We’re moving into a new office building tomorrow. It’s an incredible upgrade from the current digs and my office (yes, my office) has an especially nice view of the Hudson River. Plus it boasts the only balcony on the entire building. Pretty good luck I think. The building is amazing and is in the heart of downtown Troy. The doors open remotely by what I think are RFID security cards and the elevator is a glass lift with a view of the Hudson out the back. It’s pretty neat and I’m excited to get settled in. The picture here is looking out the huge front window (which is a disturbingly thin, single pane sheet of glass prolly 10×15 or bigger) on our floor.
Brandon

On the way home from an exciting day in NYC today. On our way down we stopped and checked out the Orange County Choppers store in some small town off the express way. If you’ve ever watched the show then you’d be impressed to see the bikes in person. They’re very cool and super smooth. After that we continued onto the City. We got in and walked all over the place (from 9th Ave past 1st, and there’s not just numbers in there, there was also Lexington, Madison, and a few others). We then jumped in a cab and went back where we had came from essentially, and headed for Times Square. I’ll attach a picture to try to express how nuts TS is, but it’s basically a wild zoo of people and advertisements (tv ones too!) moving but not going anywhere at all. It was definitely cool seeing how the City really operates, but I can’t imagine living there or working there. We then headed to a wonderful Italian place off of Times Square. It was a pretty fancy joint, and the food was authentic and delicious. Next we took to the streets looking for Rockefeller Plaza (it’s the picture with the gold statue of Prometheus, and where the put the gigantic Christmas tree at). The Nintendo World Store was our destination, and our route was possibly the most indirect possible. We made it, but only after being swindled by a guy into buying some hates to help homeless people (he was a great salesman though). The Store itself was kind of impressive, but I was hoping to buy something exclusive or see new game demos (why couldn’t they send the e3 demos still set up to them??) but there was nothing that couldn’t be found elsewhere, save for some embroidered hats and jackets. I even lugged my DS there with the high hopes that they’d have the downloaded demo stations they have in Japan and at e3, but nothing still. They did redeem themselves though with the micro-museum. I put a few pictures of this up. Lets see, there’s a prototype cassette recorder in the classic NES gray, along with a keyboard and two redesigned controllers. Then there’s a huge collection of I believe every style Gameboy SP, including the Japanese Famicom version. Lastly there’s the Famicom itself next to a normal NES, both in pristine condition. That’s pretty much it for ny, except we did stop at an NBA store that was massive. So I decided to include a picture of Todd guarding Shaq… I thought he did a good job….

Oh yeah, I also saw a sweet LOVE park sign replica. You can barely make it out in the pictures, but it’s definitely there.
Brandon

Pictures here

Finally made it to the local skatepark. I’m used to outdoor concrete parks which I love and all, but every now and then an indoor park comes along that makes you realize how great being indoors is. Immediately after work I ran home and wrote down general directions to get to the park. It’s over the Hudson in Albany, about 20 minutes or so, on the highway, away. Much like the Tampa park it’s in an industrial park setting. Vast, open building and presumably cheaper rent, you do the math. Anyway the park itself is decent, a nice manual pad or two and some cool granite ledges which I’d really never heard of in a park before. It’s nice though, they grind super smooth and give it more of an authentic feel (how often do you walk down the street and see corner metal on all the planters?). The locals were pretty cool. I chatted with a few and they were always quick to cheer for good tricks no matter who did them. It took me a little while to get into the swing of things (combination of lack of skating + being in the presence of people who did nollie fs crooks like they were still in style) but once I did I had a lot of fun. Now I feel a lot more complete, and tired enough to fall asleep anytime now. I’m getting out of work early tomorrow so I can clean up the house a little before my parents arrive. Lets just hope they brought real food…… or even cooking skills….
Brandon

Whew, halfway through the week already. I’m not used to the whole nine to five gig yet (lets just say last thursday I woke up at 2 pm) so I tend to stay up too late and then have to get up too early. Each morning I wake up 20-40 minutes before my alarm goes off which is probably the worst feeling in the world because I know, and you know, that even on the off chance that I do fall back asleep I’m going to wake up again in what feels like fifteen seconds later. After I manage to get out of bed I move to the shower. It’s one of the old timey showers too, clawfoot tub, that sort of deal. This means that there’s a drape around it. Not too bad, but the drape doesn’t quite complete the whole circuit around the tub so there’s a 13 inch opening near the handles this is good so you can reach out and adjust the handles if necessary. This is bad if you have an acute childhood-induced fear of flooding the bathroom. Each second that my eyes are closed when rinsing shampoo from my hair I grow more and more anxious to see the floor and what the current water mark has managed to submerge. After the shower I tend to scrounge up semi-dress clothes and make something besides cereal to eat quickly. I drive to work, hardly knowing the way, and arrive on-time always…two days straight. During work it’s difficult for me to stay 100% occupied the entire time. Between running proposal reports, embedding links, writing content, and finding keywords I still have down time. The job isn’t bad, but it is a bit dull at times. The tasks I’m doing are somewhat menial and I’d prefer higher order tasks. But then I’d probably complain about something altogether different. After work I’m burnt out and I mess around on my laptop for too long (after being on said laptop for 8 hours straight only minutes earlier) and end up going to bed too late.

Rinse. Repeat.

So each night I lay in bed thinking about all the stupid minor details of the next day, though it will be identical to the one prior, until I realize I just missed out on precious hours of sleep instead of the minutes I mentioned missing earlier.

This weekend, on the other hand, should be exciting. My parents are coming into NY and I believe we’re heading to NYC which should be packed with amazing adventures and sticky situations of its own.
Brandon