The Daily Parker

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time:

A new site called OldNYC delivers a Street View-like view of what the city looked like in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The site includes a map of New York City and a slew of dots that can be clicked on to see different images of that particular location.

According to Business Insider, which earlier reported on the site, it was developed by Dan Vanderkam in collaboration with the New York Public Library, which has acollection of more than 80,000 photographs of New York City shot from the 1870s to the 1970s.

While OldNYC is not a Street View clone—users will not be able to "drive" their way through the streets like they would on Google's service—it's somewhat similar. Indeed, users can zoom in and out on a particular location, pick their favorite crossing, and click on the small red dot. Upon doing so, images related to that location are displayed.

I'll be playing with this for a few minutes...

The weather today is the kind that we only get about 15 or 20 days of the year in Chicago. It's 19°C and totally sunny with a light breeze from the east. And I'm actually able to take advantage of it today.

That's why Parker and I just got back from a 2½ hour, 14.5 km walk.

Yes. We walked that far. He's now out cold, and I'm having a spot of lunch. And shortly a shower.

The total damage was 14.51 km in 2:24:57 (not including two stops at Starbucks along the way), for a pace of 9' 59" per kilometer—just a shade faster than 16 minutes per mile.

My Fitbit tells me I kept my heart rate between 115 and 125 the whole way, burned 1,289 calories, and took 17,429 steps. The last two kilometers were actually faster than the first two, because Parker always needs to get things out of his system in the first few minutes of a walk, and that takes time.

I don't think I'll make him walk any farther today, except to the front lawn.

We also got our first walk on The 606, Chicago's answer to the New York Highline:

I've been out of town twice in the last 10 days. First, to New York, where I found this light at the end of a tunnel in Riverside Park:

This weekend I went to Indianapolis for a wedding, and stopped by the Indiana State Capitol:

That building is home to what may be the stupidest legislative body in the Western world. Don't even get me started.

Why posting is slow today:

Software developer Todd Schneider has analyzed 22 million CitiBikes trips (the New York equivalent of Chicago's Divvy). He's even got some cool animations:

If you stare at the animation for a bit, you start to see some trends. My personal favorite spots to watch are the bridges that connect Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. In the morning, beginning around 8 AM, you see a steady volume of bikes crossing from Brooklyn into Manhattan over the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges. In the middle of the day, the bridges are generally less busy, then starting around 5:30 PM, we see the blue dots streaming from Manhattan back into Brooklyn, as riders leave their Manhattan offices to head back to their Brooklyn homes.

Sure enough, in the mornings there are more rides from Brooklyn to Manhattan than vice versa, while in the evenings there are more people riding from Manhattan to Brooklyn. For what it’s worth, most Citi Bike trips start and end in Manhattan. The overall breakdown since the program’s expansion in August 2015:

• 88% of trips start and end in Manhattan
• 8% of trips start and end in an outer borough
• 4% of trips travel between Manhattan and an outer borough

There are other distinct commuting patterns in the animation: the stretch of 1st Avenue heading north from 59th Street has very little Citi Bike traffic in the morning, but starting around 5 PM the volume picks up as people presumably head home from their Midtown offices to the Upper East Side.

Schneider previously analyzed 1.1 billion New York taxi trips.

Almost a meter of snow fell on parts of the United States over the weekend. Even in places that get big snowfalls from time to time, the results were grim:

While New York City emerged from the season’s first blizzard with relatively little damage, the toll along the Eastern Seaboard as a whole was more sobering: 29 deaths related to the storm, thousands of homes without power and serious flooding in coastal areas.

In Baltimore, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on Sunday that she could not give a timeline for clearing the streets. In Washington, the leadership of the House of Representatives — scheduled to convene on Monday for a pro forma session — said no votes would be held this week. Federal offices will be closed on Monday, as will state offices in Maryland and Virginia.

Most of the storm’s victims died while driving on icy highways or shoveling snow. The New York Police Department went to the scene of 401 accidents and towed 367 vehicles by 4 a.m. Sunday, about four hours after the snow stopped. Three of those who died while shoveling were New Yorkers in Queens and on Staten Island, all men over 60, the authorities said. Two others were on Long Island, a 61-year-old man in West Hempstead and a 94-year-old man in Smithtown. His body was found next to a snow blower, the authorities said.

Clear skies today over the East let NASA composite this awesome photo of the snow:

Everything from New York to Richmond, Va., is shut down today as a major winter storm drops meters of snow on 50 million people:

Weather emergencies were declared in at least 10 states, including in New York and New Jersey, and the storm has disrupted travel throughout the region, with thousands of flights canceled and public transit shut down in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Jersey. In New York, bus lines were scheduled to be suspended at noon Saturday.

Forecasters were predicting 300 to 600 mm of snow to fall in the city by the time the storm ended and warned of flooding in coastal areas, especially along the Jersey Shore. On Saturday morning, water had swept onto the streets of some oceanfront towns in New Jersey, including Ocean City.

“If there was a trend overnight, it was that the heavier axis of snow has now shifted into New York City and onto Long Island,” said Patrick Burke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Around Washington, where some of the city’s police officers were issued shovels at their morning roll call, the storm had already dropped 280 to 380 mm of snow by Saturday morning. Even as the storm moved north, Mr. Burke said the Washington region should still receive lighter snowfall throughout the day, raising totals in some places to over 20 inches.

Meanwhile, in Chicago...nothing. We had a flurry, maybe two, and we're expecting above-normal temperatures—up to 9°C above normal, in fact—through the end of January. The little snow we have on the ground could be gone by tomorrow.

Cooling my heels (just what does that cliche mean, anyway?) at JFK. I miss New York. I don't want to live here again, but I do like visiting.

I mean, look:

That might look a little better if I could get Lightroom to work on my Surface Pro. Time to reinstall it, again.

Note: These "site news" historical posts come from the original data sources in the proto-blog that debuted on the Q2 website in May 1997.

Wed 3 Sept 1997 11:30 EDT

World Clock feature added to city list

The site's international city list now displays each city's current local time.

Thu 4 Sept 1997 19:00 EDT

Site Map Appears

Finally, Dave has gotten off his duff and added a map to this site. It's crude but effective.

Mon 8 Sept 1997 13:00 EDT

World weather linked dynamically

We have added dynamically-linked weather reports for cities worldwide provided by the National Weather Service.

Fri 12 Sept 1997 15:25 EDT

Featured Guest debuts on main page

As a demonstration of one method to rotate content and control the results, without using server-side add-ins, this site now shows a randomly-selected featured guest on the main page. Though the rotated content right now includes only a few personal photographs, using ADO instead of the server-side Ad Rotator component offers tremendous flexibility and power.

Tue 23 Sept 1997 16:30 EDT

Weather conditions on welcome page

The main page now displays current local conditions from the National Weather Service METAR data site.

Tue 23 Sept 1997 17:05 EDT

World weather on display

The site's international city list now displays each city's current local temperature.

Wed 24 Sept 1997 11:15 EDT

Weather histories available for 67 cities

A side effect of fetching a bunch of data from the National Weather Service METAR data site is that this site maintains a small amount of historical weather data for the cities listed. You can select a city from the list and see its past 25 hours' temperatures, dewpoints, and sky conditions.

Wed 24 Sept 1997 16:30 EDT

Site gets new logic, features

Lots of new features have appeared at this site:

• The site login logic has changed. Now, the site keeps track of your city information on the server side, instead of in cookies. Only the User ID is stored in a cookie. This will eventually allow users to log in from any web browser anywhere.
• The international city list, weather history, and greeting page now all take advantage of improved server-side weather gathering and reporting tools.
• Watch for new photographs soon.

Keep watching this site for exciting new developments.

Fri 26 Sept 1997 14:00 EDT

Important: Legal statement revised

This site's legal statement changed on 26 September 1997. We clarified our positions on copyright and privacy issues, and changed other parts to reflect the site's new architecture.

Fri 26 Sept 1997 20:00 EDT

Site Completely Overhauled

Those of you who have visited before will notice a number of huge improvements in the site's presentation:

• All of the pages have a consistent look and feel
• We have redesigned most of the pages to bring you more useful information
• The site's automatic polling of the National Weather Service METAR data site is more stable and consistent, meaning you get more complete and timely updates
• We have tested every page with Netscape Navigator 3.0 (as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02) and, despite huge temptations to continue, we have stopped bashing Netscape at every turn
• Introductory pages and others have clearer instructions and descriptions to make this site easier to use.

We hope you continue to enjoy the site. As always, we encourage you to comment via email.

Mon 29 Sept 1997 08:00 EDT

Q2 Gets T1

Q2 II, Inc., your web designer's employer and the host of this web site, just upgraded from a 56kbs analog network line to a 512kbs fractional T1 line. If you have the opportunity to view this site on a host computer with equal or better web access, you will no doubt notice the amazing speed improvement.

Tue 30 Sept 1997 17:30 EDT

Explanations appear

Since this is a demonstration site, we thought we should actually explain to visitors what we're demonstrating. Now, pages that have explanations have hyperlinks to the page on the disclaimer line.

Note: These "site news" historical posts come from the original data sources in the proto-blog that debuted on the Q2 website in May 1997.

20 July 1997

New York Choral Society gets a Tenor

Make sure you see me perform this fall with the New York Choral Society. I'll be hitting people up for subscriptions and tickets soon.

The nationally-recognized chorus has an amazing performance calendar for next year, including Mahler's Symphony #8 ("Symphony of a Thousand"), Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust, and a kickoff performance on PBS's "Live from Lincoln Center" series.