Coreyh.com

Tourist Package A

My friend Ben in Oregon asked me for NYC tourist recommendations.

This was my reply:

1. Ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth – it is free, easy, good views of the harbor, etc
2. Eat at Shake Shack (the Madison Square location if it is warm enough) or the Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridian.
3. Eat Lombardi’s pizza in NoLita & right across the street, amazing Rice Pudding at “Rice to Riches”
4. Walk up West Broadway (distinct from regular Broadway) from Canal to Houston (pronounced “house-ton”), take detours to the to the right as you please
5. Get an expensive drink and play free pool at the Hudson Hotel Library Bar on W 58^th street. Walk in, go up the escalator, turn left, then right, walk to the back like you know where you are going. 
6. Rent bikes and ride around Central Park – the big loop is 6 miles (rent them at Columbus Circle next to Kinkos or on 96th & Broadway)
7. If you like Thai food, take the 7 train to Queens (an adventure on its own, a bit like a ride at Disneyland) and have the best at this place: Sripraphai
8. I haven’t been in years and years, but either the Top of the Rock or Empire State Building to get a good view is probably worth doing. Go at an off hour.
9. Visit Grand Central Station – good food court downstairs if you need a snack.
10. Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and back
11. The subway is the best way to move uptown and downtown.
12. Cab drivers have to pick you up no matter what, look for one with the numbers lit up, flag them down, get in and then tell them where you are going. Pay before you get out. Tip $2-$3 or so.

------ Don’ts

1. Don’t go eat anywhere within 4 blocks of Times Square (for Pete’s sake!)
2. Don’t try and walk through Times Square, just witness it.
3. Don’t worry about crime other than keeping a handle on purses/backpacks.
4. Don’t expect much if you go to “ground zero” (we don’t call it that), it is really just a construction site now. Although you do get a sense for how big of a footprint the buildings had.
5. Don’t hesitate to ask me for more, I’m happy to help

posted @ Saturday, January 03, 2009 7:28 PM | Feedback (0) |

Run like a Kenyan

Let me get this out of the way right at the top. This post has absolutely nothing to do with racism, i.e. there is no evidence (VO2 max, red blood cell counts, etc) that genetics plays any part in why modern running events are dominated by East Africans.

With that said, here is what it takes:

1. Starting as an infant, run often, e.g. 6 miles to and from school every day, and do it mostly barefoot.
2. Put yourself in an extremely competitive racing environment. Running in Kenya is equivalent to the NFL+MBL+NBA+NHL combined. And winning a major city marathon means more money than the majority of your countrymen will earn in their lifetimes (by far).
3. Work incredibly hard. Run between 125-150 miles per week. One sample workout would include 20 reps of 440 meters with less than 45 seconds jogging breaks.
4. Be very skinny. Carrying extra weight of any kind (including unnecessary muscle) makes you slower, is harder on the joints and requires extra oxygen.
5. Train and live at altitude, with rolling hills, and on dirt. When we think Africa we think hot and flat, but in fact a huge portion of elite runners come from the Rift Valley in Kenya which is actually cool most of the year, and is roughly 7500’ high.

Okay, so what does this mean for the rest of us?

1. Kenyan children have an advantage in that they are building strength and neurological connections to their feet that we are missing. The Western industrial shoe-complex is seriously flawed. Most running shoes are really engineered for a style of running closer to “walking fast” than proper technique and is inefficient and likely to lead to injury. Buy some Vibram Fivefingers to build strength and look to “flats” with low heel-to-forefoot ratios and are less than 10oz.
2. Fortunately, in New York City, in any given month there are 2-3 races offered by the NYRR club that will have a minimum of 4,500 runners including teams that field some serious runners.
3. Run every day, sometimes twice. Run the 20x440 w/ 45 seconds rest and try not to throw up.
4. Eat really well. Ethiopians are particularly fond of Teff, a hearty grain.
5. American elite runners either live in places like Boulder CO, Mammoth Lakes CA or sleep in hypobaric chambers which simulate altitude. Most of us aren’t willing to take those kinds of steps, but we can rotate the surfaces we run on. Central Park has the bridal path, the reservoir loop, the great hill track and the northern hill trails which are all soft surfaces.

posted @ Friday, December 05, 2008 5:53 PM | Feedback (1) |

NY Tech Meetup version two

Charlie has a Poking the Bear post up where he suggests among other things disbanding the meetup as is.

Rather than comment point for point, I’ll just take a second to write up a couple of my own points.

The meetup as it stands today does do a few things very well and any future events/organizations will need to keep these in mind.

1. Presenting at the meetup, even if it is not egalitarian, is still a significant milestone for a company seeking to gain exposure in the New York tech scene.
2. It puts a diverse set of people in a room. One of the problems with relying on small, nimble groups of people is that it reduces the chances for fortuitous connections that might not occur at “Technical CEO/founders with blue eyes meetup”
3. As mentioned in Charlie’s comments, it serves as the front door to the community.

The dynamic between nimble, flexible events as championed by Charlie/NextNY and the recurring, established meetup seems to indicate, clearly, there is a place for both. This new infrastructure and leadership of the meetup should focus on:

1. Help organizers put on small events that work. Hold workshops for new organizers. Create a library of best practices. Manage the collective intelligence, even if it just means being the stewards of a wiki.
2. Coordinate. Gary’s Guide is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive list of upcoming events, but there should be some dedicated energy to making sure that there is not too much overlap between events. We’ve all seen way too many of the same prolific presenters that go from event to event pitching to anyone that will have them. There also needs to be an easy way to provide better context for the events.
3. Cultivate the conversation. One thing that NextNY does really well is police the threads for spam, self-promotion and non-helpful contributions.
4. Fight the bottom-feeders. There is a fine line between offering “services” to the community versus being a pest. Building a reputation system for these events whereby getting banned is a possibility and is appropriately damaging is needed.

Overall, I feel like many in the community feel like that because the meetup group is going to have more structure and potentially going to get bigger that it is going to suck. It doesn’t have to be so.

posted @ Monday, December 01, 2008 4:58 PM | Feedback (0) |

Restless No More

If you didn’t see on Twitter or FB, I ran the NYC Marathon a couple weeks ago. Everything went according to plan; my goal was to qualify for the Boston Marathon, which for my age group is a 3:10. I stuck to my game-plan and came in 3:09:46. Pix are here.

The night after the marathon I laid in bed thrashing around with terrible restless legs (technically it was my arms that were bothering me, but the syndrome is called restless legs -- same thing). I could not get to sleep even though I was naturally, incredibly tired. I figured that all that sweating meant my electrolytes might have been messed up, so I got up, took two Endurolytes, which are pills I’ve used in the past for the ultra-marathon and for really long runs, and went back to sleep easily.

As I was sending the link to my mom, who also has issues with restless legs, I noticed that Hammer, the company that makes them even includes this on the description:

Taking two or more Endurolytes before bed may help prevent night cramps and nighttime muscle twitching.

Since then, I’ve taken these at the first sign of RLS (restless legs) and it has been 100% effective. Previously, I had to stop drinking red wine because it consistently gave me trouble, but even there, if I pop a couple of these I can sleep fine.

If you haven’t dealt with this, it is hard to appreciate how annoying this issue is and I’m so, so glad to have finally found a cure. My mom is now also successfully using these too.

And the best part, and why I feel so comfortable recommending it to people is that it is not “medicine” it is just minerals, and mainly salt. Just tiny rocks really. 

posted @ Wednesday, November 19, 2008 1:50 PM | Feedback (0) |

URDB intern

One of the projects I’m involved with is called The Universal Record Database. The site is rapidly approaching launch and to help make sure the V1 launch and subsequent launches go smoothly we are trying to recruit an intern to join the team. Take a look and if you know anyone that would be a good fit, please do let me know. (Click through to read the whole post)

posted @ Thursday, September 18, 2008 4:55 PM | Feedback (0) |

Instructable Alchemy

Emily and I are big fans of Etsy.

• I bought my wedding ring (see picture right) on Etsy
• Emily bought her wedding band on Etsy
• We commissioned a t-shirt quilt to be created using 40+ old t-shirts of ours that had sentimental value, but were not being worn
• Emily is having her dress converted into a wearable top and turning the rest into pillows.

The feature where you commission projects to be made is called Alchemy. The process is straightforward. You post a project and individual crafty type people bid on it.

Between Etsy and Instructables there is some exciting stuff happening in the world of DIY, craftsmanship and local creation.

Here’s another opportunity by way of annecdote:

My dad has a kayak. He asked me to buy him one of those contraptions with wheels that you put on the front of the boat to make it easy to take down to the lake. Campmor, the excellent outfitter sold me a nice model for exactly $166. Now this is two plastic wheels, some metal bars and a piece of foam – $4 in parts for $166. If I lived in the suburbs (which I don’t) I would have bought the pieces and made it myself.

So I guess I’m asking for some kind of Instructables/Etsy/Alchemy mashup where I can ask craftsmen with the tools, space and knowhow to build stuff for me. Sometimes they might be one of a kind constructions like the dining room table + bookcase hybrid I had the unfinished furniture store build for me years ago. I also need a custom pump built for my dishwasher (long story). And other times, frankly, it will be to knock off some piece of equipment that I would otherwise overpay for or am unhappy with for some reason. Throw in a demand that my projects be built using sustainable, eco-conscious methods and we’re really doing something great.

posted @ Wednesday, September 10, 2008 6:11 PM | Feedback (0) |

Best Athlete Ever

This Michael Phelps "Best Athlete Ever" stuff is getting under my skin. Now, not to take away from his amazing ability, genetics and domination, but there is a lot more to trying to determine who the best ever is beyond just medal counts. Swimming has a ridiculous number of events which serve to boost the egos of young athletes and inflate medal counts. The argument can plausibly be made that M.Phelps is the most dominant Olympian ever, but a) that might not even be true and b) let's choose the sport to work with first.

I am considering an equation which could be constructed that would attempt to solve this problem. My first step is to determine the various factors involved with picking the right sport.

• Endurance. Endurance athletic events require rigorous training put in over years of build up are factored higher. Longer events should be factored somewhat higher, for instance the Ironman triathlon world record time is 8 hrs 4 mins.
• Strength. Table tennis does not require much physical strength. Muscular development has to be considered to be the "best athlete ever".
• Mental toughness/strategy. The 100 meter dash is an amazing showcase for the human body, but there is very little gamesmanship involved.
• Body type specificity (less is better) You simply have to be over 6'9" to be a center in basketball. Sports that any body type can play gain advantage because the pool of contestants is higher.
• Access to sport/equipment cost. Polo is out of reach for 99% of the population. Soccer requires a cheap, durable ball and that's about it. Cycling is a sport which should be considered highly, but expensive technology is a requirement at the elite levels.
• Injury edge. The description needs work, but in many sports, athletes push their bodies up the point where additional training would result in injuries. Some sports, swimming included (it seems), don't suffer from this problem.
• Body fat/diet requirements. Many sports require extremely low body fat to be competitive and as we all know, keeping <10% body fat requires incredible dedication. Events which allow you to eat nothing but McDonalds get deductions here.
• Coordination. Both arms/hands and feet need to be considered.
• Reflexes.
• Years in training. Some sports require athletes to begin their training at a very young age and require 7+ years of training in order to become competitive.
• Dominance. In order to be considered the best ever, the athlete should at least be considered the best ever within their respective sports and hopefully by a wide margin.

The next step would be to weight these things against each other and put some scales and numbers to it, but just in talking through this quickly last night two sports emerged as contenders.

Tennis: requires full body coordination, requires years of training, there is some argument over whether the access is egalitarian or not, endurance is needed to sustain five set matches and any body type can play (male champions span 5'7"-6'5").

Soccer: requires lots of endurance, anyone can play, skills are easy to learn but hard to master, but your arms don't do anything.

Cross country skiing: these folks get a mention because whenever VO2Max, a measure of blood oxygen capacity is brought up, studies of athletes has shown that these athletes consistent test highest.

Hybrid sports like the modern pentathlon which is shooting+fencing+swimming+horse jumping+3000m run are neat ideas, but just not very many people compete in these things.

posted @ Friday, August 15, 2008 9:57 PM | Feedback (6) |

Season 2 Episode 1

It just so happens that my favorite episode of the excellent This American Life is one of the ones Showtime publishes on their website in full.UPDATE: turns out it isn't the full episode, just most of it. Sorry. Showtime: That's annoying.

This is saved on our Tivo at home and I don't expect to ever delete it.

Try this link first but if that doesn't work, try the Showtime page and click on the right for “This American Life – season 2 episode 1”

posted @ Saturday, July 19, 2008 10:00 PM | Feedback (1) |

MS Installer Cleanup breaks Office 2007

This post is strictly for the great search index in the sky.

If you install the MS Installer Cleanup tool, perhaps on the recommendation of Adobe for CS3 installation issues as I did you will break MS office. The error you'll get is "Microsoft [Word] is not installed correctly for the current user." As far as I can tell there is no way to fix it manually. I ran the Vista System Restore tool for the very first time ever and it worked.

Also, the Photoshop problem I was having was that all CS3 apps would just start and either hang or no UI would show up. I had to download this Licensing patch from Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3750 

I was able to find a ton of posts in forums and usenet that described the exact problem I mentioned, but no solutions, nobody ever goes back and says "for the record, here's what I did". So I'm doing that now.

posted @ Thursday, May 29, 2008 5:16 PM | Feedback (0) |

Determination

I was duly impressed by the efforts of the amputee runner in Saturday's Long Island Greenbelt 50k, but I didn't realize that in the process she set the world record for an amputee runner. She also owns the road marathon record with a stunning 3:05 time. Amazing stuff & congratulations to Amy Palmiero-Winters.

posted @ Monday, May 12, 2008 1:37 PM | Feedback (2) |

Ultra Marathon Recap

Kilometers: 50
Miles: 31.07
Participants: 59
Time: 5:35:14 or so (they still haven't posted the official results)
Overall Place: 11
Overall Male: 10 (The woman that won is a famous ultra runner)
Powerbar Gels consumed: 6
Electrolyte pills: 5
Dixie cups of warm, flat Pepsi: 9
Ounces of Gatorade: 100+
Injuries resulting in blood drawn: 0
Times lost on course: 10

I ran the Long Island Greenbelt 50k trail race yesterday.

It was my longest race to date (previous was 18M) and my first trail race. Path-finding was a major challenge and one that I did not fully anticipate. I got lost a whole bunch of times, but fortunately never for very far or long. The biggest physical challenge was the steep downhill sections. Even though I had limited time training on trails, I had prepared to go up hills well enough to cover the day, but I neglected to train specifically to go down steep inclines and by half way my quadriceps were crying uncle and I was forced to pick my way down hills slowly and often times by grabbing trees to slow my descent. The whole vibe was completely different from a road race, nearly everyone you passed along the way (it was a double out-and-back course) would say things like "looking great!" or "awesome job!".

Since so much of it was a new experience, I'm thrilled to have learned as much as I did and finished with no major catastrophes along the way.

UPDATE: official results posted

posted @ Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:48 PM | Feedback (0) |

Twitter

Not sure why I didn't mention this sooner, but if you are so inclined, you can find me on Twitter here.

What is Twitter? See the Twitter in Plain English video.

posted @ Wednesday, April 30, 2008 6:53 PM | Feedback (1) |

Where do you find the time?

This is my favorite video of 2008 so far.

Makes me so happy to be involved in actually building and experimenting with "what's next" in the long-term meaning of the phrase. And that my bets placed on technologies that require huge amounts of human input are the right ones (eventually).

UPDATE: It appears there is an issue in Internet Explorer and the video. If you don't see anything, here is the direct link: http://blip.tv/file/855937/

posted @ Wednesday, April 30, 2008 6:49 PM | Feedback (1) |

Product Guy - digg it

Jeremy Horn, aka the Product Guy interviewed Tim and I about Notches.

posted @ Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:35 PM | Feedback (0) |

hReview Pickup -- Akismet

posted @ Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:15 PM | Feedback (0) |

Meet the Team

So much is happening in Notches-world it is hard enough just to keep Emily (my fiance) updated, let alone my loyal blog readers. I don't even know where to start.

The sites we are building continue to get refined. We just added our glamour shots to the "Meet the Team" page for instance.

Tim wrote a killer post called Innovation, Disruption and the Economics of free which was picked up by the NY tech blog CenterNetworks. What a multi-talented guy that Tim is.

Life right now is a tangle of meetups, meetings, coding, researching, planning, talking, writing, listening.

posted @ Friday, April 11, 2008 6:21 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Startup-life ]

British Ladies Make Music

I would like to just note a time-when-I-discovered-them-progression of my favorite women in music that happen to be British.

Ms Dynamite - R&B signer, favorite song "DY-NA-MI-TEE"

Lady Sovereign - Grime rapper, favorite song "Random 2"

Lily Allen - favorite song "LDN"

Amy Winehouse - favorite song "Tears Dry on Their Own"

Kate Nash - sounds an awful lot like Lily Allen*, favorite song "Foundations"

Adele - sounds an awful lot like Amy Winehouse*, favorite song "My Same"

*In both cases, I mean this in the best possible way.

And even better than just telling you about them, I created a Muxtape (click to listen):

posted @ Saturday, March 29, 2008 10:19 PM | Feedback (0) |

Text to Speech in Winword 2007

Whenever I have an important document to write, I use a trick that got me through high school writing classes: I use Text-to-Speech and have my document read back to me.

The computer reads your document literally, following punctuation via a rules engine, now "how you meant it to sound." It becomes painfully obvious if you miss a comma or use awkward language.

The original tool I used came with my sound card at the time, this was the beginning of Windows 95 and ran on my 90mhz Pentium. Over the years I've used a different packages to do the same thing. In Windows XP and Office XP there was the Language Bar (and its maddening UI quirks).

The other day while writing something for potential Notches angel investors (spots still available ) on the airplane I tried to get Windows/Office to read my document back to me. Dearly missing Google access I was really frustrated by the whole thing. Vista has a new Narrator tool that is designed for the blind and can read back all sorts of screen elements, but it does not work in Office 2007. You have to copy and paste the text into Notepad. I'm especially forgiving of Microsoft on all sorts of topics, but I really couldn't believe this one. Surely this must be my error. Something that used to work in 1997 should still work in the latest stuff. But no. Incredibly the functionality is there in Excel, but not Word. How's that for making sense?

Back on land I eventually found a document called Word text to speech that outlined a workaround using VBA to get it going in Word 2003. The instructions there worked perfectly with just one minor tweak (noted at the bottom of the page). Once the macro(module) is there, you need to just add icons which point to the macros in the quick launch bar, which you probably never noticed, it looks like this:

You can customize the little icons and I went with these semi-obvious choices.

ps. I'm so old school that I call it "Winword" in my head as to distinguish between it and the DOS version that I grew up with.

posted @ Wednesday, March 26, 2008 1:46 PM | Feedback (0) |

BU skis Mt Hood 2008

My BU ski team friends and I have an annual ski trip. We've only missed two years in the ten since college.

This year, Brennan and I flew out to Seattle/Portland (long story) where Val and Ben took us Easterners on a snow-storm-chase which ended up at Mt Hood in Oregon.

We stayed at the Salmon River Meadows Lodge, skied three days at the Meadows mountain and did one day of backcountry ski touring. Basically that means you hike up and earn your turns. 

You put "skins" on the bottom of your skis that allow the ski to slide forward, but not backward. Touring bindings have two modes, one locked down for regular alpine skiing and a free heel mode for going up.

At this particular spot called Tom Dick and Harry Mountain, it took us about 45 minutes to hike up (a minute or so to come down) and we made about four laps.

Here is the Flickr image set and some YouTube videos.

posted @ Friday, March 21, 2008 3:20 PM | Feedback (0) |

Presentation tips for future-Corey

Tuesday evening, Tim and I presented Notches for the first time in public at the Web2NewYork tech meetup.

I had just flown in from my annual ski vacation, but made it from JFK with enough time to spare. The cab trip in was stressful, but I wasn't nervous at all going into it the talk.

On the plane ride I put together my final script for the seven minute presentation, and I was pleased at how it turned out. But when it was our turn to present, I didn't have a good way of keeping my notes, which were digital only, on my laptop in front of me. So when the microphone was passed I suddenly had to wing it and consequently struggled through the first few minutes before I found a more natural groove. Fortunately the reaction we got from the crowd was quite positive and we had a number of really good conversations with folks looking to add reviews to their sites which is exactly what we were hoping to accomplish.

But in the spirit of self-improvement, I made a list of presentation tips for future-Corey.

1. Focus 67% of your preparation effort on the opening. I'm very comfortable talking through all kinds of details, but because every audience is different, the introductions have to be custom tailored. Focus on the opening and the rest will flow.
2. Even if the event is heavily demo focused, go with slides to get through introductory content. Give the audience some visual clues and use them to ensure you are hitting the points you need to make in the first minutes.
3. Figure out a different way to demo mobile tools. Having your partner type something into a phone doesn't work. Choices are either finding an emulator or maybe even prompting the audience to try something like send a Twitter message.
4. As painful as it sounds, practice with a microphone and videotape yourself. 

posted @ Thursday, March 20, 2008 6:37 PM | Feedback (0) |