Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities will be speaking tomorrow night about <a href="http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cepp/courses/special_events.html#3
” title=”Jane Jacobs: The Past, Present, and Future of Office Skyscrapers”>The Past, Present, and Future of Office Skyscrapers. It's free, but registration is required. Thursday, May 6, 6:30pm in the Great Hall, City College (NYC).

Spot Draves' presentation of his electric sheep was one of the best presentations I attended at last February's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Electric Sheep is a screen saver that uses a distributed computing model (a la SETI@home) to create and render new "sheep."

When the screen-saver is activated, the screen goes black and an animated 'sheep' appears. Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts a server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep.

Every fifteen minutes 24/7 a new sheep is born and distributed to all clients for display. Each sheep is an animated fractal flame.

The sheep are amazingly beautiful, and hearing Spot speak about his work is great. Lucky for you, if you're in NYC tonight you can experience it yourself. Spot will be doing his presentation at the dorkbot-nyc gathering. Also there will be a presentation on "Gameboy Hacks" at the same meeting! It's a geek's delight! Wednesday, May 5, 7pm at Location One in SoHo (NYC).

You have until the end of the year to check out the New York Public Library's exhibit, The Subway at 100: General William Barclay Parsons and the Birth of the NYC Subway, but why wait?

Celebrating the centennial of the opening of the New York City subway system in 1904, this exhibition both salutes William Barclay Parsons, the first chief engineer of the subway, and recognizes the importance of the subway system to the life and growth of the city.

Sounds great, and since the subway is one of my favorite things about New York City, I'm keen to learn more about its construction and history. I'm adding this exhibit to my to-do list.

A reminder: I'll be at the Apple Store in SoHo tonight from 6-8 PM participating in the New York Bloggers event. I'll be discussing the technology of blogging with the dashing Anil Dash and the fording Paul Ford. Please join us if you've nothing better to do on a rainy New York evening.

Neat stuff today over at MUG with Tribeca Pentimento. This essay highlights what I love about living in old cities, the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) history that's everywhere. Working in Tribeca I know these spots and wish it were a sunny day for exploring the neighborhood rather than a cold rainy day for coding.

Former New York Times restaurant critics William Grimes and Ruth Reichl select eateries for A Quick Guide to the Best Restaurants in New York. Handy, but why aren't these restaurant names linked to the Times' reviews?

I've hardly heard anything about it, but apparently there's a rally and march planned for tomorrow beginning at 11:30 AM, a "global day of action on the first anniversary of the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq." Here are the logistics for the New York City demonstration.

My favorite daily email has been, and continues to be, Charlie Suisman's Manhattan User's Guide (MUG). Today, Suisman asks New York City bloggers to share 10 Great Things about NYC. There's some great stuff in there — some new to me, some just reminders of places I need to revisit and things I need to redo. Tomorrow will bring Part Two of the series, and I hope many more wonderful tips about NYC.

I did it! Yesterday was a beautiful day for running, clean and not too hot and not too cold. I braved the crowded course, avoided collisions as I passed (and alas, was passed by) runners, and slogged up hills. Yes, hills. Sadly, my training had neglected hills and it hadn't occurred to me that there would be hills (these hills are really much more noticeable when you're running) in Central Park, but there were. So the race was a little harder than I'd anticipated and I couldn't push myself as much as I'd planned. But I made it, and I finished in under 40 minutes, which was my goal. For some reason, the race results still aren't up on the NYRR site. When they are, I'll post my official time. Ok, my net time was 37:39 and my pace 9:24/mile. Not the best, not the worst (especially with those hills!) and there's lots of room for improvement. Thanks, once again, to everyone who contributed. It was a great day, a great race, and we raised over $975,000 to provide meals to people living with AIDS, cancer and other serious illnesses.

Here's a full-size photo of me [54 KB] in racing action, thanks to Jason who picked me out of the crowd by some miracle.

In less than two weeks, I'm going to run the NYRR Hot Chocolate 15K, 9.3 miles in Central Park. This time though there's no fund raising involved. This time it's just for the free hot chocolate at the end!