This week, I went out four times for lunch around Downtown Manhattan. All of it was delicious, but here is my ranking:
1. Jubilee Marketplace: a Korean hot/cold buffet with many delicious options, and the only meal under $10 I had.
2. Tin Building: They used to have a full sandwich and salad bar, but right now you get only pre-made sandwiches at the bakery. The bread is delicious and the ingredients are fresh. But $16 is also pricey.
3. 55 Fulton Market: I enjoyed their hot/cold buffet, but the selection was basic. My meal came to almost $12.
4. Halal Food Cart at Wall and Water Streets (“best halal in the city”): the lamb gyro sandwich was tasty but too big and too expensive ($12 with a last-minute Apple Pay surcharge). Halal street food used to be a steal, but not anymore.
Yesterday we went for a picnic at the Williamsburg waterfront, where you can see the entire Manhattan skyline. Many buildings that dominate the city today did not exist ten years ago.
What also has changed is the illumination of the buildings. For a long time, the Empire State was the only skyscraper that could change its lighting. That required somebody to climb to the top and swap the gels from the lights, so they did it only for special events and seasons.
When we went to Hong Kong in 1999, I was fascinated with The Center, which used neon lights cycling through the color spectrum to a mesmerizing effect. Manhattan looked quaint in comparison.
Not anymore. Almost every landmark building features some fancy lighting. The latest addition, 270 Park Avenue – the new headquarters of JPMorgan Chase – was testing its illumination yesterday. The lights are only monochromatic (maybe they surprise us at Christmas?), but they can be used like a display to show all kinds of moving shapes and patterns. I‘m curious what we’ll see there.
The Rooftop at Pier 17 is a spectacular venue, but unfortunately, the booking is not quite our cup of tea. So we devised alternatives that might fill the 3,500-person capacity in this week’s glamglare newsletter.
AOL recently announced that it would terminate its dial-up service. The first two questions that come up: what is AOL, and what is dial-up? AOL apparently still exists as a subsidiary of Yahoo, which itself evokes nostalgia.
My first dial-up was an acoustic coupler, which someone gave me for free. They were slow, 300 bit/s, about a millionth of a typical high-speed connection, but ultra-portable. Advertisements showed businessmen connecting their costly portable computing devices in a phone booth to the mainframe at their company’s headquarters.
Dial-up speeds eventually went up to 28,800 bit/s, which was ok for browsing text-based websites and small downloads. The last time I used a dial-up was during the blackout on August 24, 2003. We still had a dial-up service for backup purposes, and it became useful to check ConEd’s site to find out that they didn’t have an ETA for power restoration in our area.
Enjoy a touch of swanky jazz-age atmosphere at the Seaport for free: at 7 pm, the Clipper City departs for her sunset cruise, and a live jazz band greets the guests. You can relax at the pier and take in the view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the NYC skyline.
Yesterday we went for a picnic at the Williamsburg waterfront, where you can see the entire Manhattan skyline. Many buildings that dominate the city today did not exist ten years ago.
What also has changed is the illumination of the buildings. For a long time, the Empire State was the only skyscraper that could change its lighting. That required somebody to climb to the top and swap the gels from the lights, so they did it only for special events and seasons.
When we went to Hong Kong in 1999, I was fascinated with 
The 
Enjoy a touch of swanky jazz-age atmosphere at the 