New York, New York! I’m in New York. For the first time since January. And gosh, I like that city. I had a really, really good time since I arrived in this city this morning.
But before arriving in the city, I took the train. And waah. These trains don’t joke around. You know these sleek white trains in Japan or in Germany, which smooth themselves through the landscape? Yeah, the trains in the US are not like that. The train between DC and New York was a MACHINE. It was made of steel and pipes and rust and it didn’t hide anything of it. It felt like an adventure to board it; I was wildly excited. But all that industrial charm was only from the outside. From the inside, it was surprisingly comfortable. Really big seats. Even plug-ins. Small windows, but still, I enjoyed my window seat and can recommend taking the train.
From the Penn Station in New York - where I arrived three hours after boarding the train in DC - it was only a short walk to the holy doors of the New York Times. I spent the day there to visit my fellow fellows Dan and Martin in their professional habitat, to learn from the amazing Gregor Aisch and to get to know lots of great, great NYT Graphics people. I learned so, so much in one day – I’m very happy and grateful that I had this experience.
And from the NYT it was only a short walk to the GeoNYC meetup at the Mapzen headquarters, where I listened to 2 good talks. To then finally find my way to the personal habitat from my fellow fellows Martin, Dan and Pietro, where I’m staying for the next two nights.
New York is great. I’m a little bit jealous that I’m not living here. I look around and see wonderful diverse people in the subway; I see artists and hipsters and day dreamers and tourists. In DC, everybody is in a suit. Nobody plays music in subway stations. My complain is not about culture – DC has great museums. What I miss is spontaneous creativity. Expressing of personality. I feel like more people in DC adapt to the socially excepted career behavior. It’s more ok to be different in New York than it is in DC.
Input? 9
Output? 4
Learnings?
Mapshaper! Guys, do you know Mapshaper? Mapshaper is amazing. Mapshaper is a better and smaller qGis online, and it’s wonderful, eg to simplify Shapefiles and to export them as SVGs.
ggVis! Guys, do you know ggVis? ggVis is amazing. It’s a R library like ggplot, but the charts can be interactive and it produces HTML code built on Vega.
needs! Guys, do you kn….ok I stop. “needs” is another R library, one that makes installing and calling R libraries so much easier.
Also, R markdown! I saw it in action today, for the first time, when Adam was showing me how it works. It totally convinced me. I should definitely use it.
Questions?
What will happen tomorrow? I’m visiting my first unconference (about data journalism), and I’m skeptic, excited and nervous at the same time.
Every city has everything, just in different doses. Where do I find the “spontaneous creativity” scene and places in DC?