Trip Report

I got back from my trip last Sunday night, but was too busy catching up on various things to write up a post about it until now.

Overall the trip was totally awesome! Except for a tropical storm at the beginning, the September weather was perfect for almost the entire time. I was able to see everything on my (long) list and even more. In fact, two weeks might even have been a bit too long: on the second-to-last day I realized that I had pretty much seen all the big-ticket sights, as all I had left to see that day were the semi-abandoned grounds of the 1964 World's Fair and under-demolition Shea Stadium (both somewhat underwhelming).

I had originally only planned to scope out a few of the top software companies, like Google and Fog Creek, but some unexpected turns of events left me with a lot of free time to explore others as well. I was somewhat surprised at the sheer number of cool software jobs and startup companies which were located in NYC. Google's offices in Chelsea were particularly awesome (er well, the building and location are awesome, but the 'offices' are actually more like cubicles and 'open workspaces' - I'm not sure what I think about those yet..). Of course, while I was there, the entire financial industry sort of imploded on itself, which will undoubtedly lead to a glut of thousands of out-of-work bank IT workers, pushing down programmer salaries there for some time. Million-dollar Wall Street bonuses probably won't be making appearances again for a while either..

I was able to get out of the city for a day and got a tour of Princeton, NJ from my friend Savraj who lives there working on his Y Combinator startup. The startup life sounded pretty cool. I was also considering going to Boston for a day (lots of interesting companies & opportunities there as well), but decided not to when I found out that it would have and cost 4 hours and $100 each way on Amtrak.

Due to the outrageous ticket prices, I only saw one Broadway show while I was there: The Lion King. I wasn't quite sure what to expect going in. Now that I've seen it, I suppose that if your goal was to make a Broadway musical out of that Disney movie, they did a good job. It was well staged, choreographed, and acted. But it also re-used most of the dialog from the movie, as well as the fart jokes (which, in the commentary, the directors of the movie admit were inserted in order to keep 6 year-olds from becoming bored), leading to many awkward, incongruous moments. It felt like nobody had ever stopped to ask "Wait, why are we making a musical out of this??" (In reality I'm sure that question was asked at some point, and the answer was "Because it will make millions of dollars!").

I'm sure that everybody has seen the internet-famous map of the distribution of single people in the US. It pointedly shows that the Seattle area has 40,000 more single men than women, but the NYC area has about 200,000 more single women than men. The dearth of attractive, single women in Seattle has certainly been stunning, so I was curious about whether the opposite effect would be noticeable in New York. It was quite noticeable - surprisingly so, even. There seemed to be beautiful women everywhere - on the street, in shops, on the subway, etc.. I'm trying to do the math to figure out whether this could have just been an anomaly (due to NY Fashion Week coinciding with my trip, or something like that). I'll run the numbers from the National Geographic article to calculate the "expected odds" and post the results up soon. Either way it was quite impressive.

Another particularly striking thing for me was the efficiency of the public transportation system. I had no car but didn't feel like I needed one at any point, since I could easily get to basically anywhere in the city using the subway. It really puts to shame the public transportation systems in cities like Denver or Seattle, which basically consist of "some buses". Building a real subway system in these sort of cities today would require absolutely astronomical amounts of money, so it's probably hopeless at this point.

During the second week I didn't bring my camera around as much unfortunately, but some of the pics I did take are below (the first week's pics are in the previous posts).

I took a whole lot of pictures from the top of the Empire State Building, figuring that I could find some software to stitch them all together into a panorama automatically. Interestingly enough, while I was there Microsoft Research released a free tool which does exactly that. It works pretty well, though it did screw up a few places like the Brooklyn Bridge. Here's a thumbnail of the panorama, linked to a larger version:

The larger version is still only 15% of the full-resolution image which is 16,000 pixels wide at 150 MB, way too big to upload here :).

I tried to attend a taping of the Daily Show, but I didn't realize that all the reserved tickets are gone months in advance, and the standby line was ridiculously long, even several hours before the taping (apparently the guest that night was some guy named Tony Blair). When I realized that I wasn't going to get in, I ran over to the Colbert Report studios, but by that time it was too late there as well.

Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A cheese steak sandwich, which was quite good, but presumably also quite unhealthy.

Lions and gazelles at the Bronx Zoo.

The Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair.

On the flight back all of the in-seat video consoles simultaneously crashed and rebooted during some turbulence (always a good sign..). I was only able to get a cameraphone pic of Tux before it was back up again.