Monthly Archives: July 2014

First bookstores, now restaurants being driven out of Manhattan

Posted on July 31, 2014 | Comments Off on First bookstores, now restaurants being driven out of Manhattan

This Village Voice article has a run down of a number of great restaurants being forced to close due to the price of rent in Manhattan. Restaurants are following bookstores,  which are also suffering from the cost of doing business in this part of NYC.

I suspect low margin businesses like this will move to the other parts of NYC and away from the big rent/big money sections. It will be interesting to see the migration both of the businesses and the people. Compared to the way Manhattan used to be in the later part of the 20th century, this is a better problem for them to have.

For more on the bookstores closing, see this piece in the New York Times.

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Posted in food, nytimes.com

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Bon Appetit teams up with IBM’s Watson for some great summer recipes, like these ribs

Posted on July 30, 2014 | Comments Off on Bon Appetit teams up with IBM’s Watson for some great summer recipes, like these ribs



The story of IBM and Bon Appetit is really interesting to me, since I love food and I am proud of the work IBM is doing with Watson. Anyone interested in the topic of innovation in IT or food should find it worth a read.

For people who aren’t interested in the high tech aspect of it, check out the recipes. In particular, these ribs with a range of flavours from bourbon to oyster sauce look fantastic.

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Posted in new!

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On the shocking decline in the income of writers

Posted on July 9, 2014 | Comments Off on On the shocking decline in the income of writers

The writing business is getting more and more difficult as this Guardian article illustrates and with woeful stories of the income (or lack of it) that well known authors make. The decline is shocking.

Anyone considering writing for a living should read this.

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Posted in new!

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The Day One app is free right now and it’s great. Here’s nine reasons why I really like it

Posted on July 7, 2014 | Comments Off on The Day One app is free right now and it’s great. Here’s nine reasons why I really like it

  1. Reason #1: it’s free. I always like free apps. But there are lots of free apps out there, so….
  2. Reason #2: it’s a great journalling tool. If you are like me, you spend more time capturing things digitally and less putting things on paper. And yet you don’t want to put everything out there for the entire world to see. Day One gives you that. It makes it easy to capture words and images and save them. For people like me who have good intentions of keeping a journal but never do because it is never handy, Day One is perfect. Let’s face it: your phone or tablet is always handy.
  3. It works on alot of different devices. Right now I have it on my iPad and iPhone. It also works on the Mac, too. Regardless of what device you have, you can update your Day One journal and it syncs up with the other devices.
  4. How does it sync up? Via the cloud, of course. Even better, it will also back things up to cloud storage, like Dropbox. I particularly like the Dropbox integration. All the photos you capture in Day One are there, as well as the text. And the nice thing for geeks like me is that the text is in XML format, so there are opportunities to hack around with that. You don’t have to touch it at all if you want, but that is a nice option. Even if you aren’t a geek, here are more reasons to get it…
  5. You can go back to previous days via a Calendar and update them. That way if you get busy but want to keep a comprehensive journal, you can. Or if you want to find out what you entered for a certain day, you can.
  6. You can use tags to get more out of your journal. For example, if you wanted to keep a fitness journal and a cooking journal, tag some of your entries fitness and others cooking and then you can access just those entries by the tag
  7. You can add your location and the current temperature to a post, too. Perfect if you were using Day One as a travel journal.
  8. It has password protection as well: so if you are sharing your device with your kids or others, you can prevent them from looking at your journal.
  9. Did I mention it is free? Yep, it is at the time I am posting it. But if you ever buy just one paper journal for travelling, work, or fitness…if you replace it with Day One, it will more than pay for the app.

Day One is free for a limited time right now. You can click here to see it in the App Store.

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Posted in apps, IT

Want to know what your IP address is? Try this

Posted on July 7, 2014 | Comments Off on Want to know what your IP address is? Try this

Depending where you are, you may have any number of IP addresses: one for your home network, one for your work network, and even one from the coffee shop providing free WiFi. Since it is not uncommon to have sites block you based on your IP address, it is good to be able to determine what yours is.

The site WhatIP.com does just that. It will tell you what country, ISP, and city it thinks you are in, along with your IP address.

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Posted in advice