I'll Miss FreshDirect

Another thing I'll miss about New York is FreshDirect, New York City's 100% fabulous grocery delivery service. Even though I live on Long Island, most of which does not get FreshDirect, I continue to get tantalizing e-mails like this one. I just can't seem to hit unsubscribe and say goodbye to delivered-to-your-door goodness forever. And yes, I'm aware that Stop-N-Shop and Safeway deliver groceries. FreshDirect is a fantastic customer experience. Finding what you want is easy. Ordering it is easy. Choosing things for a special dinner is easy. Picking the best produce is easy. Ordering delicious and healthy non-frozen single-serving meals is easy. Finding the nutritional content of everything you buy is easy. Ordering wine and beer is...maybe a little too easy. The site is beautiful. The customer service is excellent. I haven't yet read "Delivering Happiness," but FreshDirect was one of the first businesses I thought of when I heard about the book.

Goodbye, FreshDirect! I'll miss you!

A Little Test....

So, say there's a two-way street, and due to construction it's closed down to two lanes. One lane is full of cars going one way. What is the other lane for?

a. Um, traffic going the other way.
b. Sixty-five MPH.
c. The same thing. I don't know why nobody's in that lane. I guess it's because I'm the smartest person here!

Ready for the answer?

If you said a, I like you very much and you are sane.*
If you said b, you are clearly an IT professional who hasn't slept in a month. Go to bed.
If you said c, you're a degenerate freeloader who thinks the world is all about you! Congratulations! Also, I hate you.


*The term "sane" as used here is strictly relative, and should not be construed as an alternative to professional care.

I'll Miss the Wackadoos

There are a lot of things I'll miss about New York. This is definitely one of them. It defies satire. The former madam, Kristin Davis, performed better at the debate than some presidential candidates have, and ya gotta admit, she's got the sound bite down. (I personally think the MTA runs pretty damn well, but I can still appreciate a finely-tuned insult as much as the next person.) And astute Blackadder fans no doubt watched Jimmy McMillan lay out the platform of the "Rent is too Damn High" party with fond reminiscence about the Standing-At-The-Back-Dressed-Stupidly-and-Looking-Stupid-Party:



Seriously, and I mean this with absolute sincerity, New York is a place where magic happens. Crazy, wacky, surreal magic, to be sure, but magic, all the same.

So True

I've taken on a role in my latest project that I lovingly refer to as "Documentation Whore." I won't go into all the geeky reasons I'm not thrilled with being the Documentation Whore. The documentation has to be done, and I'm pretty good at doing what needs to be done and explaining to the compliance trolls when something isn't necessary. (This is because I still have that scrap of optimism which imagines a world where the documentation actually helps someone. Most of us are well beyond that point, and see the documentation as meaningless busywork. Coincidentally, this is probably why I'm the Documentation Whore.)

The problem is that people insist on inventing new documents. The trolls only want a specific set of documents explaining what insanity you've wrought over the course of your project. But there's a host of other people who seriously just invent documents and then ask you to produce them, and a lot of what we end up doing is regurgitating the same content into a variety of different templates. Seriously, sometimes it's just easier to produce something that looks like what people are expecting than it is to educate them about why what they are expecting is insane or asinine (or both--why limit ourselves).

And so another day passes where our entire project team is convinced that Scott Adams has installed surveillance equipment in our workplace.

End of an Era, Part II

I totally know what Shifter's talking about. I'm going through the same thing with books. I got an e-reader a few months ago (yeah, no, not a Kindle, and not a sexy new Kindle, but a Bookeen Opus, which is the smallest and lightest e-reader on the market, and yes, I like it, but I'm tired of explaining to random people in airports and restaurants that not all e-readers are Kindles). My dream would be to have only a few physical books--the ones by my favorite writers, the ones I pick up and look through occasionally, and the ones that are autographed. So I started looking through my books and really being honest with myself. Which ones might I read again? Which ones have I not opened in ten years?

It's been an interesting experience. On the one hand, I'm a former English major, so a lot of my stuff is readily available for e-readers, and it's free. The collected works of Charles Dickens are easy to come by. Even the collected works of Wilkie Collins aren't difficult to find. On the other hand, there's a lot that isn't available yet. I have some academic texts that I really enjoy. Some of my absolute favorite books, my touchstone books, are not yet available as e-books (Marathon Man is one I'm particularly sad about--I'd feel great about having that book in my purse all the time).

Some things are actively better as e-books. When I bought the collected letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (from before she was Barrett-Browning), I could not afford a nice edition. A good edition reproduces certain pages of the letters, and has footnotes providing context for some of the things they mention. I was really fond of Browning's doodles--there's a cute one where he draws a musical note in the margin to describe the squeaky wheel sound that grates on his nerves when he has a migraine, for instance. Not knowing that it's there makes the letter kind of whiny, but the doodle hints at a lively humor. The edition that I had was pretty much your bargain basement text, with no footnotes and no facsimiles. So far I've only been able to replace volume 1, but there's a nice PDF with the pages I remember and nice footnotes.

I have six boxes of books ready to go to a charity. A couple of other boxes are waiting to be mailed out to friends and family, but I'm still replacing a few special titles. I'm really hoping that I can get down to one bookshelf (which would mean getting rid of about 3/4 of my collection). No doubt some tough choices lie ahead...