MIC...KEY something something MOUSE

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Orlando, Florida for a work conference. It was absolutely incredible. They flew about 3,000 Partners, Directors and Managers from all over the US (and a number of other countries) to Orlando for three days of intensive training. It was very well delivered, and we learnt a lot from it. The venue was incredible. We took over two hotels, which looked as though we actually owned them. There were big banners out the front, the lobbies were in stunning corporate theme, even down to the room keys which were presented in a holder that was specially themed and printed for the conference.

The conference venue was incredible. It was like a normal office. Obviously with so many senior staff there, the conference wasn't going to stop work for a week, so they provided complete work facilities, including LAN broadband connections, printers, on-site support for technology, office supplies and everything. It was so amazingly well done that you couldn't help feeling incredibly proud to be part of the event and the firm.


For dinner on the Wednesday night, we had an off-site function, so we went to Universal Studios. It was oppressively hot, so having more than one or two beers was not going to happen, and the hot food didn't go down too well either. Fortunately, work paid for our admission into the park, so we went through searching for all of the water rides. Luckily, there were no queues so we cycled through the rides and managed to get completed soaked every time. It was nice and refreshing.


What I found most amazing was the number of people that I knew from other offices. I've only been here 10 months, but already I know an amazing number of people from the different jobs I've been working on. Particularly seeing them in the one place at the one time made it clear that I've certainly established some good networks and friends throughout the US in the time we've been here.

Once that was over, Alicia and Kyan flew down for a few days. There was only one reason they came down, and that was to see Walt Disney World. Over the three days we were there, we went to Magic Kingdom, Disney MGM Studios and Animal Kingdom.

Magic Kingdom was very much like Disneyland in Hong Kong, and similar to the one in Paris. It was a lot of fun, but we felt like we'd already been there before. On
the Saturday, we went to Disney MGM Studios, which was great. It had a lot of the things that Kyan liked, including Little Einsteins, Jo Jo and some of the other characters from Playhouse Disney. At all of the parks, Kyan loved seeing the characters, almost as much as Alicia did.

It was certainly the best day of the three, although the heat and humidity were killers. Orlando's the same distance from the equator as Brisbane, so it certainly felt like being back home for summer. It made us remember part of the reason why we left in the first place! Every afternoon at 3 o'clock on the dot, we received a thunderstorm for about 30 minutes, then it went away. It was very much like the
storms we used to get in Brisbane, and made the afternoon cooler, if not a little muggier.

On the Sunday, we went to Disney's Animal Kingdom. It was very different to the other Disney parks we've been to, having an animal theme (believe it or not). I don't know the history of the place, but it seemed a lot newer and was certainly better laid out than the other parks. The weather was just as hot as on the other days, but there was a lot more shade and water sprays around which kept us going.

That night, we have flights back to New York. Unfortunately, these were on different airlines, and Alicia and Kyan had a connection in DC. There were a
million reasons why that wouldn't have worked, but we actually landed at La Guardia airport about 4 minutes apart. It couldn't have worked out better. We got home very late and very tired, but it was a great weekend, and certainly worthwhile; even if the weather was so hot. We've done Disneyland in Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo, and Disney Sea in Tokyo, each time without children. We could certainly get more done and have more fun for ourselves. A word of advice - Disneyland is not for kids. Leave them at home!

The funniest thing about the whole weekend is that I keep having to leave Kyan at home to fly off to work somewhere. This time was the same, except Alicia and Kyan came to meet me. Kyan probably thinks I work with Mickey Mouse now that he's seen me at 'work'. Some days, I think the same too!

Rove in New York City

I headed into Times Square last night to watch Rove Live being taped. His guests were Adam Sandler, Kevin James and Ben Lee (and a few others). It was a fantastic show, and Rove was in totally top form. Unfortunately, Dave Hughes was still in Melbourne, but Pete Hellier came over and was great.

Unfortunately for Alicia, she was in Chicago for the weekend, so I gave my spare ticket to Sarah, a girl I know through work from the Melbourne office. We all had a fantastic time. It was amazing to actually get tickets. Only 49 people were allowed into the audience. Thanks heaps to Shaun and Lesleigh for the heads-up to get tickets.

What was unusual though, was the realisation that I'm slowly (or quickly) becoming American. A number of jokes they did were obviously based on current events in Australia; not so much the events themselves but the commentary and public perception around them. When they did those jokes, I didn't quite get it, and neither did most of the audience, who were comprised of Aussie expats. I guess that when you lose the perspective of current events, the jokes about them become less funny. What was the most interesting about that was that before the show, they obviously anticipated that so in the warm-up, they said "if you don't get the joke and it sounds like it's probably funny, laugh anyway." Interesting words of advice which I can take into my life beyond TV celebrity.

Daddy Day - Summer edition

Alicia's out of town doing a scrapbooking thing again, so it's Daddy Day version 2. This time, it's the summer edition. Last time Kyan and I went to a very frozen Central Park (-10C in the park wasn't much fun). This time, the weather was superb, so we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Central Park Zoo and the 4th Avenue Pub (his idea, not mine).

It was a lot of fun, and Kyan loved the zoo. We're members of the zoo, so we've been there a few times now.
He didn't go much on the Museum, but 4000 year old Egyptian treasures are entirely over-rated apparently. Luckily, thanks to work being a corporate member, we could get in for free, so no big loss there. Certainly something to go back to.

Tonight, I'm off to see Rove being taped in New York. I haven't seen it in a while, so it will be good to watch again. Just so long as Hughesy's there, it will all be good. Anyway, the show's on 9pm tomorrow (Sunday) night, so WATCH IT!!!! It was on Channel 10 last week (courtesy of the web), so I assume that's where you'll find it. With any luck, you'll find me in the audience!!!!

NYC gets a little steamy

Some amazing news this evening. At 5:56pm, there was a huge steam explosion in Midtown Manhattan. For those of you who've come to visit, you'll know that I happen to work in Midtown on 42nd Street. In fact, it was about two blocks from the office. Thankfully, I was working in New Jersey today, so missed the drama. I've since spoken to people from the office who have incredible accounts of the amount of steam, rubble, noise and commotion in the area. It took Con Ed (the power company) about two hours to shut off the steam.


There was a massive plume of steam shooting into the sky. Apparently, people over 20 floors up had rubble hitting their windows. Public transport was completely thrown into chaos and traffic came to a virtual standstill.

So why steam? Apparently, there are a number of steam generation plants in Manhattan (and the outer Boroughs) which are used by businesses for heating, air conditioning (?) and cleaning. It is piped through the city under extremely high pressure. The pipe that burst was built in the 1920s. In a city as old as New York, things are bound to fail. Even the subway is over 100 years old. This place was bigger a century ago than Brisbane will be 100 years from now. Unfortunately, one person died and that number may increase through the night.

A very unusual day, and thankfully we've not been involved. Also, it looks as though commuting to Midtown tomorrow will be chaos. Luckily, I'm in New Jersey again tomorrow, so won't have to deal with it. The second photo is immediately out the front of our office.

New York is certainly a place with a lot going on. Since we moved here, we've had a plane crash into a building on the Upper East Side, the steam explosion today and the (very embryonic) plot to blow up the fuel store at JFK and its supply pipeline. Life here moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you miss it.

(Thanks to the New York Times for the photos I ripped off)

Update (also courtesy of NYT): The pipe that burst is part of an underground network that Consolidated Edison acquired in the mid-1950s, when it absorbed the old New York Steam Corporation, which started selling steam to Manhattan buildings in 1882. The steam company’s huge generating plants once powered elevators. But as electricity became more widely available the demand for steam power leveled off.

Now the steam is used to spin turbines that make electricity in Con Edison plants. After that, it is piped to about 1,800 customers in Manhattan, mainly large buildings. In most cases, the steam provides heating and, with the help of compressors, air-conditioning.

Excitement plus

This morning, I signed the lease on a new apartment, which we'll be moving into in mid-September. This is very exciting for us, becuase it means we're out of the noisy, dirty part of town that we're in now and into the proper leafy, trendy part of Park Slope. It's all confirmed, the money's paid, and we're going to be official residents of a whole new (and far nicer) zip code, 11215.

We also spent the weekend in Florida going to Walt Disney World. There's a separate post coming on that one.

I've been travelling a bit since I got to the US, so I thought I'd put together a map of where I've been and what I've been doing. It should cover everything I've done to date, so I can hopefully keep it up to date. Anyway, here's the link

Enjoy.

Is this where I get a script for beer filled?

This city just keeps on getting better.

Poor Kyan caught a cold so he's feeling a bit miserable at the moment. Being the great father that I am, I stopped by the pharmacy on the way home to get something that might make him feel a bit happier.

Then I made the discovery that has changed my life: you can buy beer at the pharmacy! The pharmacies over here are not so much a place where you get a script filled as a place where you can just about buy anything. The whole medicine thing is just a side business they're in to keep the customers coming through the front door. The one I went to tonight had two levels - the main floor where all the general merchandise is sold, and then you go down to the basement level to buy the medicines. Very much an afterthought.

I guess the best way to describe it is as a mini-Target store. By the way, even Targets have a chemist in them, so the distinction's not as clear as you'd think.

Unfortunately, in the ultimate twist of irony, they also sell cigarettes. Are these people trying to help the community or kill it? Maybe this is the definition of supply-induced demand.

At the end of the day, I didn't actually buy any beer. Just seeing a sign advertising that they sold beer was enough to keep me excited for today. Maybe I'll go in another time and actually buy some.

And yes, even with all that excitement, I still remembered to get something for Kyan's cold...

A word with two apostrophes?

Back in the motherland, I used to know my grammar quite well. Having moved to the US, I have very quickly found myself unable to spell basic words, and quite often being completely misunderstood. Brace yourself, but you're in for an English lesson today.

The worst violation of English is the inexplicable and constant overuse of the letter Z. For starters, they call it 'zee' which is entirely unhelpful due mainly to the fact it's pronounced the same as C. When somebody spells something here with a C in it, sometimes if you substitute a Z, you'll probably find what you're actually looking for. Also, any words with the -ise suffix become -ize. I don't get it. But then there are words like compose, which are pronounced the same, but spelt with an S. I find myself constantly asking how to spell basic words. I probably look like a complete goose when I have to ask a Director how to spell a word like compose, but that comes with the territory. What's even worse is when your work comes back reviewed with basic spelling 'errors' that need fixing. Apparently there's something called US English. It's supposed to be a language, but it sounds like a cop-out to me.

There's worse to come. Americans, particularly in the south, abbreviate "you all" to y'all. It's roughly equivalent to the Australian "youse". The problem gets more complicated though. On a number of occasions, I've had the word y'all used when I'm the only one there. What do they mean by you all? There's only one of me, so who else are they talking about?

It gets even worse - brace yourself. The possessive form of y'all gets ugly. In the same way that you becomes your, y'all becomes y'all's. How on earth does a word actually come to have two apostrophes in it? One's a contraction, and the other's a possessive. Any 'language' that has a polyapostrophic word in it just doesn't qualify as a language as far as I'm concerned. The sooner they realise that, the sooner we can get rid of the letter Zee.

Two Words: In. Sane.

I've started a new job for a client in Kenilworth, New Jersey, and work has given me a car to get there and back each day (how very nice of them). I've travelled there and back for two days now, and I've discovered that New York traffic is absolutely insane.

Driving back this afternoon, I came via the Holland Tunnel. The run through New Jersey was fantastic, but as soon as I hit Chinatown, all bets were off. There were cars driving in whatever lane they felt like; pedestrians walking across the flow of traffic; cars deciding that they were about to miss their street so blocking four lanes of traffic so they could turn across; three UPS vans double-parked and blocking a lane; the list goes on.

I've got a hire car at the moment, and now I know why any cars that live in the NY City area have all got dints on them. With traffic like this, it's inevitable.

I saw a pretty decent accident yesterday. A woman decided that she wasn't going to wait for the traffic to ease up for her to come out of a side street. So she just pulled out anyway. Because she squeezed through a gap in the cars coming in the other direction, she had absolutely no idea where the cars were. Sure enough, she cleaned up the front of her car, made a nice dint in the poor car that had right of way and decided that when she was done, she'd stop where the accident occurred and blocked off the road that she wasn't even supposed to be on.

The traffic in this town is insane. Good thing we don't have a car. I don't think we'll be getting one in a hurry.

Lots of visitors (must be summer)

What a busy month it's been. Not only has work kept me busy, but the warmer weather has brought a train of people from out of the woodwork (aka Australia) to visit the Big Apple (aka New York).

Since the past blog, we had Shaun and Lesleigh grace us with their presence as part of their epic world tour. We did a few of the standard New York things (Statue of Liberty, Times Square), but also a couple of the more local things to show them how us locals do things here. Best of all, we did a Broadway show, and that show was Xanadu. Without a doubt, the best show I've ever been to. The music was fantastic, the venue was nice and intimate, and the show itself was an absolute blast. Alicia and I are dying to get back and see it. Another one to look out for is Young Frankenstein, the new Mel Brooks musical which opens in a couple of months. Xanadu totally deserves its own blog post, but there's been so much going on that I'll just have to mention it and move on. Best. Show. Ever.

After Shaun and Lesleigh, Lachlan from the Brisbane office came over for a couple of weeks. It was good to be able to show him around some of the sights of New York, and take him on a tour of the office. It was bizarre talking to Lachlan in the office; it was just like being back in Brisbane like last year, but this time, we were on the other side of the world. It sounds like Lachlan had a great time, but travelling with a couple of girls seemed to get on his nerves a little - he doesn't strike me as the shopping type.

When Lachlan headed off, Marcel and Belinda came up to visit from DC. As predicted, it was a fantastic weekend. We went to Jones Beach on Saturday. The sun we beautiful, the water was freezing (but great once you're in), and the sand was very prone to having a hole dug out of it. We went to a pub/restaurant on 5th Avenue for dinner, and then settled into the 4th Avenue Pub for a couple of nightcaps. On Sunday, we went to Governor's Island, which is in New York Harbor. It's a National Park, and a very historical part of New York. Everything was free, and there were hardly any people there, so it was a great day out.

In the middle of all our visitors, we've been doing other bits and pieces around town. Of particular interest was the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Bisexual Pride
Parade in Manhattan. It was very interesting to see, very noisy, extremely colourful and had thousands of people in it. Kyan loved all the colours, and it was good to see so many people having a good time. The parade itself went from 53rd Street down to Greenwich Village. I'm not exactly sure how long that is, but it's a good number of kilometres.

All our visitors got back home in one piece, so that's always good news. The weather's now fantastic. Every day is lovely, although the humidity in Manhattan seems oppressive on some days, especially since the buildings block any breeze that comes through. The beach was great; the parks are great. It's a good time to come to New York.

So don't be a stranger. Be our next visitors to New York!

We're looking at moving late-September, early-October into a nicer part of Park Slope, so if you're a previous visitor, don't be afraid to come back!