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Jersey City Heights Riverview Jazz Festival, Year One

It was over 90 degrees in the shade yesterday, but that didn’t stop Janna and me from walking up to Riverview Park in Jersey City to spend a day listening to some great live music during the very first Jersey City Heights Jazz Festival.

The show started off a bit slow with a confused, and noisy, performance that had big problems with the microphones and speakers — everything was painfully distorted and muddled and just plain too loud — and so we decided to take a little walk around the neighborhood and try again in an hour.

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My Obsessive Verizon LTE iPad Testing Continues

I confess I am obsessed with trying to figure out why Verizon LTE is so sucky on our two brand-new iPads.  Yesterday, we were at the dentist’s office in Jersey City and I asked Janna to pull out her iPad to see what kind of service levels we were getting.  Our dentist is one block away from our home where I was getting two Verizon LTE bars and 1.7Mbps down and 1.47Mpbs up.  At the dentist’s office, the iPad was screaming at 25.94Mbps down and 10.35Mbps up with four bars of Verizon LTE active!  Amazing!  An outrage!

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Lessons Viewed from Afar: Yoga at Bryant Park

One of the greatest things about living and working in New York City is seeing real life happenings that look like staged events.  Janna and I are currently teaching together in Manhattan, and all Summer we have had the pleasure to watch — from our classroom perch on West 40th Street — weekly group Yoga sessions in Bryant Park.  Last night after the final class, I flung open the window and took this image.  You can see the Bryant Park carousel in the foreground and at least 300 yoga students congregating and sprawling on yoga mats on the green.  The students change poses in unison.  It’s like watching a beautiful, magical, dance from afar between the trees.

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Central Park Saffron Gates

The unveiling of the ugly “draperies gates” in New York City’s Central Park was the epitome of what I call “Pretentious City Pretend Art.”

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