Here’s a shot up Wall St. in New York showing the GMC 4x4 pickups they use as mobile road blocks. The construction debris in the foreground is just that (i.e. it’s not some tricky terrorist obstacle course). The New York Stock Exchange is the building at the very back on the left.

I’m sitting in the back room of the LimoLiner, the “luxury” bus from New York to Boston. Here’s a shot of me talking to Steven via AIM:

And here’s me, my iBook, and the Bronx:

The “luxury” on the bus is mitigated somewhat by the inevitable bump, bump, bump of the bus. This makes typing on the iBook something of an extreme sport.

The WiFi connection, which uses some sort of voodoo to get to the Internet, isn’t exactly broadband. It claims to range from double the speed of dial-up to DSL, depending on location, but I’m getting something near dial-up speeds, and it does fade in and out, although now that we’re out on the highway it’s pretty solid.

The bus itself is a little rough around the edges: there was no water in the washroom sink (apparently you have to wait awhile after the toilet flushes); there a lot of crosstalk on the onboard sound system (I can hear engine noise, and, from time to time, AM radio, through my headphones); and the snack offered was more like Air Canada circa-1990 than “executive class.”

But the seats are comfortable, we seem to be making good time, and the downtown to downtown (rather than downtown to airport, through security, to airplane, to airport, to downtown that the flight would take) is nice. Boarding took all of 2 minutes, which was nice.

I’ll write more when the trip is over.

Hey, it’s April 5, 2004 and I’m in New York State. On April 5, 1966 I was also in New York State, being born. Thanks, Mom. And Dad.

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.