2006-05-04 14:35 UTC Late Spring 2006 Travelog: Part 5 (Big Apples)
I'm at Google's New York office for a couple of days. On my way to the hotel yesterday I accidentally barteredhaggled my taxi fare (after he told me how much he thought it would be, I responded, quite sincerely, with "Oh, well, if it's that much then I'll walk", to which he suggested a lower price). The hotel I'm staying at is the only one I've ever been to which provides condoms and lubricating jelly along with the minibar snacks and drinks.
I've been to this city before, but this time the subway really reminded me of post-apocalyptic representations as seen in, e.g., Half-Life 2: the dirty, dirty stations that look like they've been abandoned for fifty years which you see in such games turn out to actually be correct representations of the stations as they stand today. Even the repetitive and annoying incomprehensible messages repeated by speakers next to the escalators are faithfully reproduced in the real thing.
The WebAPI meeting Monday and Tuesday was interesting; it's funny (and gratifying) seeing the W3C working on specs I've been pushing for the last few years, after the huge push-back that we initially got.