A Real New York Bakery

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The cakes looked so good, I had to take a photo.

A year or two ago, Mike and I went back to New York to do some visiting. While we were there, we downtown in Manhattan for a walk around SoHo.

The SoHo area of New York, as many people, know is the area SOuth of HOuston (pronounced house-tin). It started getting popular with the artsy crowd at least 20 years ago and most of the buildings and lofts have been renovated. There are lots of great shops and restaurants. There’s even an Apple Store down there.

It was a kind of crummy day weather-wise but the light drizzle didn’t bother us. People from Arizona generally like rain — because we get so little of it — and we’re no different. Mike’s cousin Rick was with us and he’s from Seattle so he’s used to rain. We walked around the relatively empty streets, past street vendors who’d given up trying to keep their wares dry and were packing up for the day.

Then we saw this bakery. I wish I could remember its name or where it was. North of Canal, I’m sure. We went in, ordered some delicious pastries and coffee, and sat down to snack out of the rain.

A Real BakeryThis case of cakes and pies and pastries called to me. In Arizona real bakeries are a rarity. Supermarkets here are big and new and almost all of them have a bakery department. Some are actually quite good. Our recently renovated Safeway here in Wickenburg has a nice display case of cakes and cookies these days. But I’ve never seen any bakery in Arizona with a display like this. And I’ve never been to a bakery in Arizona worth writing about.

That’s why I took the photo. To remind me of New York bakeries.

This coming weekend, Mike and I are going back to New York to do some visiting. We’ll only be there two days. But I’m hoping, with my fingers crossed, that we get enough time to drive into Manhattan, perhaps down to Little Italy. There are some Italian pastry shops down there that are to die for. I’d like to put together a little box of goodies to take home on the plane and, if they survive our airline-induced hunger, snack on for a few days next week.

That’s the plan, anyway.

WebCam Timelapse – July 9, 2007

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Another interesting timelapse.

What I like about this one is:

  • Nice colors at sunrise. Remember, this camera points northeast, so we don’t actually see the sun.
  • About halfway through the day, the clouds going by seem to make a right turn as they move across the sky. I think there was a wind shift up there. Interesting.

You need to click the image to download and play the file with QuickTime. I did this purposely for the folks who aren’t interested in wasting bandwidth on something as trivial as this.

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-070907.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-070907-poster.mov 160 136]

For those of you who requested a larger image, one is on the way. Yesterday’s big image was too big, so we’ll have to wait until the next interesting sky. Today’s might be a good candidate; lots of clouds. We’ll see.

And for those of you just tuning in, these images are my attempt to show how the weather changes here in Arizona during out annual monsoon season. Usually we don’t have any clouds at all, so these images really do show something special. I’m hoping that images created later in the season will include storms and, if we’re lucky, even a few lightning strikes.

Twitter Sluts

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A new term defined.

Okay, so maybe this isn’t a new term. And maybe I’m not qualified to define terms like these. But as I get an e-mail to inform me of yet another Twitter follower who has nothing in common with me, I came up with this term and felt a need to share it and its definition with the blogosphere.

A Twitter slut is a Twitter member who indiscriminately adds Twitter friends to his (or her) account. He may be doing this for one or more of the following reasons:

  • He’s believes that all of the people he adds as friends will reciprocate and add him as a friend so he has a large audience for his tweets. I discussed this phenomena in my “Twitter Spam” post.
  • He’s hoping that other people will respond directly to his tweets using the standard @membername format so other people will make him their friend.
  • He’s desperate to follow the tweets of anyone who can type intelligible comments into Twitter. That is a minority that I am apparently part of.

Twitter sluts can easily be identified by their friends to followers ratio. If that ratio exceeds 3:1 (that is, 3 friends for each 1 follower), that person is may be a Twitter slut. If the ratio is around 5:1 (5 friends for each 1 follower), that person is likely to be a Twitter slut. It the ratio is closer to (or higher than) 10:1 (10 friends for each 1 follower), that person is definitely a Twitter slut.

Twitter Ratio.jpgHere’s an example. This person has been a member of Twitter for only 9 days. Yet he’s added over 4,000 members as friends. With only 9 updates to his name, he has apparently attracted 398 suckers to reciprocate his friendship.

(Okay, okay. I’ll try to tune down the cynicism. But it’s very difficult sometimes.)

The other day, a Twitter member on the public timeline asked, “Am I the only one who gets a bunch of new friends every time I post a tweet?”

The answer: no, you’re not. Like the rest of us, you’ve just been discovered by a handful of Twitter sluts.

Found: Scanned Want Ad?

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A mysterious image file found on my computer’s hard disk.

Ever download something and forget all about it? I must have done that with the following image, which I just found on my PowerBook’s hard disk, in my “Desktop Junk” folder. (The Desktop Junk folder is where I throw all the files on my desktop when I need to make it look neat. It has a lot of files in it and I was in the process of cleaning it out when I found this.)

Lost!

I don’t remember downloading this at all. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t put on my computer by someone else, since I’m the only one who has access to this laptop.

The image file’s timestamp is December 19, 2005.

WebCam Timelapse – July 6, 2007

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The first timelapse of monsoon season.

I’ve set up my WebCam to create small timelapse movies of the scene out my window. Here’s the one from yesterday, the first day this season that clouds began to build up and come our way.

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-070607.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-070607-poster.mov 160 136]

You’ll have to click the movie frame to play it; I’ve set it up like this so the folks who don’t want the download don’t need it clogging up their bandwidth. You’ll also need QuickTime player (or a related plugin, I guess) to view it.

If you like this kind of stuff, please let me know. I might use the larger WebCam image to make a movie, but I won’t bother if no one wants to see it.

Also, I know the camera’s placement isn’t perfect. My Mexican Bird of Paradise bush has gotten quite large and is blocking the view. Unfortunately, the camera has to be within cable distance of my Mac. Again, if folks like the WebCam and the movies — and take a moment to tell me using the Comments link or form for this post — I’m far more likely to fine tune things to improve them.

January 3, 2009 Update: Since writing this, I’ve taken the Webcam offline. It really wasn’t worth keeping a computer turned on all day, every day. I may revisit this in the future, but at this point, I wouldn’t count on it.