Tag: nyc

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Recommended Reflected

In Praise Of Adam Kuban

Truffle Pile-On

I have met many of my best friends over pizza.

In 2004 and 2005, I found myself attending a couple of “Slice Club” meetups, a gathering for people (who like pizza) to meet other people (who also like pizza). While at the time I wouldn’t have considered myself a “foodie” – nor much of a “blogger” – these events introduced me to some really fantastic people, which began so many of my friendships (both directly and indirectly), spawned adventures in NYC and beyond, and triggered more parties than I can remember.

To that end, I owe a gigantic amount of love and respect to Adam Kuban, the founder of Slice NY, creator of Slice Club, and all around awesome guy. Ironically, I did not meet Adam through Slice Club – but his friendliness and efforts to get people together over a love of pizza (and burgers!) has perhaps impacted the last five years of my life more than I realized. (As was clearly evidenced by the outpouring of connection tracing on Twitter with so many friends this evening, I am not alone in this respect.)

Why mention this today? Adam has informed the world that he is leaving Serious Eats after four and a half years there. He has done a tremendous job as a part of Ed Levine’s team, and I’m sure his future exploits will be similarly amazing.

Adam Kuban

So, many thanks, Adam. I bet you didn’t think you’d change lives with a pizza blog, did you?

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Debated

Four Years Later, Still The Same Answer

I’ve been scrubbing through my blog archives since my WordPress migration to clean up categorization, tagging, formatting, and a bug caused by my blogging style that left some posts half-imported.

This morning, I went back over this post from February of 2007, regarding Sen. Carl Kruger’s proposed law to ban cellphones and music devices while walking.

“While people are tuning into their iPods and cell phones, they’re tuning out the world around them… If you want to listen to your iPod, sit down and listen to it. You want to walk in the park, enjoy it. You want to jog around a jogging path, all the more power to you, but you should not be crossing streets and endangering yourself and the lives of others.”

The crux of my argument in 2007 was “we already have laws against jaywalking, why do we need this?”

Not ten minutes after cleaning the post, I saw that Colleen Taylor had shared a NY Times article from this week on Google Reader: States’ Lawmakers Turn Attention to the Dangers of Distracted Pedestrians.

The New York bill was proposed by State Senator Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who has grown alarmed by the amount of distraction he sees on the streets in his neighborhood and across New York City. Since September, Mr. Kruger wrote in the bill, three pedestrians have been killed and one was critically injured while crossing streets and listening to music through headphones.

My argument in 2011 is the same as my argument in 2007.

I look forward to revisiting this proposed law again in 2015.

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Happened Narrated

A Love Letter To Freeverse

Touch Arcade and Techcrunch have details on ngmoco:)‘s acquisition of Freeverse Software. This has a lot of implications for the iPhone software market, but I’ll let the business wonks talk about that.

Freeverse is entwined in the last 15 years of my life in ways that few things can compare. Their games and software toys helped keep me sane during high school. When my life went into a slight free-fall during college, I became anchored with an internship with them.

Continue reading “A Love Letter To Freeverse”