A Visit to The Big Apple (Weeknotes

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These are the highlights from the week of Dec 11–17, 2023.

Weblog Changes

I’ve made significant changes to my site’s navigation in an attempt to integrate my micro.blog presence with my weblog while providing an intuitive navigation experience. The drop-down menus are gone, and I’ve refactored the footer links too. Trying to put links in one place or the other but not both. Also found that I had too many “My” Such-and-such pages” to list them all in the nav so they've been relegated to a single link in the top nav. I’m not sure I’ve got this whole navigation thing completely solved yet, but I think it’s better. Update: I’ve since closed my micro.blog account.
I went back to using the omg.lol profile page as a separate “thing.” Now, the weblog’s home page is just the most recent post. (Can you tell that I’m trying to simplify?)
I stopped mirroring my Mastodon feed to my weblog. It was pretty obnoxious and now that I’m on micro.blog, completely unnecessary. Seems cleaner.
Also stopped showing Mastodon comments on my weblog pages. Folks can comment on my Mastodon and micro.blog posts, and that ought to be good enough.

Stayed up til past midnight Monday night finishing up an orientation course for my latest new side gig. Starting after the first of the year, I’ll be joining the faculty of University of Maryland Global Campus as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Data Analytics.
Needless to say, the 5:00 AM alarm on Tuesday morning came WAY too early.
Learned about IndieBlog this week, which lists independent personal blogs. You can click the die and visit a random blog post. Pretty cool!
Visited the dentist for routine maintenance this week. I really hate going because they nag me about flossing and make my mouth hurt. And then they nag me some more because I don’t visit them often enough. Believe me, twice a year is quite enough!
This blog post spoke to my soul.

We spent the weekend in New York City. We’d never visited during the Christmas holiday season before, and I’m not sure we would again. The place is just crawling with touristos (like us).
Despite the crowds, we managed to have a wonderful time together, including some interesting culinary experiences: extraordinarily good cinnamon donuts at the Bryant Park Winter Village, mochi donuts (weird by not bad) and decent ramen in Chinatown, surprisingly good German fare in midtown, and an Italian feast for the senses in the Flatiron. (I have a new favorite thing.)
We also shopped. A lot. Our haul included new new shoes, shirts, sweaters, gloves, books, chocolate, and souvenirs.
We ended our stay with a visit to Radio City Music Hall to see some dancing people.
Oh, and did you know that LaGuardia is actually really nice now?
For the three full days we were there, my Apple Watch recorded 54,274 steps. Not bad.
Upon returning home, I logged my 24th and last flight of the year in Flighty, for a total of over 16,000 miles traveled.

The flights between Columbus and New York gave me time to finish reading The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski. I enjoyed this book a lot. The author showed how things are connected in ways I never imagined. Reading it reminded me of the passion of Carl Sagan.
Didn’t watch a lot of television or movies this week, but we did sort of half watch The Wizard of Oz in our hotel room at the end of one of our busy days walking around the city.