Big Apple, 3AM
I ended up having quite an interesting weekend. I took a trip to NYC to visit my brother's friend Evan and to check out the city. My mom works at Jet Blue so I can get stand by tickets to JFK for only $20. I left for New York at about noon on Saturday and got to JFK at about 1:30 PM. From JFK, I took the sky train to the subway to get to Evan's apartment. I couldn't help but people watch on the subway. It was my first time on a subway so I was curious to see how people behaved. For the most part people just sat there quietly but I was still interested.
I got off at my stop and had to walk a bit to meet Evan. I walked next to McCarren Park and there was a band playing and a ton of people laying out in the sun. Shortly after walking through the park, I met Evan and we walked to his place. I was actually surprised at how new Evan's apartment building was. I was expecting some shitty apartment you'd see here in Buffalo. His apartment was pretty messy though due to his roommates.
After having a couple drinks, we went to grab some food at this place called Eat. I would consider it to be an organic type restaurant. A cool thing about the restaurant was that it was BYOB, something more common in NYC compared to Buffalo. From the restaurant, we went to a party hosted by this one girl Evan knew. We pretty much stayed there and hung out for the majority of the evening. After the party, we went and got food at this Thai place. I ordered some type of chicken dinner and it turned out to be a half of a chicken. I guess I wasn't in the greatest mindset. From the restaurant we went back to Evan's apartment because I needed to take my daily insulin. I think the mix of drinking all day and the chicken didn't sit well with my stomach because when I got there, I puked.
When I woke up the next day, I had heard of the attempted bombing at Times Square and was glad I stayed in Brooklyn. I also got a call from my Mom saying that there were three canceled flights from Buffalo to NYC and the people on the canceled flights were moved to the other flights throughout the day making all flights to Buffalo full that day. So I had to buy a ticket home for $160 and go from JFK to Dulles in D.C. and then to Buffalo.
We went to Manhattan for brunch at this place called Esperanto. They had South American/Brazilian food and I ordered the huevos rancheros which was pretty good. After eating, we walked through Tompkins Square Park and up to Union Square and to the skyline, an elevated walkway in West Village. It was a lot of walking, but I got to see a good chunk of lower Manhattan. We got pizza at this place called Artichoke which sold spinach and artichoke pizza that was delicious. I Burned the top of my mouth really bad because I couldn't wait to eat it. After that. we headed back to Evan's apartment and I had to leave for the airport. The trip back was pretty smooth except I had to get off at this one stop because the train I was on wasn't going to the airport but the next train was.
I really liked New York City. I liked the amount of walking that I had to do. I'd much rather take subways/walk or ride a bicycle then own a car because it's so much healthier. I also like the fact that there is so much opportunity to interact with people. In Buffalo, I go to work, I go to the gym and come home and I don't really get a chance to meet new people. But in New York there is a lot more opportunity.
There is so much I still want to do there. I didn't get to experience Times Square, there is a boat ride that goes around the Statue of Liberty which would be awesome to do, I'd like to go to Coney Island and I'd love to do some NYC shopping. I hope to get back there again this summer with my brother or something.
Diabetes Has Changed My Life
Some people may not know this about me but I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes around April of 2007. Throughout the beginning months of 2007 I started to notice unexplained changes with my body. I started losing a lot of weight for no reason, I was thirsty a lot and I had to frequently urinate. All common symptoms for someone with diabetes or high blood sugar levels. However, I shrugged off the changes for a long time and refused to think that anything was wrong with me.
I can still remember one of the first times I tested my blood sugar with my grandma's glucometer and seeing the results being over 300 mg/dl (which stands for milligrams per deciliter). Shortly after that, I was admitted to a hospital and was officially diagnosed. It was a very scary time but it was a definite wake up call that things needed to change with both my eating habits and how much I exercised.
These changes did not come right away. For a couple years or so I was limiting my sugar intake but I really wasn't limiting the amount of carbs I ate, Two crucial things that should be restricted in those with Diabetes. Carbohydrates when digested are converted into glucose and then enter the bloodstream raising your blood sugar. I also wasn't exercising as much as I should have.
But with some help from a friend, some knowledge from Men's Health magazine, and a lot of motivation and self control, I can say I am on the right path and I have never been so healthy in my life. I rarely eat foods that are bad for me and go to the gym/exercise 5-6 times a week. My last A1C test result was a 5.6, which finally showed that my hard work has been paying off.
But if I was to never get Diabetes, a lot of the changes I made wouldn't have happened. I would probably still be the guy who gained weight at college and kept it. The disease has definitely changed my life. I'm not glad I have diabetes but a lot of good has come from it.
See You At The Crossroads
I seem to be hitting a crossroads in my life where I have some big decisions to make. I've been working at my job for over a year and a half and it has definitely been a good learning experience, but I feel it's time to move to greener pastures.
One of my dreams for a long time has been to move to a new city and it looks like that opportunity maybe coming. My brother is planning to move to New York City after he finishes his MBA and that would be something I am definitely interested in. The hard part about that situation is that there is no telling how long it will take for him to sell his condo and for he and I to get a job. Plus who knows what could happen in that time. He could find a girlfriend or some incentive that would make him want to stay in Charlotte.
But until then I could do three things: I could stay in Buffalo at my current job and wait until Tom gets everything sorted out. My second option is, my friend Colby's company that he works for is hiring and I could get a better job there. I would work with my one of my best friends, have more interesting work, have a closer commute, better pay. But if my brother came to me in September or October ready to move, I'd still want to do that. The third option was my brother said that he knows someone in Charlotte that places people into IT jobs and he might be able to get me a temp job down there for the summer until he gets everything sorted out. That would be awesome. Charlotte is an awesome city and it would be a ton of fun. Plus if NYC still fell through, I'd be living in Charlotte which is not a bad thing at all.
So I have a lot to figure out. In the mean time, I have a lot of things planned coming up and some things that aren't planned that I hope to do. For Memorial Day weekend, I'm going to Charlotte to visit my brother for the first time in two years. I can't wait. I also signed up for The Ride For Roswell on June 26th and I'm excited to participate in that again. My friend Matt's wedding is also coming up in early August and I'm pumped to see him again. I miss him a lot. As for things I hope to do, I hope to get to NYC to visit my brother's friend Evan, who I would potentially be living with in NYC should I move there. And finally, I'd like to get to Boston with my friend Jon. He might be moving there come fall and I would love to experience more of the city with him.
I'll try and update you when I get a better idea on what I plan on doing.
OnLive – The Future of Video Games?
For those of you that don't pay much attention to the video game industry, OnLive is a new cloud-based gaming platform that you connect to via your PC or to your TV with a "MicroConsole". It's like Time Warner's on-demand service but for video games. All of the data would be computed at a data center and streamed back to you onto your TV or PC monitor. Meaning you wouldn't have to buy an Xbox or Playstation and you wouldn't have to buy an expensive PC to be able to play the games that are coming out now. In theory, you would be able to run today's games on a netbook. You could own one system for the rest of your life. However, there are limitations to the service which make me skeptical on whether it will break through the video game industry.
The number one concern I have is, will the average person have a fast enough connection speed to be able to use the service? The requirement to be able to play High Definition content is 5Mbps. The requirement to be able to play games in standard definition is only 1.5Mbps. However, they are only offering the high definition when the service first becomes available. When you sign up for OnLive, they will do a test on your connection speed to determine whether your speed is fast enough. But curiosity got the best of me so I decided to do a test at home by going to Google Topeka and finding a couple sites that do a connection test for you. A couple of them that I used were http://www.testmy.net/ and http://www.testmyspeed.com/. I was actually surprised with the results. I got an average of around 12 Mbps. I have Time Warner so I was expecting something under 5Mbps. But I had a feeling I had an above average connection speed so I wonder what the average person's connection speed is.
One of the other more underlying issues is, how will it feel compared to playing on an Xbox or a Playstation? Will the controls feel delayed? When you press a button on the controller, it has to send that data from your controller to the data center where it will compute that data and send back the action onto your TV screen or Monitor. This would obviously take more time than it would normally on an console, but will it be so minute that you won't even notice?
OnLive will be a monthly subscription fee of $15 dollars a month which gives you the basic service. You still have to buy the rights to games in order to play them. There is also a feature where you can rent games for a certain time period which is pretty cool and would definitely hurt Blockbuster even more if Onlive took off. And if you are the the first 25,000 users to successfully sign up you will get the first 3 months free. 15 dollars a month doesn't seem bad, but it definitely adds up over time. This generation's console life is now 5 years and is expected to last another 2. The Xbox 360 at launch cost $400 and the original PS3 cost $600. If you payed that monthly subscription fee for that seven years it would cost you $1,260. You could buy 3 Xbox's in that time and still have enough to get a game. $15 dollars a month doesn't sound as good now does it.
Another issue that concerned me was that there are no first party exclusives for OnLive. Games Franchises like Gears of War, Halo, Mario, and The Legend of Zelda will not be on OnLive and there are no games on OnLive that you wouldn't be able to get on another system. So if you have an Xbox or Playstation, there really is no reason to buy this at the moment.
OnLive is set to launch in a couple months on June 17, 2010, so we will see then if it works in a wide scale environment and if it will actually get the support base.
My New Website
Hey everyone! I just created this new website so I could jot down stuff I want to talk about. I'm not done customizing it yet. But anyways, welcome and I hope you enjoy!