Recently, on reddit, someone linked to a map of the US interstate system laid out “subway style.” Rather than including all the geographical features of the United States, the artist opted to realign everything on a relatively simple aligned grid, emphasizing the purpose of the system (“get me from here to there”) rather than the implementation (“via this bridge over this river, using this exit by this town”). The artist himself complains tongue-in-cheek about the complexity of the existing…

I hadn’t even heard of Rob Paravonian until over the weekend, when I went with a friend of mine to wander around Duke, but I’ve become an immediate fan. Anyone who’s ever played classical music has developed an intense loathing for Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The song is highly repetitive, playing the same melody over and over, in a giant, musical circle of pain, with only the most miniscule changes over its multitudinous repetitions. It’s like a three-year-old’s take on Bolero. Combine that with…

I have discovered a new, guaranteed way to lose weight fast: lose your unlimited MetroCard. Last week, on my way home, I accidentally dropped mine at some point, likely because my ski jacket has a hole in the left-hand pocket (which unfortunately I didn’t know at the time). As a result, I’ve been walking to work every day—a trek that comes in at an even six miles a day round-trip. The downside is that I have to get up considerably earlier—my commute suddenly takes 50 minutes instead of 15—but…

Amazingly, the woman at registration was right. I fell onto the floor got up at 5:30 AM, groggily showered, grabbed a bagel and some OJ at a patisserie that was apparently run by the bitter sister of Soup Nazi, was politely asked for “loose” change about forty-two times by people who admittedly looked like they probably needed it, and then went to Moscone to find a line that already arced its way around the convention center. Apple let us approach the Presidio in steps. First, at seven, they…

Today was…long. The fun started when I got a call at 7:20 AM reminding me that my car was coming at 8. For some reason, I’d had in my head it was coming at nine, and so decided that I’d wake up at about 7:30, spend 45 minutes packing, take a quick shower, and be ready to go. Instead, I pretty much literally just dumped a wad of clothes into a suitcase, jumped into the shower, and proved that you can easily run with a 35-pound suitcase if you have enough adrenaline and don’t really care about…

Good news: Benjamin Pollack is now listed as starring in Aardvark’d. Bad news: Banjamin Pollack is still listed, too. Great News: I apparently have been a writer, producer, and editor.

I have always had a hate-hate love-hate relationship with the media, particularly when I’m in them. On the one hand, it’s cool being in front of that many people, but on the other hand, the media’s success in actually quoting what I say and getting my name right has been fairly abysmal. One of my first TV appearances, for example, was made when WISH-TV, a local CBS affiliate, showed up at school one day and wanted to interview me and two classmates for our work on the Legacy Initiative, a…

There are lots of things to love about New York, but I’d like to think that even the most diehard New Yorker would admit that the housing situation is as easy to decipher as a message sent by an Enigma machine in Sanskrit, and about as pleasant to deal with a hungry Reaver. In recent days, I’ve been in a fight with various New York agencies as I try desperately to get permission to give them a ton of money. You see, I’m trying to rent an apartment on the Upper West Side directly adjacent to…

After a semester of virtually no coding, I’m preparing to return to New York to do more work for Fog Creek on Fog Creek Copilot. This will be the first time in my career that I’m returning to a code base that I haven’t seen in a bit over a year. In some ways, this is very exciting. Knowing that something I put so much time and effort into has proven to be truly useful to a large number of people is extraordinarily gratifying, and getting a fresh chance to fix all the little things that I ran…

I love New York City. Sure, it has its flaws: the air reeks in summer, people are surprisingly rude and insensitive (and desensitized to people acting that way), the city whines, groans, and clanks at a painful volume, and the crowds move with all the speed and grace of a human mudslide. Despite that, I love it for all the things that it gets right: the superb mass transit, the unsurpassed arts, and the melting pot of worldwide culture that lets you wander in and out of America while staying…