This past weekend my company moved into a new office several blocks away from Union Square. Today, on our first day in the new office, we could hear the voices of the massive crowd of people who gathered at Union Square to protest against immigration laws. However the only people in my company who could actually see the crowd from within the building were men, since the only accessible room on the floor where the windows were facing the square was the men's bathroom. I took this shot to share with my female co-workers who were curious about where all these voices were coming from but, in spite of my persuasion, refused to step into the men's room to see the spectacle.
Every Spring Brooklyn Botanical Gardens hosts a festival of Japanese culture called Sakura Matsuri (Cherry Blossom Festival). For the entire weekend (both Saturday and Sunday) the gardens featured shows of Japanese dance, martial arts, and music as well as exhibits of Japanese arts, crafts and food. The festival takes place during the peak blooming of the flowering cherry trees. The trees are covered with small flowers which one can use to simulate snow:
The weather did not have any precipitation though. Both days were totally sunny without a patch of clouds and the weather was just right - upper 60's. There were many beautiful flowers in the gardens, but some sections of it were still closed since it was still early in the season. Click on the photo to see all photos. You may find some nice wallpapers for your desktop.
The TV and movie actress Arden Myrin that I happen to personally know since she is a sister of my co-worker Alarik is visiting from LA. Tonight Alarik, Christine and I went to see her perform a stand up comedy act at Rififi. The act was called "Fart 69". Here is the video:
This was Arden's first time doing standup comedy. She came up with the script and the words of the song just a few days before the show. It's amazing how fast she and her partner could put the routine together and perform it as smoothly and funny as they did! Arden is currently a member of the cast in MadTV.
This is my second time at Rififi. The first time was the after-party celebrating Regina's Birthday when we went there on the TRASH night. The photos of taken there on that day start with this one.
During the Easter Parade a photographer from REUTERS took a bunch of pictures of Kerrie and I dancing. The photo that was submitted to various news agencies is below. Help me out and recommend it by clicking on the 5th star below RECOMMEND THIS PHOTO inscription! You must have a Yahoo ID to vote.
The latest developments in Macromedia Flash technology now allow streaming video be played by regular Flash plugin in a browser. The cool thing about that is that almost 100% of browsers are compatible with Flash plugin regardless of the platform (Mac,PC, Linux, etc). Using the Flash technology many websites now allow users to upload and share their videos. I've tried several of them would like to share with you with what I found. I've tried the following websites:
I uploaded the same video in Windows Media Video format 320X240 30 fps to all websites and below are the resulting videos:
Not only the video is blurry, but also the frame rate seems to be low. Definately the worst.
The video is very grainy! Also half of the time it does not even come up. You may need to refresh the page to see it. TagWorld is still in Beta so they are probably still ironing out the kinks.
youtube.com is the pioneer of the mass video publishing site. The quality is better than that of tagword.com. Still is not perfect, but I guess they are trying to save on bandwidth.
myspace.com is the best out of the three. The video is played at the resolution of the original file (320x240 in this example) and although it's smaller in size, it is sharper in quality. myspace video player offers you a choice to magnify it by clicking on the right-most button and you get pretty much the same quality as youtube.com.
Today Christine and I went to the Monday Night Magic show. This is my second time going there and I enjoyed it again. Just like as last time, they had 3 magicians plus another one who was the MC. The first two magicians performed in the first act of the show. They were Danny Alan and Francis Menotti. Then there was a 15-minute intermission during which several other magicians scattered throughout the theatre and showed close-up magic tricks. Then the third magician, Jamy Ian Swiss, took the entire third act. The first act consisted of the visual tricks, but in the last one the magician was performing the mind tricks. He was basically "reading peoples minds". He was able to guess someone's favorite book, guess the words that people found on random pages of a book, etc... Everything went pretty smoothly until Jamy Ian Swiss got to the trick where he has a member of the audience pick a two-digit number and then fills in a 8X8 grid such that the number in every row and column add up to that number, and the numbers in each 2X2 grid ad up to that number as well and the numbers in diagonals ad up to that number as well. On two tries he could not do it. He promised to get it right next time...
The annual Quadrille Ball Junior Committee Appreciation Party took place today. Every year this party is organized by the dancers to thank the Junior Committee members (and I am one of them) for their efforts throughout the rehearsals and the ball itself. This year the party was held at the old fashioned Soldiers' Sailors' Marines' and Airmen's Club and the theme was "Roaring 20s". Everyone was supposed to dress in costume. The accessories from my last year's halloween costumes came in handy.
It is a tradition every year for the dancers to give out awards to the Junior Committee members. Finally this year they really figured out who I am:
The room was filled with "Wanted" signs for all JC members and here is mine.
In my opinion this year was the best JC appreciation party since I was involved in the Ball. The venue and the theme were great. We took lots of photos and here is a video taken at the tail end of the party:
Later we adjourned to an apartment of once of the dancers for the afterparty.
It's amazing that in a city with more than 8 million people I keep bumping into the people I know. Today I bumped into the reporter from New York Sun Amanda Gordon. She is the author of the section of the paper called "Out and About with Amanda Gordon" where she publishes photos and small blurbs about various events that take place in the city. Many of the events are charity galas such as various balls that I frequently attend. First time I met her was at Quadrille Ball 2004 when she interviewed me and Kerrie among other people. She published Viennese Opera Ball 2005 dress rehearsal. She took this picture of me in the paper. Also she wrote an article about Viennese Opera Ball 2006.
Ok, today has been a quite a bad day at work! First our entire office lost internet connection due to some problems with Verizon in our office building. We could not get any work done because we could not access QuickBase via the internet. So everyone decided to go home and continue work from there. So I zipped the source code and some documentation on my flash card and went home to my apartment with my co-worker Christine who is working on the same project as me. So we come to my apartment to my much-surprised house guest Marianne. So we go on line on my computer and the first thing we see is that QuickBase is also down! The entire reason why we came to my apartment was to access QuickBase! Oh well, then I copied all the source code to my hard drive and tried to open my copy of IntelliJ IDEA which I have not used for a while. And guess what... Norton did not like that! Gee, looks like today was not supposed to be a working day!
Finally QuickBase went back on line and I had to disable Norton Antivirus to launch IntelliJ. But still we've wasted quite a bit of time!
As you know, I am a fan of both DDR and Dancing With The Stars Show. I am very excited to report of a new show coming out in the fall called "DDR With The Stars". Click here for more info!
