Best Places to Work in Manhattan

November 17th, 2008

Places, as in Neighborhoods. Our friend William Cobbett extracts his stern opinions and sends these along, in a jar of formaldehyde:

The 50s: from 9th Avenue to Park. (Noteworthy Institutions: Tiffany’s, Carnegie Hall, Random House, Rockefeller Center, Time Warner Center.)
Chelsea: almost anywhere, but not north of 23rd Street. (Noteworthy: Chelsea Piers, Chelsea Market, Google, Meatpacking District, Tekserve.)
SoHo/Tribeca/NoLita. (Noteworthy: Nobu, Pearl Paint, Penguin.)
Upper West Side. (Noteworthy: Lincoln Center, Fairway, San Remo.)

Somebody’s going to ask what the worst ones are. Apart from the slums of Harlem and Loisaida:
Grand Central Hell: between Fifth and Third, 38th to 48th Street.
West 30s, Fifth Avenue to 12th: nasty, nasty area.
Financial District: anything south of City Hall.

Design Note: Nine Shades of Green

October 22nd, 2008

I found to my chagrin that this template does not work with my WordPress 2.6 installation. Not to worry, however. I still have several installations of WordPress 1.5, left over from the early Kubrick days, when apes ruled the earth. Here is Nine Shades of Green in all its cenozoic glory.

Three Years, Eight Months Later: A WordPress 1.5 Installation

October 22nd, 2008

February 15, 2005: I am furiously experimenting with all manner of blogware and have set up three blogs in Movable Type, two in Blogger, one in Live Journal, and a few in WordPress. WordPress is very exciting because it is free, open-source, and has the most support and development activity going on. And it’s launched a new upgrade, 1.5, which the enthusiasts and developers say is the biggest improvement yet. So I try an install of 1.5, and it doesn’t work. I leave my files on the server, and go set up another WP with 1.2.2.

October 22, 2008: I find myself wondering if I can still log into my old Movable Type blogs. With a little bit of searching around and experimentation, I do so. I find an old Sy9 Serendipity blog and find I can still log into that too, if I want to. How many WordPress blogs do I have now? Eight, ten, twelve?

WordPress ClassicSome I’ve forgotten totally. I find this old WP install from Feb. 2005, the one that didn’t work. WP didn’t like the database name. I go to the config file (haven’t thought of those things in a dog’s age), get rid of the database suffix (wordpress), leave the prefix (po) as-is, and try it again. This time it works. I finish the install. Voila—a brand-new, virginal, WordPress 1.5 installation, come to life like a prehistoric spore.

What a treat. There are two (2) themes available on the Dashboard. I decide to forego the popular Kubrick theme (which had just become the default WordPress then: big blue banner at top) and use the stone-age Classic theme instead.

Goodbye Cruel World!

October 22nd, 2008

Oh boo hoo I wish I were dead. I work and I slave and what thanks do I get? The truth is, I am bored. Feed my parrot.