Manlio Rules

so… apparently you can’t waltz into the airport 40 minutes before your flight takes off and just “get on” the plane. traffic was an absolute bitch going to the airport and lyandra (whose fault this is NOT) kindly waited in the parking lot to make sure i got on the flight. which was good in retrospect.

the clever thing about self service check ins is that they’ll give you the boarding pass, but they won’t let you check any bags if you’re less than 45 minutes before flight time. and they won’t let you fly without your bags. and of course that was the last flight out tonight. so i’m chilling at lyandra’s tonight and going back again at 5AM tomorrow to get on the 7AM flight which hopefully will go better than this one did.

also, why would you have a 2 for 1 burger deal? and if you’re me, why would you get both burgers and eat them in maybe 15 minutes?

ok, we’ll try this again tomorrow. stay tuned.

Tonight was my last night in NYC for what will be awhile. It was a full retrospective. Started the evening in Astoria for dinner, followed by a little trip around the lower east side, and now back in brooklyn. It was a good night. i’m not drunk, but i’m a little buzzed and watching some TV, as well i should be. Thanks to everyone who made these last two weeks wonderful, i am going to miss every one of you so much.

A lot of people have asked me if i’m excited for the move to SF, and i really am. but i wouldn’t be as excited if i didn’t have as amazing and encouraging a group of friends as all of you. Y’all are the best.

Karen and Alex have a blog now. Yay! blog!

Karen posted a video that Jody and I did with her a few years ago at ITP. it’s hilarious for many reasons, and can be seen here.

yeah, as i write this, three men are moving all my worldly posessions out of my house and into their large truck… i know it’s strange to say, but this is finally becoming real to me, and i’m starting to freak out a little bit…

well, i think we did my time in NY a proper respect on saturday night. people got drunk, people jumped around like maniacs, people made out. all in all, i would call that a rousing success.

thanks to everyone who came out to send me off properly. i will have pictures sometime but i stuipidly packed the usb cable to my digicam already. s’ok, most of the shots are out of focus and crazy, cause i was fairly drunk and should not be given a camera when inebriated.

this is more for my personal record, but in case you’re interested:

i’ve been working on a site for a few months now, that needs to have the address and phone number of the company aligned at the bottom left of every page, within the left hand column, a little above the footer.

now, i both love and hate CSS, for various reasons (lots of them alcohol related). in any event, the big problem with this is that it’s difficult to say to css: “always put this element at the bottom of this column”, because the typical way to do such a thing is with the top-margin attribute, and you set it to however further below you want. at least, that’s what i do. and of course the problem with doing this is that when the length of the column is always changing, that number has to change based ont he page content. which is a job for javascript, who i really hate working with, cause she’s sort of like the annoying boring chick who talks to you all the time and somehow thinks that makes you friends. Just because you’re always THERE doesn’t mean i like you.

so after a little javascripting and much soul searching, i hit upon the solution. instead of nesting the div in the left nav column, i placed it AFTER the footer, at the very bottom of the page. then i set the top margin to -100, and it moved up 100 pixels, right where it needed to be!

of course, this didn’t work in firefox. so i took out my hunting knife and slowly carved D batteries into my eyeballs for a few minutes (sparkly!). then i realized that it didn’t work because for some reason the command was moving the address below the left nav column. so it was there, but something was on top of it. z-indexing everything didn’t work (it never does), but using the “position:relative” property fixed it!

overall record: CSS: 35, Manlio: 10

but that’s a lot better than it was a few hours ago…

ranking every new years eve that I had while i lived in NY.

1. 2004-2005: the theme of this new years was: i can do everything. Started the night at a friend of karen’s with the a/k combo, then Kevin’s place, which was big cause it was early days with those kids. then went to the crazy bunker 30’s party, and then rolled with scott into manhattan at 5AM. good times good times.
2. 2001-2002: Technically this doesn’t count, cause i was in seattle for it. but if it did count, this is where it would go. chillin with the seattle crew in those days was always a hedonistic blast.
3. 2005-2006: I was in a weird mood this whole night, but somehow it all worked out. I got to DJ for a few hours, and had my first “clear the floor” experience as a DJ, when i threw on “any way you want it” by journey.
4. 2000-2001: civilized early evening followed by debauchery till early hours. then eric threw up in my kitchen sink and i stayed up all night wondering where it all went wrong.
5. 2003-2004: blah. 3 parties, none of them much fun, i was a mess, and i owed like 4 people sincere apologies at the end of it all. Not a night for my highlight reel. on the plus side, my party hopping somehow created a legend of another ‘manlio’ in bburg who was having a party with fire eaters. and that’s pretty cool.
6. 2002-2003: a nice dinner with matt and neil followed by possibly the worst night of my life. if any night showed me the futility of trying to make important decisions while in another state of mind, this was it. it also showed me that being the only one in the room not hitting on the hot girl sometimes gets you her number. assuming everyone is trashed.

1. packing sucks
2. every time i move, i promise myself that i’m going to throw out a lot of stuff. and every time, i just end up throwing all my random crap into bigger and bigger boxes
3. i can’t wait to see the movers faces when i ask them to move $500 in change
4. packing tape is expensive
5. you would think that no one would actually need a whole box just for cables. and you would be wrong
6. we have lost the art of handwritten notes as a society. i always find random handwritten notes during moves, that usually from years and years ago. and even if the content of them is totally random, they always bring a smile to my face
7. this in no way means that i’m going to start handwriting notes again
8. packing, having goodbye dinners, and going to the gym is a great way to live

MikeLivesinTrees: we should start a things to do when your Web 2.0 startup gets funded site

manlio27: 1. your hooker count doubles

MikeLivesinTrees: 2. your weekends are suddenly all spent on the slopes

manlio27: 3. suddenly you have more random mirrors lying around

MikeLivesinTrees: 4. you invent a tagline that involves being the “flickr of” something

manlio27: 5. you dig up all your old javascript books from 1998

MikeLivesinTrees: 6. you spend 3 weeks trying to think up a better name that sounds like a starwars character and will rhyme with jelly-o

manlio27: 7. your vision statement harnesses synergetic technologies to facilitate social interaction. and that’s just your vision statement!

MikeLivesinTrees: 8. Your business plan transforms into a community-evangelized model relying on aggregating RSS feeds from the long tail of open services into a single sticky super social site (with added alliteration)

manlio27: 9. you hire a head of User Experience Design, who mostly seems to sit around berating your Creative Director and dreaming up plausible but highly unlikely use case scenarios to work against.

MikeLivesinTrees: dude - #7 is pure genius

manlio27: come on, come up with #10!

manlio27: then i’ll post it

MikeLivesinTrees: 10. Your marketing plan consists of three steps 1. Send to Michael Arrington 2. Send to that VC guy 3. Post it on MySpace

MikeLivesinTrees: weak..

MikeLivesinTrees: anyway

MikeLivesinTrees: i’m headed home

manlio27: yeah, me too

So, today in our series of things i’m going to miss/remember about New York, i’d like to discuss my favorite (and least favorite) bars from all my time in the city. let’s do 5 good ones and 3 bad ones. criteria to be determined as i continue to write:

Good bars:

1. Ace Bar: Easily the central bar of the ITP years for me, i had 3 birthdays here, and countless long drunken nights.
2. The Cellar: i admit this place got lame pretty fast once it became NYU undergrad central, but this was where Scott and I got the bulk of work done on our theater piece, every monday night from 10-1AM
3. DBA: i hate this place on the weekends, but back when Neil lived with me on allen st, nothing was better than the 2AM monday night whiskey here
4. McCann’s pub and grill: i think this was the place in astoria near my old apt, it was this little irish bar where kate and i would occasionally go if we had nothing to do in the city. excellent nachos
5. Barcade: really just a brilliant idea, and well executed. good beer and arkanoid.

also worthy of praise: Josie Woods, Bleecker St Bar, Floyd, Alibi, XR, Bar Coastal, that place near the bunker in bburg which had foosball, both softball bars that i can’t remember the names of, Bar None, the Riviera Cafe, Sing Sing, Union Pool, Decibel, uncle Ming’s, and the place across from uncle ming’s.

Bad bars:

1. Planet Rose: Objectively perhaps the worst bar/karaoke place in all of manhattan. dismal, weird people hanging out, and always just a little too crowded to be comfortable with more than a small group
2. Piano’s: i’m not sure why i hate piano’s as much as i do. but i really hate it.
3. Darkroom: fuck this place. there’s never a place to sit, it’s always too loud, and it’s routinely a post office (that’s my friend’s expression for a sausage fest)


I also hate these places: Orchard Bar, Lit, Eugene’s, that bar on 14th bet A and B that had only old irish men in it on a saturday night, all of the ludlow bars on weekends, snapper creek, John St. bar