Yankee Stadium Tour

September 16, 2008

I definitely wanted to catch a tour of baseball’s cathedral before its date with the wrecking ball, and since tour tickets have been sold out all season I followed the Yankees.com instructions, woke up early, headed to the stadium, got in line at 9 am, and got a ticket for the noon tour (from what I heard they’ll probably give tours after the season ends and up until the stadium gets torn down in March 2009).

The tour enabled me to finally make it down to Monument Park and the dugout, although I was a little disappointed to not get into the clubhouse. I went on a day the Yankees weren’t playing, but since their next home game would be the following day they wouldn’t let anyone beyond the dugout. I was really hoping to see some of the hidden gems displayed in this NY Times slideshow, but I guess I’ll have to settle for what’s on the Web.

There’s been an online petition to save the Yankee Stadium, notably headed by Linda Ruth Tosetti, Babe Ruth’s granddaughter. With all the money involved and the Bronx’s committment to recover park area, I doubt the city will give the idea consideration. Once demolished, this ballpark is to be replaced with a city park and three baseball fields.

Instead of petitioning against the inevitable, I think they ought to petition New York City to retain the original ballpark’s footprint as one of the three baseball fields (although this conclusion’s chances seem grim as well). It’s a long shot, given the size and location of the existing field, but wouldn’t it be great for kids to be able to play on the same field as the legends of the game?

Categories:	NYC
Tags:	yankee stadium baseball field

My Final Days

September 11, 2008

It’s still surreal to me that we won’t be living up here in a few days . . . I’m just anticipating a lot of car and train trips. The closure of Midtown’s Steelers bar Scruffy Duffy’s and Yankee Stadium are a consolation to me in some weird way.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get a few of the touristy things I’ve wanted to do off my list. This includes Ulysses Grant’s Tomb on the Upper West Side and visiting Tom’s Restaurant.

Grant’s Tomb, the largest mausoleum in the U.S., reminded me of Napoleon’s Tomb, which it was based upon.

I only managed to start appreciating Seinfeld through reruns . . .

Visiting Tom’s reminded me of the Bull and Finch Pub in Boston. The insides just never look like they do on TV.

Categories:	travel

LearningProcessing.com Goes Live

September 7, 2008

I recently finished my friend Dan Shiffman‘s Learning Processing book site in time for the Fall semester. It’s still being populated with examples and tutorials, but Dan’s definitely one of the best at teaching programming. Check out the site and the book.

Categories:	ITP, webdesign
Tags:	itp processing programming

Outer Banks

It’s been 10 years since I’ve visited North Carolina, and the last time involved a rather scary night club, a 150-mile ride in a AAA tow truck to VA Beach, the sale of my first car for less than the in-dash CD player, and the long ride home with my friend’s parents.

This past week I went to the Outer Banks with my wife’s side of the family and fortunately the car made it back with us (Naturally, as a true workaholic, my laptop made the trip as well). Unlike some of my brother and sister-in-laws, I’m not 100% beach bum, so I took a day trip to Hatteras Lighthouse, Roanoke Island, and the Wright Brothers Memorial.

The beaches were nice (though not Philippines nice) but I still don’t understand the fanaticism behind the OBX license plates or bumper stickers–maybe I just prefer a faster pace of lifestyle. Duck Donuts, however, did impress me, and I’m wondering when they’ll start franchising north.

Here’s the original location of the Hatteras Lighthouse in contrast to its current spot. I was a little disappointed with how there was no real on-site documentation regarding the engineering involved in moving the entire lighthouse.

I saw about a million of these in the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke.

Looking over the pictures from my trip, I realized I just don’t take/share a lot of pictures of people. The sharing part has to do with my skepticism of cloud computing (I’m too cheap to go pro with Flickr, considering I pay for so much hosting space to begin with and I don’t want to rely too much on Google’s Picasa). I guess I’ll leave it to my sister-in-law, whose pictures can be found here, here, and here.