We have reached out to our Promotional Department regarding the five year limitation for the promotional Global Entry credit amount.

This feature is designed to reset 58 months from the date in which the prior credit is issued.

Good to know.

The young woman looked at me, standing midway between them. The doors chimed and the announcement came over the speaker: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

We made eye contact and I reached my hands out to catch the hat, now arcing through the air, as it came sailing through the closing doors. My hands made contact as I saw the young woman, now behind glass, nod approvingly.

I ran down the platform to the older woman and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, and I held her hat out to her. She smiled a thank you and I raced up the stairs into the winter morning.

The Problem

When I upgraded my computer (from Mountain Lion!) to El Capitan, everything went relatively smoothly except that I lost the ability to actually search my email in Apple’s included Mail program. There were a number of suggestions I found online, many of which I tried, but the one that actually made the difference was to re-index my machine.

The Solution

The first thing I tried to do was to just erase and re-index my hard drive with:

$ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/

but this gave me a “Indexing disabled.” message. The normal way of handling this is to add your entire hard drive to the “Privacy” tab in the Spotlight settings, but this did not seem to work. Fortunately, I know how to read nerd and did the following in a shell:

$ mdutil
Usage: mdutil -pEsa -i (on|off) -d volume ...
mdutil -t {volume-path | deviceid} fileid
Utility to manage Spotlight indexes.
-p Publish metadata.
-i (on|off) Turn indexing on or off.
-d Disable Spotlight activity for volume (re-enable using -i on).
-E Erase and rebuild index.
-s Print indexing status.
-t Resolve files from file id with an optional volume path or device id.
-a Apply command to all volumes.
-V vol Apply command to all stores on the specified volume.
-v Display verbose information.
NOTE: Run as owner for network homes, otherwise run as root.
$


OK, so this is good. There’s a flag I can pass to the mdutil program to have it turn on and off indexing for a particular volume.

$ mdutil -i on /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/
/:
Indexing enabled.
$


Excellent progress! This time, running the “mdutil -E” command above actually kicked off the re-indexing process. It took a little while, but once it was done, search was restored to my Mail program.

Good luck with your mail woes!

This reminds me of the relationship that once existed between the NYPD and Critical Mass in NYC. It used to be that the NYPD would send a few scooters to escort the ride and keep the traffic disruptions to a minimum. They would keep the protest from stretching too long but would otherwise stay clear. That all changed right before the RNC came to town in 2004, when the NYPD decided to start rounding up as many riders as they could, sending in police in riot gear outside of St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery.

As I’m finishing this up, a helicopter hovers overhead and I hear sirens in the distance. Somehow, I think this peace will be short-lived.

This book went on vacation with somebody. There is sand trapped between the plastic covering that the library puts on the books to keep them tidy and the jacket itself. I can imagine the person before me, sitting on the beach, somewhere warm, maybe there’s a cocktail sitting on the table next to them, and they’re listening to the waves rolling in and out.

There are no waves here today. It’s raining, and the sound of the water outside is less rolling as it comes in and out off of the shore, and more a not-too-gentle, steady pitter patter of drops falling from the sky. The rain is coming in sideways, knocking against my window, wanting to come in.

Do you remember when library books had the names of all of the people who borrowed the book before you, stamped into the back cover? A violation of privacy, to be sure, and where, other than libraries, can you get that sort of privacy these days, but still, I miss seeing those names, feeling like I was part of a club. A club of people who touched this very book, who went on vacation, who left sand and rain drops on its cover.

The book was due back to the library yesterday, and I would really like to finish it now.

1. Install homebrew
2. brew install qpdf
3. qpdf –password=YOURPASSWORD-HERE –decrypt input.pdf output.pdf

Done!

Via cyberciti.biz

Next year, I’ll write more as well.

(In fact, that previous sentence originally read “I often wonder if I’m prone to overcomplicate things,” which is an overly complicated sentence.)

I woke up early this morning. I had to be out the door by to attend an event, I’ve been trying to shift my schedule earlier, and I find that I’m a much happier person in the morning than at night. So I woke up early.

The sun was just starting to peek out from behind the horizon and the morning red was streaming through the smoke from a nearby chimney. Naturally, I grabbed my camera, stepped out into the cold, and took some photos. It is so quiet in this city in the morning and I wanted to capture that moment – the red smoke, the silent streets.

And what did I do with that moment? I made this.

I took that moment of quiet that I wanted to capture and turned it into this jerky, kitchy bastardization of the photograph that I actually wanted to make.

I like my animated GIFs – I really do. But sometimes I need to just chill my shit out a little bit.

So here’s the picture I actually should have posted this morning.

Sorry about that.

Let’s talk about Times Square for a moment.

Let’s talk about the lights and the tourists. Let’s talk about the standing and the gawking and the looking up and the pointing and the noise and the traffic. Let’s talk about the billboards and the terrible food and the chain stores. Let’s talk about the fact that most sane New Yorkers would say that this is the worst of the city. It’s the part of the city that they would go hours out of their way to avoid.

And let’s talk about the fact that I love Times Square.

No, really, I do.

Forgetting everything else there is to know about Times Square, what I love about it is that it is in my backyard. To many, this strip of Broadway is why they come to New York City to visit. It is the epitome of the big city, the anti-town-they-came-from, the anti-every-place-else-in-the-world. It really does never, ever sleep. And once you step foot in there, you know that you’ve made it to the Big Apple.

What I love about Times Square is that I never actually have to be there. Unlike those just passing through, for whom that one visit to Times Square may be the only change they have to stand smack dab in the middle of the greatest city in the world (the East Coast equivalent of, say, standing with one foot on either side of the prime meridian), for me, it is just another neighborhood in this city that I love so dearly.

Sometimes I stop. Sometimes, as I ride my bike through that mess, I stop just north of 42nd Street and I look uptown at all of the people, at all of the lights. The tourists come through Times Square because they need to be there, because they want to know that they’ve been to New York and they’ve seen Times Square. They come because to them, this is New York City. I love that they’re happy, and I love that at any time I can turn right around, leave it all behind, and head back into the real New York.

My New York.

I started with an exhibit imagining the proposed Lower East Side Lowline, followed by a trip to Greenpoint to drive some of the boats in the Newtown Creek Armada, then joining up with my friends Kelli and Daniel to visit Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus installation in Columbus Circle and ending the day at the Marlborough Chelsea to explore Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe’s Stray Light Grey.

The answer to the first question is “by bike” (the question being, “how did you get from the Lower East Side to Greenpoint to Midtown to Chelsea in one afternoon?”).

The second thing that was so great about my day of art was how everything I did encouraged me to play, in one way or another. From driving a toy boat around a polluted creek to sitting in a living room next to a giant statue, these things all took my normal perspectives on the world and tweaked them just a little bit. And nothing did that more than the Stray Light Grey exhibit. Kelli and Daniel, who had seen the exhibit before, shoved me into the gallery ahead of them. “Go ahead,” they said, “look around. You lead the way.” In the back corner of the room, a broom closet, with its door open, and inside, another room, and beyond that, a hole in the wall, broken through the sheetrock. And from there we walked through room after room, exploring this space in a space, this constructed world inside the gallery. Beyond whatever grander vision the artists were conveying, at its very basic level, it was permission to wander around a space that we felt like we weren’t actually supposed to be in.

It’s rare that we get to do things like that much any more, as adults. As we get older, we’re supposed to know better, whatever that means. Even at Newtown Creek, in order to pilot the toy boats I had to sign a waiver stating that I would not touch the water, for touching the water in a Superfund site can lead to death.

On the way out of the gallery, we passed a group in formalwear, heading to a party upstairs. “Check out this exhibit,” we told them. “Go into the back room. It doesn’t look like you’re allowed in there, but you are.” Excitedly, they walked into the outer gallery. It was the youngest of the group, just a teenager, who first ran into the broom closet, gesturing for the others to follow her. Tentatively, they stepped through the door, one at a time.

I hope they had fun.