I saw my first “starts Friday in New York and Los Angeles” film tonight, The United States of Leland.

Summary: think American Pie plus American Beauty and a touch of Life as a House. It works in parts, but there are about 200% too many “pained looks” shots, and the plot just never ties together in a way that makes it all feel coherent.

Depending on your point of view, I am either in the safest or most dangerous place on earth.

As I lie here in my hotel room bed, I can look out my window down the street and see the New York Stock Exchange.

It is surrounded by a pointy metal fence — it looks like souped up version of the Victorian fence my Auntie Fran had around her apartment house in Brantford, Ontario in the 1970s.

On the street between me and there is a phalanx of extended cab GMC 4x4 pickup trucks. This truck seems to be the model of choice in the neigbourhood for mobile roadblocking. All the trucks look new. Their engines are running. And I imagine their odometers read less than 100 miles apiece.

You can’t actually walk up to the New York Stock Exchange because only members and invited guests are allowed through the security fence. You can’t use the subway entrance beneath the New York Stock Exchange because it is closed.

The street is lit up almost brighter than daylight. It would be hard to get up to no good.

I didn’t feel queasy about walking from the Wall St. subway station to my hotel tonight at 10:00 p.m. because I knew I had at least 10 pairs of uniformed eyes on me at any one time.

At the same time, the notion that I’m 300 feet from a target worthy of such an obvious show of force makes me pause.

Off to the terrorist-free woods of southern New Hampshire tomorrow.

It’s April 4, 2004. And you thought it was difficult telling the difference between year, month and day before! I haven’t had this much fun since 01-10-00, the date Oliver was born.

Halfway through More, the Yeardley Smith one-woman show I saw tonight at the Union Square Theatre, I become listless and disappointed. But the last half won me over. The play is slightly unpolished, the timing is a bit off (the laughs and the applause fit into the wrong wells), but overall it is more than the sum of its parts, and I walked away satisfied and confused. Which is a pretty good feeling.

One of the things I didn’t figure into planning for the life of a digital nomad was the ergonomics of the situation. At home base I have a body-contured Obus Forme chair, a desk that flies up and down at will, appropriate task lighting, and a nice quiet green cube in which to work.

The last 24 hours I’ve spent most of my work time either hunched over a “crash cart” in the Peer1 colocation room, or contorted into the confines of a makeshift desk in my hotel room that involves an easy chair, pillows, and a lot of anti-ergonomic positions. Club Quarters is a great, clean, cheap hotel, and it’s only 2 minutes walk from Peer1. But I can’t imagine how their marketing staff could write “latest workstation design with task lighting” on their website, as the desk in this room is 12 inches above reasonable typing height, the desk chair looks like it came from the Lido Deck of the Love Boat, and the “task lighting” is a brass table lamp with one light bulb burnt out.

My body is starting to feel the effects of this: lower back pain, wrist tingles, and the like. Fortunately the worst is over: two servers have been upgraded, and I’m halfway done the reinstallation of the content. In the meantime, Almanac.com and YankeeMagazine.com continue to be available for your viewing pleasure.

I’m taking the night off tonight to go and see More, the Yeardly Smith one-woman show. I’m a sucker for the one-woman show.

Imagine the movie Bullworth. On television. In America. With every swear word “bleeped.” It’s like morse code. I’m watching right now. It’s part of “Movies that Rock Week” on VH1.” Sigh.

This morning in the Globe and Mail I read a story about a fast ferry called Spirit of Ontario that is to offer service between Toronto and Rochester. I paid attention to the story both because the ferry had suffered a gash in its side, and also because Rochester is my birthplace.

Today I was wandering around aimlessly in lower Manhattan looking for a place to have dinner, and I rounded a corner and, by complete coincidence, stumbled across the selfsame Spirit of Ontario, gash and all.

For some reason, my compatriots in Rochester are taking this all very seriously (who would have ever thought the prospect of people from Toronto boating across the lake could be so compelling?), to the point where a mobile news truck from WHEC-TV, the local NBC affiliate, is live on the scene.

For the record, the gash is very, well, gash-like. It looks like God took a misshapen can opener to the side. They’re doing their best to hide the hole with a big tarp, but you can see the gnarled edges around the sides. The operators of the boat are downplaying the accident, but you gotta think that “gash” and “boat” are two concepts you don’t want associated with each other.

Here are the things I learned today about New York City.

New York City, or at least Manhattan, or at least Lower Manhattan, is really rather small. I am working on Broad St. this weekend, and staying around the corner on William St. I can easily walk to both sides of the island, and Brooklyn (or what I assume is Brooklyn, it looks like Brooklyn) seems so close that I could reach out and touch it.

For some reason there are large liquid nitrogen tanks located all over this neighbourhood, with rubber hoses running from the tanks down into the earth. A quick Google suggest that this might be a fix for leaky steam pipes causing problems with fiber optic cables.

Every city has its Faneuil Hall, Peakes Quay, Spinaker’s Landing, Harbourfront, Granville Island, etc. Here it’s the South Street Seaport. And they are all the same: expensive stores that sell things nobody really needs, food courts selling generic food, a little bits of ye oldieness scattered around for “ambience.” I fled as soon as I wandered in by mistake. Who is the customer for this stuff?

And finally: I’ve realized that there are more people in New York that don’t plan to kill you than do. Growing up in flaccid Canada, and experiencing New York mostly through Law and Order reruns and urban legends about “Bob and Milly down the street who got mugged,” it’s easy to understand why I would assume that the city is made up mostly of gun-wielding killers. I’m sure they exist. But none of the people I encountered today in Lower Manhattan did, in fact, try to kill me. Or if they did, they didn’t do a very good job of it because I didn’t notice.

If work proceeds as well tomorrow as it did today, I might have extra time to head out to the theatre tomorrow night; I welcome recommendations.

Often I find that when I’m trying to access hotel WiFi, I get assigned a TCP/IP address that starts with 169. The Apple network setup complains that this is a “self-assigned” address, and it don’t get any Internet access in any case.

The universal solution to this problem appears to be simply to power the WiFi access point off and on. Sometimes this is easy to do yourself (hint: often the access point is hidden under the desk in the hotel room); other times you have to ask the hotel staff.

I just had to do this at Club Quarters in New York: there’s a little SMC access point on the desk in the lounge; I unplugged the power, plugged it back in and, presto, working WiFi.

Off to New York City to kick off an American tour. Expect much scatterbrained, U.S.-influenced posting.

Update: In the Air Canada lounge in Montreal. Stale bagels, free Internet, Bran Flakes. Who could ask for anything more!

Update: Newark Airport (now named “Newark Liberty Airport” apparently, in a bold move of oxymoronicism) is the worst airport in the world. I gave up trying to find buses, trains, or other non-taxi transport after 30 minutes of trying and took a cab. As I type this, I’m sitting on the second floor of 75 Broad St. in Manhattan, which is the former headquarters of ITT. There is so much Internet flowing through this building, that if you plugged an Ethernet into your ear, I assume you would become all-knowing and all-seeing. I haven’t tried this yet.

Update: There are many, many, many places to eat lunch in and around wall street. There are police everywhere here, and where there aren’t police there are private security. But everyone is very nice.