Sunday, August 05, 2012

Jackson Heights: My Neighborhood

I am at a stage in my life when I want to clutch a neighborhood, and Jackson Heights is perfect for that. For me.


Jackson Heights, Queens
Bounded by Roosevelt Ave., Broadway, Leverich St., Northern Blvd., and Junction Blvd...... numerous bus routes converge ..... A major renovation of this facility, completed in 2005 by the MTA, cost over $100 million. It includes one of the first green buildings by the MTA, the Victor A. Moore Bus Terminal, which is partially powered by solar panels built into the roof. ..... the largest subway stop in Queens with six subway services and five bus lines (Q32, Q33, Q47, Q49 and Q53). The Q33 bus goes to LaGuardia Airport's main terminals and operates 24 hours a day. The Q47 bus goes to the Marine Air Terminal. The Q53 bus goes to Rockaway Beach, Queens. ..... The community is bounded by Northern Boulevard to the north, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the west, Roosevelt Avenue to the south, and Junction Boulevard to the east ..... The Jackson Heights name comes from Jackson Avenue, the former name for Northern Boulevard. ..... British Airways moved its United States corporate offices to ...... large garden apartment buildings (the term was invented for buildings in Jackson Heights) ..... The community was initially planned as a place for middle- to upper-middle income workers from Manhattan to raise their families. The Jackson Heights New York State and National Register Districts range from 93rd Street through 69th Street between Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue..... the first garden city community built in the United States, as part of the international garden city movement at the turn of the 20th century. There are many private parks (historically called "gardens" by the residents) within walking distance of each other. They are tucked in the mid-blocks, mostly hidden from view by the buildings surrounding them. ...... ten to fifteen minutes to 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue via the express E train or 63rd Street and Lexington via the F train ...... The main retail thoroughfare is located on 37th Avenue from 72nd Street to Junction Boulevard, with more retail on 82nd, 73rd and 74th Streets on the blocks between 37th and Roosevelt Avenues ...... 82nd street contains many national chain stores located in Tudor-style buildings ..... South American retailers and eateries, predominantly from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru dominate Northern Boulevard from 80th Street east to the border of neighboring Corona at Junction Boulevard. Roosevelt Avenue is also lined with various mainly Hispanic retail stores. ...... Jackson Heights is among the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City, and the nation. Jackson Heights is home to large numbers of South Americans, particularly Argentinians, Ecuadorians and Colombians, South Asians,and East Asians. ...... 11372 ZIP code .... The total population of this area was 66,636, of which 57.17% were Hispanic or Latino of any race, 20.35% non-Hispanic Asian, 18.60% non-Hispanic White, and 1.78% non-Hispanic Black or African-American. ..... The largest Hispanic groups included South Americans with 29.41% of the total population, Mexicans with 10.93%, and Dominicans with 6.18%. ..... There were 23,906 occupied housing units, of which 65.94% were renter occupied ..... Colombian broadcaster RCN TV has its US-American headquarters in the neighborhood, reflecting the sizable Colombian population in the area. ...... measured crime has declined more than 79% in the last 15 years (1993 to 2008). As of January 2008, the murder rate is down over 82% and grand larceny auto is down 90% from 1990. ....... Travers Park is the main local playground. .... the PlaNYC initiative to ensure all New Yorkers live within a 10 minute walk of a park or playground. ...... The newly opened playground at P.S. 69 is the latest schoolyard to be renovated and opened to the public during non-school hours through the program, which is turning schoolyards into playgrounds in neighborhoods across the city ........... Notable natives and residents .. Alfred Mosher Butts (1899–1993), invented Scrabble in 1938, and perfected it at Community Methodist Church ..... Chester Carlson (1906–1968), invented Xerox copy machine in his Jackson Heights kitchen .. Robert P. Casey (1932–2000), Governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995 ... Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), an English comic actor and director who used mime, slapstick and other visual, non-verbal comedic routines. .... Howard Stern (born 1954), host of The Howard Stern Show ... Film location .. The film "Coming To America" is based in Jackson Heights. .. Part of The Usual Suspects was filmed in Jackson Heights around 34th Avenue and 82nd street ... It is also the setting for the TV show Ugly Betty, where Betty and her family live

A Tour of Jackson Heights, A South Asian Neighborhood
Overview of Little India
the place for some of the highest quality Indian food in New York City; South Asian jewelry, clothes, and music; Bollywood films; and plain old people-watching. This is a great neighborhood for strolling and taking it all in. ..... Shaheen's is very well known in the Pakistani community. On a weekday, its clientele are almost exclusively Pakistani men. ..... Jackson Heights is a great neighborhood for stocking up on Bollywood films and music. ..... the second largest motion picture industry in the world, and its masala-style films invariably include plenty of song and dance. ........ Butala Emporium, a perfect place to find an Indian gift. ..... Butala is a place where you can spend a quarter or a thousand dollars, and leave with a treasure. ...... Stroll down 74th Street and other shops beckon. Some brilliantly. Almost every other storefront is a jewelry shop where 22 karat gold predominates. Unlike the 14k, this rich gold is a heavy, almost dull color that makes up for its lack of shine with its beautiful dense sheen and malleability, which allows for more intricate, fantastic designs
Jackson Heights - Queens Neighborhood Profile
Jackson Heights is a bustling neighborhood, famous for its garden apartment buildings and its diversity. More than half of its residents are immigrants, particularly Colombians, other Latinos, and South Asians, with its own Little India. ..... Jackson Heights is Queens eating at its best -- varied and authentic. ..... The cheapest delights are from street vendors on Roosevelt Avenue. On a Friday night sample tacos, arepas, fresh fruit slices, and roasted corn. ..... read Jackson Heights, A Garden in the City ...... The only public park in Jackson Heights is crowded, black-top Travers Park (34th Ave between 77th and 78th Sts), also the site of summer Sunday concerts and the farmers market. ...... Many of the prewar co-ops boast shared, private gardens, each about a city-block in length. ..... Drug trafficking is no longer the major problem it was in the 1980s. .... Jackson Heights is the center of the gay Latinos in Queens. ..... Most Famous Street Sign: The 35th Avenue sign has Scrabble scoring in honor of Alfred Butts, who invented the game in Jackson Heights. ...... Jackson Heights 74th Street Merchants Association, 37-08 74th St, 718-651-6971 ..... Zip Code: 11372
Jackson Heights Life


New York Magazine: Jackson Heights
Jackson Heights offers something that most Queens neighborhoods don’t: appealing older housing stock. Many of the apartments and co-ops in its extensive historic district feature private gardens
Not For Tourists: Jackson Heights
Home to immigrants from Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin America, Jackson Heights/Elmhurst is one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods on the planet. Jackson Heights is New York City's oldest gay community dating back to vaudevillians who moved there in the '30s. These days the boys who hang out there are mostly Latino and get their groove on at local night clubs. Late nights, clubgoers of all sexual orientations grab a snack from one of many Latino street food vendors. ....... Jackson Heights is also where Alfred Mosher Butts invented Scrabble in the 1930s, at the landmark Community Methodist Church, which today conducts services in several languages, and still plays host to a Scrabble club. The Scrabble Street Sign outside the church commemorates Butts' invention with point values corresponding to the letters in 35th Avenue. ...... St. James Episcopal Church was chartered in 1734 by none other than King George III, and is its oldest building. ...... Old churches provide ties to the past and all that, but the award for the area's most intriguing house of worship goes to Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Vanaram, a Thai temple whose ornate gilded roof stands out amidst the blocky multifamily homes surrounding it. .... 76-16 46th Ave, Elmhurst, NY 11373 (Cross street: 76th Street) ... Ornate Thai Buddhist temple sporting an Emerald Buddha on its top floor. ...... Get off at the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue subway stop and you’ll find yourself in a veritable ethnic food lover's paradise. Roosevelt Avenue and the surrounding blocks are lined with Latin-American restaurants, including numerous Ecuadorean spots, legions of taco trucks, several Argentine steak houses, and dozens of Colombian bakeries. ..... Nepalese and Tibetans who flock to the Himalayan Yak for dinner and a band that plays everything from Bollywood to The Eagles
CBS Local: City Councilman Wants To Silence Ice Cream Trucks In Jackson Heights
“The ringing of these bells over and over and over and over again is really very annoying,” City Councilman Daniel Dromm said of the aggressive ice cream trucks in Jackson Heights. “They’re ringing the bells with that jingle at later times in the evening, like close to 11 o’clock at night.” ..... Dromm said he plans to take complaints from residents directly to the commanding officer of the 115th Precinct.

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Facebook In 2022

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
If Facebook is the next Google it will still be around, it will still be doing cutting edge work. It will still be innovating. But right now is not the best of times for Facebook. They got to wait it out.

Facebook could emerge the identity provider of choice. Facebook could host the credit history and score for the global population. As in, Facebook could do what many governments have not done.

Data mining is going to be big for them. Or can be.

Frankly I don't know what Facebook will be like in 2022. That is kind of far. 12 years back I had not seen a Facebook coming.

What will Facebook look like in 2022?
Like Google, Yahoo, and even Amazon, Facebook will have to recast itself as the internet landscape changes. Google started as a better search engine. As the internet grew and exploded in use, Google shifted to providing a bevy of cloud services, trying to be the provider of your core internet experience through apps such as Google Documents, Gmail, and Google Maps. Now Google is shifting gears again by moving offline with Google Glasses, Street View, and Driverless Car. ..... Today Amazon is plotting a network of urban warehouses that can ensure same-day delivery, and has even turned itself into the preeminent cloud computing provider with Amazon Web Services. .... The next 10 years of Facebook will be defined by solving the mobile problem. .... What if Twitter starts building out a more thorough profile? What if Instagram remained independent and built a robust web platform? ..... Rather than a desktop-focused social network, Facebook will be the universal sign-in solution for the social web, a collection of various mobile applications, and a powerful external ad network that overcame Google’s publisher network. ..... Watch over the next few years as Facebook builds a large publisher network based on the promise of true demographic targeting.... The Facebook of 2022 will look a lot more like a data warehouse .... Facebook in 2022 will look much more utilitarian

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Y Combinator: Conveyor Belt StartUping?

English: Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders o...
English: Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit, as he speaks about his experience getting reddit from a startup to one of the top competitors in User-rated news and networking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Not really. It is not like they get in the way of creativity. I don't think of them as a boot camp either. It is just that early stage startups have much in common. And so perhaps it makes sense to go to school together.

I wonder if the concept can be applied to entrepreneurship in other or possibly all industries.

Reddit really is special.

Y Combinator’s first batch: where are they now?
the unbelievable drive that the young would-be founders had. Without something like Y Combinator – without money, support and guidance – this creative ambition and energy can be dissipated and become unfocused. ...... “They care, and they want us all to succeed in a way that isn’t unlike a parent.” ..... While not every startup born in that experiment back in 2005 is still going today, their founders have arguably all found success. ..... Reddit is arguably the most famous of all of Y Combinator’s success stories. .... “at its core it’s just a list of headlines.” ..... The fact that the idea for Reddit didn’t even come from Steve and Alexis (it was Paul’s idea) ....... (Alexis initially had a tough time to talk Steve into leaving his job and joining him in applying for the YC program). ..... Something like Y Combinator throws up opportunities in mysterious ways. Following the Summer Founders Program and the early death of memamp, Chris’ co-founder and roommate Zak Stone moved up the street to Harvard grad school. This left Chris with two spare rooms, just as the reddit co-founders were in need of a new apartment. ..... recognizing that sometimes things don’t work and ideas shift and change and die and are born – not following some rigid road of rules. ..... Perhaps the most straightforward road to success to arise from the Y Combinator First Batch is that of Loopt, the location-based mobile service founded by Sam Altman and Nick Sivo. ..... “I always say that without YC I would have taken the job offer I had and become a consultant, and I’d probably be chained to a desk somewhere in an office park” Justin Kan tells me ....... idea of live-streaming his life. Justin.tv was born and generated a lot of media interest. The site is now the world’s largest live-streaming community, with a reported number of over 40 million registered users, and is still ran by original co-founder Shear. ..... From the simple beginnings of a man with a camera permanently taped to his baseball cap, a massive network and several spinoff companies have been born, including Socialcam (which has recently been sold to Autodesk for $60 million), and TwitchTV (a dedicated video game broadcasting community that Kan described to me as “ESPN for gaming”). ....... The least obviously financially successful member of YC First Batch has been Jesse Tov, whose startup Simmery Axe closed down immediately after the Summer Founders Program. After a short stint with the U.S. Navy Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, Jesse returned to academia and is now a postgraduate fellow at Harvard

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Grum

How a botnet works: 1. A botnet operator sends...
How a botnet works: 1. A botnet operator sends out viruses or worms, infecting ordinary users' computers, whose payload is a malicious application — the bot. 2. The bot on the infected PC logs into a particular command and control (C&C) server (often an IRC server, but, in some cases a web server). 3. A spammer purchases access to the botnet from the operator. 4. The spammer sends instructions via the IRC server to the infected PCs, causing them to send out spam messages to mail servers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Spam fighting is not just an issue of the good folks ending up with vastly superior technology. Basic law enforcement has to go hand in hand.

Grum: Inside The Takedown Of One Of The World’s Biggest Spam Networks
Grum sent over a quarter of the world’s spam and was one of the most ingenious botnets ever created. But, with savvy, a lot of luck, and cooperative ISPs, the Grum botnet dried up and died last month. ..... Like a biological virus primed to thrive in a certain type of medium, the Grum virus was susceptible to defeat if someone knocked out each of those CnC IP addresses. ..... Like Microsoft or Apple pushing out OS patches, the Grum makers were upgrading their virus regularly, adding new features and fixing problems. ...... The Grum botnet was one of the most robust and powerful in the world. ..... the system worked without peer and slowly began spamming the world, mostly with poorly worded pharmaceutical emails. ...... – for half a decade. ..... Spamming isn’t very lucrative. .... most major spammers hover at around $150 million in a good year. In the bell curve of spammers, however, most end up on the side of making very little. ..... set up in 2006 by someone who walked into a WebMoney office in Moscow and presented a Russian passport #4505016266. The name on the passport was a 26-year-old named Nikolai Alekseevich Kostogryz. ...... Around the world, sysadmins were watching the Grum takedown with interest. In Moscow, a response team from Group ID was at the ready to begin taking down the Russian and Ukrainian servers. Van Straten volunteered to assist in contacting various authorities. ..... 5 years, 3 months, and 17 days after the first emails began spewing out of the Grum botnet, the last server was dead..... The Internet got just a bit quieter

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