Archive for the 'Personal' Category

I’m published in The New York Times!

Published
by
Aaron
on December 26, 2007
in Personal
. 0 Comments

With Christmas and everything, I just never got around to posting that on Monday I was published in The New York Times. I wrote an entry for the Metropolitan Diary column, which you can see on page B2 of Monday’s paper (mine’s the fourth entry in the piece), or online. Plus, the cartoon accompanying the column is for my entry, which is great. Here’s an except, hope you enjoy:

On a late September afternoon, a neighbor of mine, Noah Ingber, came home to his Morningside Heights apartment from his teaching job in Queens, and noticed that the back wheel of his bike, locked outside his building, was gone.

I’m going to be on NPR tomorrow

Published
by
Aaron
on August 19, 2007
in Personal
. 0 Comments

logo_npr_125.gifOf my many journalistic dreams, one is dong a star segment on NPR. Well, tomorrow, I come closer to that dream. Sure, I’m not doing a star segment, heck I’m not even reporting, but I am being interviewed. Yes, tomorrow morning on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, I will be interviewed by reporter Corey Moore about the confusing world of high-definition video. Actually, the interview itself already happened on Tuesday, but it will air (with much of the original 15-minute recording cut-out) tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, I do not have an exact time of when my interview will come on, though it should be in the second half of the show. So, for those of you in my neck of the woods, you can catch the interview on WNYC 93.9 FM between 6 and 7 AM and 8 and 9 AM, or on any other NPR member station from around the country. The interview will also be posted online at npr.org sometime Monday morning, so check back here tomorrow for a link.

UPDATE: The segment aired this morning, and is also available for listening to in Real Player and Windows Media formats online. It’s about 3.5 minutes long, and I only talk for about 30-seconds of it, but it’s still pretty awesome. Also, I’d just like to say hi to all you visitors who came here via the link on NPR’s site.

UPDATE 2: Google Analytics reports that on Monday this site got 122 visits, compared to the usual 5-15. Woohoo!

My article appears in The Forward!

Published
by
Aaron
on July 26, 2007
in Personal
. 2 Comments

At long last, I’ve finally made my first big journalistic break! Yes, an article I wrote has appeared in The Forward.

The Forward, which was one of the first American-Jewish news publications, is a weekly paper covering Jewish-related topics, with a special focus on news and culture. I wrote an article for them on the Jewish fanbase surrounding The Simpsons television show (with the new Simpsons movie coming out tomorrow), with special emphasis on Jewish-Simpsons fan sites. The article is in the “Fast Forward” section, and can be found online or in the back page of the paper (which is on sale today), complete with a picture and a short description and photo on the front page. So, if at all possible, please read it online or in print, and tell me what you think!

UPDATE: My article has been reprinted in the L.A. Jewish Journal!

My iDay coverage

Published
by
Aaron
on July 1, 2007
in Apple, In the News, Internet and Personal
. 0 Comments

After a nice weekend at the beach to clear my mind of all things Mac, I’m back now and face a tsunami of iPhone news stories and blog posts — joy. But on the plus side, some of those are mine. As I posted before, I was at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York on Friday to cover the iPhone launch for The Teen Tech Buzz podcast and Macworld. While The Teen Tech Buzz coverage hasn’t been posted yet, the Macworld stuff has, in three forms. The first is a written report of coverage from around the country of the iPhone launch. I have a few paragraphs in the New York section, with a byline, of course, and a photo right next to it. That photo, plus another that I did and several from other Macworld correspondents, is posted on a gallery on Macworld’s iPhone Central blog. Finally, some of my audio coverage is on episode #87 of the Macworld Podcast.

So, while not all of my coverage is online, all of it will be soon, in the form of Flickr photos, a special part of The Teen Tech Buzz podcast, and a set of MacUser/iPhone Central posts. So, to all you security guards, line-waiters, and Apple Store employees who doubted my press credentials — look who’s laughing now.

Covering the iPhone Launch

Published
by
Aaron
on June 26, 2007
in Announcements/Updates, Apple, NYC and Personal
. 2 Comments

Fifthavenue Vert051906On Friday, June 29th (better known as “iDay”), I will be at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York (directions and map, Google Maps) covering the launch of the iPhone. I’ll be there with my friend and co-host for The Teen Tech Buzz podcast, Austen, doing interviews and stuff for the podcast, and also for Macworld. We’ll be there from about 5-6:30 PM, and I’ll be trying to manage doing work for The Teen Tech Buzz, work for Macworld, and my personal attempts to try out the iPhone, so I’ll be pretty busy. But, if you’re there, I’d be happy to interview you and even get you quoted in Macworld.

Also, I’d just like to point out that my employer, Macworld, has launched a blog devoted to, you guessed it, the iPhone, called iPhone Central. I haven’t written anything for it yet, though I may start to after launch. So, keep your eyes peeled and maybe you’ll see my byline sometime soon.

Sopranos Season Finale Countdown Widget

Published
by
Aaron
on June 9, 2007
in Apple, My Stuff, Personal, Software and Technology
. 0 Comments

SopranoscountdownI’m a big fan of The Sopranos. Now, while I only came in at the start of this season (back in March of last year), I’m already a huge fan. I’ve already planned two posts about the show’s season finale on Sunday, but until then, I decided to work on this — a Sopranos Season Finale Countdown Widget (note, you may need to right-click on the link and click “Save Link As…” or something similar to download the widget). Yes, using the countdown template in DashCode and Photoshop, I managed to pull a simple little widget together. It’s not much, and it’s coming a little late, but it’s something and is a nice compliment to your WWDC countdown widget.

Jelly

Published
by
Aaron
on June 7, 2007
in NYC and Personal
. 0 Comments

Jelly3
This afternoon, I went with Austen to a coworking session called Jelly. Jelly is basically a time, once a month, when two freelance web designer and programmer roommates open up their NYC apartment for other freelancers to come in and do work. This type of activity, called “coworking”, was written about by a disgusting, wretched excuse for a newspaper The New York Post. I found out about it from a student of my dad’s who knows Amit Gupta, one of the guys who runs it.
Jelly was pretty awesome. It takes place in an apartment right near Bryant Park, which had a living room complete with sofas, comfy chairs, a TV with a stereo, and a Wii. Most of the people there were freelance web designers and programmers, and I got to meet some. One, Luke Crawford, is an interface developer at a company called Joyent, which makes a platform for small teams of people to collaborate through documents, email, etc. (similar to Microsoft’s Office Live and Google’s Apps). Another guy, Anthony Volodkin, is the creator of a site called The Hype Machine, which aggregates information about songs and artists from music blogs around the Web, and allows users to talk about them, rate them, and listen to them online. I also met Oscar, a very nice dog who just happens to bark very loudly at Austen when he swings the Wii controller around very wildly.

Overall, I had a blast at Jelly, and hope to come back sometime next month or whenever their next session is.

Mini-Vacation in the San Francisco-Bay Area

Published
by
Aaron
on May 25, 2007
in Vacations
. 1 Comment

While I did say there would only be a 1% chance of me writing about my mini-vacation to the San Francisco-Bay Area, I did not anticipate a very boring four-hour plane ride. So, here we go (pictures are here):

Day 1:
After landing in San Francisco International Airport at about noon Pacific time, I went with my dad straight out of the airport with our rent-a-car headed for the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto. The campus is very different from that of Columbia, as it is extremely large and beautiful. It was pretty quiet, and we got there early for my dad’s interview, so we walked around a bit. It’s really quite an amazing place to see, with the missionary revival style and everyone biking.

While my dad did his interview, I waited around in the University Library playing on a Mac. Frustratingly, I tried to get on the campus WiFi with my piece-of-junk HP notebook to no avail because, as I learned later, Stanford’s WIFi requires registering your computer or wireless card’s MAC address, unlike Columbia’s open connection. Fortunately, I was able to run Firefox, Adium, and Thunderbird off of my USB key on the Mac.

After the interview, my dad and I drove into San Francisco, where we checked in at a Marriot hotel. In the room, we both crashed and I set up the in-room-high-speed-Internet with the Aiport Express I brought from home, allowing my dad and I to enjoy the connection at the same time, both from the comfort of our beds. After that, we headed out to a nice bistro across the street for dinner, went back to the hotel, and slept.
Continue reading ‘Mini-Vacation in the San Francisco-Bay Area’

Quarterly Portfolio Update

Published
by
Aaron
on April 19, 2007
in Finance, Personal and Portfolio
. 0 Comments

As a stock trader, I’ve decided to post the results of my personal portfolio every quarter. This portfolio, known as the Aaron Index (fake ticker: AFX). The portfolio currently consists of about 45% Apple (AAPL), 33% Valero (VLO), and 13% Cisco (CSCO). Apple has been held since September of 2005, and Valero and Cisco were borth purchased in the beginning of February 2007. Here are the Q1 2007 results of the Aaron Index:

My meeting with a Mac geek waiter

Published
by
Aaron
on April 14, 2007
in Apple, NYC and Personal
. 0 Comments

Apple Frittata
Today, I went out to dinner with my grandparents and step-cosuins at a nice (read: not terrific, but still pretty good) Italian restaurant in Lincoln Center. But this was no ordinary dinner. Well, actually it was, but I had a not so ordinary encounter with the third kind.
As I was eating, my mother, in her typical fashion, was yapping away to my step-cousin about my blogging on MacUser, and apparently, one of the waiters overheard. He asked me about it, and, in my typical shyness about being a total Mac geek addict worshiper, I quietly told him I wrote for a Mac blog. He then exclaimed, “I’m a big fan of Macs too!” I can’t say that some kind of magic connection occurred then, but I always feel kind of cool when a meet a random stranger who shares my affinity for all things Apple. As I lifted some of the veil concealing my geekiness, he asked when Leopard was coming out. Aha! This question told me two things: 1) he’s enough of a Mac geek to know about Leopard, and to refer to it as that, and 2) he’s not enough of a Mac geek to know that only two days ago Apple announced the delay of Leopard until October. When I broke the sad news to him, he said “Ah, that’s too bad. I want to get a MacBook Pro, but I was holding out for Leopard.” He then asked for what the blog I wrote for was, and I handed him my business card. The best part was then how he said he may have read it before, and will look at it tonight.

Throughout the meal, this waiter whose name I still don’t know referred to me as “the writer,” which gave my already too-large ego a boost. Still, I do acknowledge my place as a blogger, even a paid one, and not an actual journalist (though if The Jewish Week gets back to me on my idea for a piece, this might change). But hey, when you meet a Mac geek waiter who may have already read your blog, it kind of makes you feel just a little bit special.

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