On the way up to the bell tower I was able to take some high iso shots inside the church. This one is through the organ of some of the great stained glass work.

I once again ran around to a number of events as part of Open House New York weekend.  This year most of the places that I went to had very steep narrow stair cases, including this one where we climbed up a tight brick spiral staircase to get to the tower and then an iron staircase once in the tower.  Overall had a great time but as always there are more locations that I wanted to get to then is possible!

The Coke in Sri Lanka was sugar based and tasted great. Most of the Coke and Sprite bottles in Sri Lanka are glass, and they get reused.  We would often see trucks stacked with empty bottles in crates like these.  Sri Lankans are much more willing to fully use resources. When we bought King Coconuts, from one of the many street side vendors, to drink they made sure they got the shells back.  This photo was taken in the Galle Fort which was originally built by the Portuguese in 1588

This summer I had an exilent opportunity to go to Sri Lanka and I took it.  I spent two weeks there and had a great time saw so many things, I wasn’t able to capture all of them.  This is one of the commuter trains that would rumble by the beach every few minutes.

Headed out to Nuit Blanche a festival of lights in Greenpoint Brooklyn.  It is part of an international set of events that all take place the same the same night.  It was well attended even if the closest subway took the weekend off.

Taken from the roof of the Red Hook Fairway, this was just post fireworks, but the roof wasn’t bouncing as much so this photo came out more stable than the fireworks shots.

While on the west coast last week I went to the St George Spirits for the tour and a tasting with Aman. This is their bottle of Absinthe, we sampled it neat, with ice and with ice and root beer, all were enjoyable.

When I first signed up for foursquare I didn’t know many people on it and no one in New York that had checked in.  For some reason I continued to use it,  more people got on it and for a while it was interesting to see where people were and there were times I met up with people who I otherwise would not have had I not known that they were just around the block.  But one of my favorite parts of it was the data that I was collecting about where I had been, I’m always forgetting the name of the awesome bar that I went to a few weeks ago, and to have that data available to look up is quite nice.  But there is more data in there then that.

In order to get at that data I’ve been playing with the foursquare api. The first thing I did was try to determine how many bars I’d been to in the last year, based on categories the number turned out to be much larger than I had expected.  Partly because I go to bars but also because some places that are categorized as bars are also restaurants, so I may not have had a drink there, or some of my visits I may have had brunch and other times I may have been drinking.  Either way the number was in the triple digits for the past year.

The next thing I looked at was where my checkins were, I gathered up the geo data for the places I’ve checked in and counted how many times I’ve checked into each place, all very easy through the api.  I took this data and with google maps javascript api I drew a set of circles, sized based on number of checkins.  Not surprisingly many of my checkins are clustered around my apartment and office.  What did surprise me was how many places I had only been to once, and how large the circle for my closest slice joint is.  I also spotted a few places that were miss placed, I was able to fix this by sending new locations to a friend that is a super user. The image above is my checkins in south Brooklyn.

I rode my bike up to City Island today. I had indented to go there for sometime and as part of bike month the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum was doing a garden tour ride. We got to see a couple nice gardens on City Island the first one was at a house that has been in a few movies including The Royal Tenenbaums (as their summer-house on Eagle Island) which has a great view and a of the ocean.

Spring is here – time of flowers.