Happy New Year!
Posted by Kevin Hazard, January 1st, 2007
Do you enjoy good stories? Well we have a doozy for you.
As Adam and Todd mentioned on their personal blogs, the three of us met in New Jersey and headed into New York City for the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration.
In response to Adam’s announcement of the trip, one of our customers (who has chosen to remain nameless) shot us an email to meet up in the midst of the insanity. We are always open to meeting up with Site5 customers, so we made plans to meet up in the center of Times Square around 10 o’clock pm… We were looking for a quiet place without a million people within a few blocks; it turns out that Times Square was a bad choice of location for the meet-up. 
Did we mention that the (still choosing to remain nameless) customer had all-access to anywhere in Times Square?
Navigating through the city on the 31st was absolutely insane. Adam decided to avoid the craziness and spent New Year’s Eve with his family, so Todd and I meandered the New York City knock-off peddlers and street performers while waiting for the Times Square festivities to begin.
If you haven’t made it to Times Square for New Year’s, the experience is incredible, but it is certainly a commitment: The NYPD locks down the streets surrounding the ball drop at around 4pm. As the afternoon/evening progresses, they close down cross-streets further and further from the 7th and Broadway “Bow tie.” By the end of the night, I think they had the East-West streets closed between 6th and 8th from Madison Square Garden to around 57th (where people were still filtering onto Broadway and/or 7th). People in the middle of the action had to have been in their place by 3pm to get any kind of view… Unless they had the most amazing hook-up from our now-favorite Site5 customer.
At around 10 p.m., we were escorted through at least 10 “Police Line, Do Not Cross” checkpoints with a simple “They are with me,” and we wound up with a pretty good vantage point of the end of the countdown:
For perspective, check out our view of the end of Times Square away from the ball drop (along with the ABC stage on the left):
It wouldn’t be a Site5 weblog post without being a bit cheesy, so for your mocking enjoyment: Happy New Year!
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4 Responses to “Happy New Year!”
January 14th, 2007
My question is two fold.
1) where did you get those site5 t-shirts made, i’m looking to get some shirts made soon, and just wondering if you found a good place online to get them made
2) what is your server configuration for running this typo blog. i myself have started messing around with ruby on rails, and any application i run on my server using RoR is HORRIBLY slow. i use sqlite, apache, and mongrel
Thanks!
January 14th, 2007
Hi Neil,
I have a friend with a budding clothing company called esfac’e, and we had them make those simple “coder” Site5 shirts and another set of shirts that we have yet to debut. They don’t have an online interface, but they can handle everything via email. They have a quick turnaround, better prices than cafepress, and they ship out of Northern California. If you have an idea for a design and want a quote, you can send an email to dele |at| esface (dot) com.
We recently migrated the blog content from Typo to WordPress because the development on Typo stalled, and it had too many quirks that needed fixing for us to use it in the long haul. If you are looking for rails-based blog software, you can check out uses Mephisto’s software, and our customers have guides to getting it up and running here.
January 15th, 2007
Kevin,
Shortly after I made the original comment, I realized my mistake, and saw WordPress at the bottom, I was skeptical when I didn’t see the usual “Powered By Typo” tag. I am new to RoR (being a LAMP guy myself) and decided to mess around with Typo to get started with some prebuilt apps. I haven’t yet been able to create a configuration on my server where load times for the typo install to be quick enough to throw into production. This turns me away from RoR, although the development process for RoR apps seems to be amazing, I’m still attracted to it. I don’t know what to do! PHP or RoR. I’m stuck.
January 21st, 2007
I was about as far from Times Square as it is probably possible to be … in an old farm house on the wrong side of a steep and intimidating small mountain surrounded by untouched forest and native birds at the top of the South Island of New Zealand. With family and friends. We looked down across fields and out over a large ocean bay lit by a near-full moon, with hills hemming us in behind and on each side. And it was world class!!! Although it was mid-summer down here in the Southern Hemisphere, we had to have the fire going. But we had a great time.
But one thing I did have in common with the commotion in Times Square was a 2007 business resolution … I decided that I wanted to crank up some serious clients this year for the corporate teambuilding program I help with.
But this intrusion of work into pleasure still did not stop me staying up until around 2am. Even though my wife and I are over 50 and don’t always find it easy to compete with the endless energy of our children, who are young adults (indeed, one of whom will be married in eight weeks. See her site.
I’d like to go back to our old farm house next New Year. And will probably find myself making more business resolutions!