition of Otto Dix’s work.  Beginning with his unsettling and brutal depictions of the First World War, and then moving on to his colorful, sometimes comedic and sometimes unnerving portraits.  Amazing use of color, I very much recommend.

The sausages, potatoes, beer, and huge slab of cake required a walk.  A long walk.  I went to the Park, south of the Reservoir.  It’s beginning to feel slightly autumnal despite the residual mugginess.

Central Park Reservoir

Looking towards the UWS

The final part of the ritual is a walk to Zabars to pick up coffee.  The UWS on a Sunday is full of strollers and brunching.

85th Street and Central Park West

Zabars smells great.  Looks great.  Feels great.  Appealing in every way.  I want to dive into the barrels of coffee beans every time I visit and it’s a real feat of control not to leave with enough food for a month.  A favorite Manhattan place.  There is only one other store I found to rival their coffee, and that was Darwins in Cambridge.  Which became one of my favorite Sunday morning rituals when I lived up there for the summer too.

Zabars

Coffee barrels to dive into

I have done this exact same route: lunch at Sabarskys with the paper, walk through the Galerie, across the Park and over to Zabars, many times now.  It’s seriously relaxing.  Perfect for a gray Sunday at the end of the summer.

I spoke on the Noisy Idiot Dilemma at Ignite NYC recently during Internet Week.  It was huge fun, slightly daunting: my not-very-eloquent first words as you’ll hear are “my god, there’s a lot of you…’  Thanks to all the Ignite NYC crew – I had a great time.

The floor is open to all of us in the NYC tech/entrepreneurship/academic community to share and contribute.  Let’s go! (And don’t worry about how old you are…)

Picture: @wesleyross

I am taking a series of classes organized by Tech@NYU this summer.  These awesome guys are a student organization with the aim of bringing the tech and entrepreneurship communities together.  It’s great.  We meet every Wednesday evening at the Courant Institute (you can’t help but feel a little more intelligent in there), and for 2 hours we get a crash course in various programming languages.  Last week it was JavaScript and JQuery, this week it was Ruby.  I love these sessions for 2 primary reasons.  First, they’re perfect for someone like me, who is not an expert coder, but wants to understand enough to be able to traverse from the Geekosphere to TechNotAtAll Land.  Second, it’s run by students.  I’m very used to this kind of approach having just spent 2 years at ITP.  Our Thursday evening student-led DriveBy sessions covered every topic imaginable, from how to be a VJ, to math for artists.  A couple of weeks ago I co-hosted one on the World Cup.  Not only are the DriveBys at ITP incredibly informative, they are a really effective way to build community, and to get to know your peers.

Here’s the thing though.  I heard tonight in the seminar one of the very capable speakers asking if anyone minded that it was students taking the class, and the fact that they possibly younger than some of the attendees – would this be a problem?  The answer from me was a resounding “duh – are you kidding me?!”  I am astounded and continually thankful here in the NYC tech-entrepreneurship-academic community at how open and willing people are to listen to others, if they’ve got smart stuff to share, whether they are bearded and grey, or bearded and spotty.

The floor is yours guys, have confidence, you are doing a great job.

I’ll be speaking on my ITP thesis “The Noisy Idiot Dilemma” at Ignite NYC IX on Wednesday as part of NYC’s Internet Week.  There is such an exciting and vibrant tech community here in NYC at the moment, its great to be part of it.

It is my first speaking gig on my thesis since I presented it at ITP (video here).  I’ll be speaking alongside some people I really admire including the Director of Expert Labs – Anil Dash and Smith Magazine’s Larry Smith.  The magic of Ignite is in its format: 5 minutes per speaker, 20 slides.  That’s one way to really summarize your year-in-the-making-thesis…

I’ll be speaking about how we can make online group discussion easier, specifically how we can deal with noisy, disruptive behavior in the online conversation sphere.  The results surprised me, I’ll be really interested to hear your thoughts.

Details:

Ignite NYC IX – Internet Week

RSVP here

Doors open at 7 pm, talks begin at 8 pm

Internet Week HQ, The Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th Street at 6th Avenue.

More on Ignite NYC

More on NYC Internet Week

More on The Noisy Idiot Dilemma