I am on a short trip to NY with Jeremy to run some errands including Sunday and Monday. The Acela train was being repaired by Bombardier technical staff because of the millimeter wide problems with their brakes and we were afraid it might affect the service levels of the Fung Wah bus in Chinatown so we drove down in the PT Cruiser. We also had to stop in Bedford to drop Sarah at her parent's house because she was sicker than a dog. The dog, Leelin, was not sick at all. But Sarah did have a fever about 102 when she awoke.

On the drive down I argued with Jeremy about the best way to provide healthcare in the US and the challenge of how to get democratic governments to offer altruistic services. His impression is that we are way behind the rest of the world with the concept that citizens have a basic right to core healthcare. He made a very good point at one time that I can't remember and neither can he. The drive down passed quickly and I survived the dog food like Dunkin' Donuts bagel egg and steak creation. I wouldn't recommend getting any items labelled steak from Dunkin' Donuts based on this experience. Jeremy was also still talking about the SMS service in England where people are more likely to use a SMS sex chat line if they knew they were talking to a robot than if they were talking to a real person. Eliza has come a long way.

Sunday was a beautiful day and since it was among the first days with nice weather the whole city was wandering outside in their skin displaying outfits and enjoying the weather. So we walked from the Edison hotel, an art deco place in the middle of times square, down Broadway until we were at the bottom of NYU near Union Square. On the way down we passed through a street fair where I ordered the worst boba-tea I had ever had. Instead of the tapioca balls they put chopped hard jello in the bottom of some green tea that was flavored heavily with rosewater.

After we made it through the crowd at the street fair Jeremy led me into Deisel, an upscale jeans store where he had once had a girlfriend. He was unhappy that she wasn't still where she had left her. Jeremy is worried about hedging his bets with entymology girl. The deisel store was cool because they had a DJ station in the basement that looked like a real DJ was spinning in the middle of the store. I think it was an illusion though because the guy behind the DJ booth looked like a clerk and the music kept playing after he left the DJ booth.

I got tired and napped on the couches downstairs from Matt's place until about six when I met Matt and his pregnant wife Mai briefly before moving onwards to dinner with Matt, Mark, and Mark's new wife Elizabeth at Bar 89. Matt seemed highly concerned with the price on the menu since he is now trying to juggle living in Manhattan, going to medical school in his first year, and having a baby. Bar 89 didn't look like a Gray's Papaya option but Mark and Elizabeth were inside and we pledged to mainly order light to keep the tab down.

Bar 89 is an interesting location with a very modern look. The bathrooms are the main attraction with opaque windows in front of each stall showing the sink and toilet you are about to enter. All the stalls are visible from the lobby area in front of them. The ladies and mens rooms are demarked with a pink or a blue neon glowing light inside of the stall. When you enter a stall you can see outside until you latch the door. Once you do the glass frosts over in an opaque look and a sign appears within the glass saying occupied. The people on the outside can't see in and you can't see out again until you leave the bathroom. My only complaints were that the first time I went into the booth I didn't realize the rules of pink vs. blue so I entered a ladies stall and I couldn't figure out where in the high-tech stalls they had put the paper towels. I did find them on my second trip to the stalls. Although I have seen this gimmick in other locations before it never ceases to amaze me.

Back at the table Matt had ordered a Sapphire and Tonic. When it arrived the tonic was apparently flat. So Matt figured he was paying for an expensive drink and sent it back to the bar. The waiter, bar staff and manager then disappeared and huddled around the bar to figure out what was wrong with the tonic and Matt didn't get a replacement drink for about forty minutes. They had needed to reinstall the tonic CO2 system and rewire the building to meet code or something. The good news was that his drink was very bubbly and very strong.

Deciding on a meal was luckily quite simple. We split two orers of wings with extra blue cheese as a dinner for five. At some point we were chatting about medical school in Barbados where Scuz is going and he told us about an uncle of his who went to medical school in Mexico where they kept all of the cadaver's in a big pool of formaldehyde. Each class began with fishing your cadaver out of the pool with the hook.

Mark is involved in a new start-up involving rebates and free bandwidth. We had an incredibly fun time jabbering about every silly Internet tool and product we knew of for five hours. It was a little frigthening how excitable we were about all of the new technology out around blogging, RSS, email, smart clients, embedded databases, and desktop search tools. We considered partnering together and I may meet with Mark and his entrepreneur partner to investigate whether we can connect his business with Viapoint.

Mark let me know that Olenick (the locked out trumpet angry drunk) is now working on buying and selling malls, salsa dancing to pick-up women in long lines who await his arrival, and bringing to market a concept of buiding concrete in mall parking lots with embedded solar components that power the mall to market. Maybe when we run out of fossil fuels the pave the earth project will at least generate enough power to keep our gadgets running.

Jeremy has to return to his place of business when he comes to town. It is filled with fairly religious Jews many of whom can't understand the strange lack of ambition that Jeremy has. Somewhere in New York in a cubicle there is an orthodox jewish girl who eloped to Brooklyn with a Peurto Rican man and was ostracized by her religious family, community, and high school. She wants to go to college but still hasn't managed to return to her religious high school to get the diploma that she needs to get through the admissions process.