This is the second year I assist to the Union Square Pillow Fight. This time I went with my family and took the SLR camera. During the shoot, by mistake I pressed the button for monochrome mode and serendipity stroke my photo set.

This post is to share with you my favorite pictures. Feel free to share them, they show the spirit of many New Yorkers, and they’re quite a good idea of something to do for free with lots of strangers of your own town.

The very start, in color, for your context

Girl smiling over someone’s shoulders

V for Vendetta

Yes, it’s a Macbook

Air full of feathers

Floor covered in feathers

Now the B&W’s

The battlefield

The arm of evil

Breathing from the top of the Pole

A Beautiful face

Luchador

Probably allergic to feathers

Come and get me, I’m dressed as a chicken (most hilarious moment, they beat him to the ground)

Gas Mask

Pure Joy

Click here for all the pictures.

We went yesterday on a school field trip to the Yankee stadium for a tour. The stadium is being torn down
they will open a New One next year (right across the street).

If you’re in New York and have the time, be sure to visit the stadium before its gone, its a great piece of history of this city and of this country’s culture, it’s awesome being there, a truly magical place where unbelievable things always happen, go soon if you haven’t done it before.

Girl reading her Amazon Kindle, 86st Subway Station, New York

Originally uploaded by Gubatron.

On our way back from the museum, back in January, I had to sneak out my camera to take a picture of the first Amazon Kindle I got to put my eyes on.

She was an asian girl who probably has something to do with amazon, cause this devices were sold out the minute they came out.

The device is pretty amazing, but I’m not sure If I’d spend $400 on it.

Eventually this is what the subway will be like in the future, everybody holding digital books, to read books, blogs, news… no more deciding which book to bring with us today.

207 people did something really cool at Grand Central station in New York. I’d like to be part of it next time they do it.

It’s all organized it seems by a group called Improv Everywhere Global, they like to create scenes.

There’s been a discussion this week on the New York Tech Meetup mailing list, and this guy’s answer (Allan Benamer) has to be documented somewhere. Check this out.

“…find it difficult to understand why a Stanford can achieve such great town-and-gown synergies that brought the world Yahoo!, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Google, Silicon Graphics, etc., and a Columbia or a Rutgers or a Cornell or a SUNY cannot.”

I’m from the West Coast and got to see the dotcom boom up close. I think it’s not just Stanford but my alma mater, Berkeley, and a host of other great schools on the West Coast like UCLA and Cal-Tech that are also helping out. The truth of the matter is that much of NY Metro’s inherent “nerd power” is sucked up by financial services firms. An engineer being paid upwards of $100k a year to do crappy Oracle SQL calls for some financial services Intranet app is pretty much the average around here. There’s no incentive to innovate as a result. Plus, there’s a cultural problem. If you go on BART, you’ll see people reading programming books all the time. Here, it’s just multiple copies of Kite Runner on the subway, (not that there’s anything wrong with that, that’s why I moved out here.)

The nerd infrastructure is just not supported well either — nerds need Fry’s and great tech book stores like they do in the Bay Area. Here, all we’ve got is J&R, a host of cheesy grey market electronics retailers and Barnes and Noble. It’s hard out here for a nerd. ;)

That said, I would more than welcome whatever energies are poured into a Silicon Alley. I just hope that the infrastructure gets better as a result.

Plaza Venezuela Subway Station, Caracas, Venezuela – Any weekday starting at 6:30am

And I don’t think its due to bad subway planning (of course it could be better), but Caracas subway is way more frequent than NY subway, wait times are really short specially at rush hour.

No subway station in New York is that full at 6-7am, at least I haven’t seen one. It seems New Yorkers sleep a little more late, try to get on the subway on Bedford Av towards Manhattan at 9am… is everyone late for work? does everybody start work at 9:30 or 10am? I only see the immigrants (probably illegal) going to work early in the morning here in New York.

Photo courtesy of zethanx