Gerard's Blog

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Photos Of Other Cities

Hello. I know I have been absent from this blog. Unfortunately, I have to say, do not expect this to change any time soon.

In the meantime, here are some photos of trips to New York and Chicago.

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Grand Central Station

We were lucky enough to run right into a Free Tibet march, fake prisoners and everything.

Lunch in Bryant Park.

Central Park.

Looking uptown.

Looking downtown.

By sheer coincidence, we found ourselves in Times Square during Earth Hour, when they shut off all the big screens.

A secret burger joint!

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At night, this American Gothic couple comes to life and cleans garbage off the streets.

At the Museum of Science & Industry, in one giant room, they have a giant train set model of the entire country!

High atop the Sears Tower.

The Museum of Natural History is pretty freakin' cool.

From Navy Pier.

Cincinnati Impresses: ShareThis.com

At a recent OINK-PUG meeting, the accessible folks from ShareThis.com talked about their ubiquitous Javascript button and their server infrastructure.

If you aren't familiar with ShareThis, they provide the sharing button that appears at the bottom of this very blog post. Every page I go to these days seems to have the little green button. Occasionally I find myself wanting to share a page that uses not ShareThis but one of the alternatives, and I find myself cursing because I do not have immediate access to my contacts. (Thank goodness I have the ShareThis Firefox add-on to fall back on.) I bet that there are a lot of people in Cincinnati using the button on their web properties, and don't even know that the company is based right here in the Queen City.

ShareThis started in Columbus, moved to Cincinnati, and now has an office in Mountain View, California. They boast a number of accomplishments to be envied by any company in any city, the least of which being $21 million in venture funding. A $21 million dollar funded consumer internet company, in Cincinnati?

But equally impressive to those in the industry is the raw technology that powers their infrastructure. ShareThis was one of earliest case studies on Amazon Web Services, and the Rightscale demo given that night was memorable (maybe that says more about Rightscale).

They've got that hockey stick growth according to relevant traffic measures, so I'm excited to see what happens from here onward. Let's downplay that Mountain View office, and keep the PR coming from Ohio.

Cincinnati Impresses

This is the intro to a series of blogs coming up that all submit the same theme. Perhaps it will become a longer series.

I have observed or have been sent a few things lately that keep sticking in my mind. Each of these sticks in my mind because they are or imply, well, super awesome things about Cincinnati. When I think about them, I think, "Wow. That's incredible. Is this happening in other cities?" And I am left to wonder. (The answer is probably yes, but still it feels good to wonder.)

And these aren't impressive in an obvious way, the way that maybe we have sports teams that dominate, or the way that our modern art museum is architecturally significant. These impress in a more subtle way (at least they're subtle to me). Or perhaps they impress only to the niche that I find myself playing in these days.

Streetcars & Pecha Kucha

Some short notes on a couple items in Soapbox this week. First, an excellent opinion on the streetcar.

It should be noted that the proposed Mill Creek Expressway/I-75 project will essentially add one single lane of freeway in both directions of I-75 between the Western Hills Viaduct and Paddock Road, while also revamping on/off ramps, and will cost an estimated $642.5 million. That's an extra lane of freeway for 7.9 miles, plus revamping interchanges. ...In addition to the $642.5 million Mill Creek Expressway project, the Through the Valley project will engage in an additional widening exercise from Paddock to I-275 at the cost of an additional $149 million (at least).

...Coincidentally enough, if the full stretch [of the streetcar] to the zoo and back were implemented, it would be a route of roughly 7.9 miles, the same stretch of widening on I-75.

So we have critics carping on the profligacy of spending $185 million versus a whopping $800 million for freeway widening.

The second item I noticed was about the apparent success of the first Pecha Kucha night in Cincinnati.

"PK Vol. 1 was such a huge success," says official organizer, Greg Lewis. "It demonstrated that the same desire that got PK started in Tokyo six years ago is present here in Cincinnati today."

Uh, I don't mean anything negative, but I know that technology groups around the region have been doing these presentations for last two years. They may not have been as flashy, and certainly none were in as cool a venue as the CAC, but they have been around. You may have heard them mistakenly referred to as Machu Pichu talks, or Pikachu presentations, but PK has been present in Cincinnati for a while now. So thanks for participating. :)

Storm's A-Comin'

Tornado sirens sounded on and off as a high wind advisory lasted throughout the day and into the night. But the afternoon was actually pretty calm, except for a few isolated torrential rainstorms that stopped as soon as they started. Here's the end of one of those rainstorms, looking at Bellevue and Dayton.