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.

Last night I checked out the Red Hook Crit. Previous years the criterium had been held on the streets of Red Hook but this year it was in the ferry terminal a closed course without cobble stones.

The weather is getting warmer – tonight I found myself in soho and decided to got for a stroll through china town. Away from the hustle and bustle of the tourists and the other china town goers I found this fruit stand.

Up until last night I had never been to Katz’s Deli despite having lived close by when I first moved into the city.

I hiked out to Dunanda Falls in Yellowstone on a crisp morning. It was the first time that my beard has ever frozen. Hiking through the meadows was very pleasant but crossing a couple of the streams was challenging as I didn’t want to ford them in the freezing temperatures.