I really need to do this more, to get out and take advantage of what NYC has to offer. Once I leave this area, I don’t want to regret not having done enough of the things that people who live around NYC so often take for granted. Thankfully, the oportunity to meet up with my friend Suanne, whom I hadn’t seen since last winter in Taipei, was motivation enough to get me onto a train and into the city today.

We met up at the MOMA, this being my first visit to this museum, and meandered around a bit before heading over to the Munch exhibit. Like so many other notable artists, tragedy in Munch’s life seems to fuel most of the emotions pervading his works. Why do you suppose that is? Is it because sadness and angst beg to be voiced, demand to be heard, more so than joy and happiness? Or is it because we as spectators are overly zealous in recognizing misfortune to the extent that we revel in dejected company. Or maybe it’s simply because we acknowledge more that with which we can more easily identify. Or maybe I’m just a cynic with terrible grammar ;) Anyway, back at the MOMA I spotted a Judd sculpture I remember seeing back at the Tate Modern in London. He describes his work as “the simple expression of complex thought,” but it just looks like a bunch of colored blocks to me.

Afterwards we had dinner at Sushi Yasuda, which I highly recommend. The service is friendly, the fish is deliciously fresh, and the prices are reasonable. The traditional atmosphere of the restaurant is also a refreshing break from the hustle and bustle of the city.

After dinner we took a taxi over to the Lincoln Center to be entertained by the New York Philharmonic and pianist Gabriela Montero. The nyphil performed Schubert’s fifth symphony, Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, and Ravel’s La Valse. I’d never heard (or at least didn’t recognize) the Schubert, and I don’t really care for Schoenberg’s twelve-tone aberrations, but La Valse I’d played once before during my short stint with the Princeton University Orchestra. I like La Valse– it’s colorful, dynamic, expressive, and historically relavent, and I thoguht the nyphil did a pretty good job with it. Gabriela Montero performed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and boy was I jealous afterwards– and that’s a good thing, because it motivates me to pick up the piano again. I’ve stumbled through the 18th variation in the past, but hearing performances like this makes me want to go back and learn it properly.

I spent the past week attending two conferences in Vegas. The first was at the JW Marriott– a beautiful, relaxing and invigorating resort about 30 minutes away from the strip. A colleague from California and I spent three days socializing with business partners and mingling with potential clients. The conference had a great atmosphere, and the overall experience was very enjoyable. It was quite nice being able to work out at a world class spa, cool down with a walk outside under swaying palms with waterfall backdrops, and then relax in a jacuzzi in the hotel room.

The second conference, however, was held at the Mandalay Bay on the strip and consisted of long hours and tedious work in a hectic environment. We stayed at the Luxor, which was quite ghetto, especially after the JW Marriott. The only exciting event worth mentioning, besides a talk by John Chambers (president and CEO of Cisco), is my comeback from being down 280 USD to breaking even at a ten dollar, six deck blackjack table– not bad for my first time in a casino.

I got back around 6 AM on the redeye, on which I got maybe 1 hour of restless sleep, then went straight to work to attend a conference call with one of our guys in Belgium. With that over now, I can finally go home and get some sleep.

Here’s a really useful site for choosing color schemes for web design. I don’t often get too excited about web-based tools, but this one is awesome. Props to the creators.

Those of you who are web designers– you know that feeling you get after spending a large amount of time trying to figure out why your page works in Firefox but not Internet Explorer, and eventually discovering yet another pitfall in the way IE handles CSS? I’ve become quite familiar with that feeling, so often now that surprise and disbelief no longer accompany such scenarios, just mere disappointment and loss of faith in anything Microsoft does. (Read on …)