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Since this was our first weekend in the city after closing up the Fire Island house, we decided to break out of our routine and venture uptown.  It was great.

We had dinner Saturday at Robert, in the Museum of Arts & Design on Columbus Circle.  (Warning: the restaurant’s website is really irritating.)  Food was great, interior design is terrific, views are amazing, and service was spotty but generally ok. We’ll definitely go back.

Our table at the restaurant. Amazing views of Columbus Circle, the Upper West Side, and Central Park.

The view of Columbus Circle from our table at Robert

After dinner we took a 10 min tour through the Hudson Hotel, which has an amazing outdoor terrace/bar.

Then we walked another 10 minutes or so to the new Ink 48 hotel on 48th & 11th.  Views from the 16th floor rooftop bar were absolutely stunning; there are no other tall buildings around, and it provided a rare East-facing view of Times Square and midtown.

Big City Lights

270 degree panorama shot taken with the help of my new Droid X

Nifty water feature has changing light colors

Sunday we headed back to the Upper West Side, starting out with a stroll around the Natural History Museum.

Museum of Natural History

Heed that warning

We passed by several nice-looking brunch places, but most were pretty dog-unfriendly and wouldn’t allow Nanu to sit under the table in their outdoor patios. Finally we found a place with less stringent rules. Our brunch at Al Dente was actually quite good, although the online reviews I read today are pretty bad, so I guess I wouldn’t recommend it in general.

Our meal was good at Al Dente, but online reviews are pretty bad

Next, we checked out an outdoor flea market. It was pretty upscale and they had some interesting stuff.

Old compasses, magnifying glasses, telescopes and sextants

Still, there were no buyers

Finally, someone’s short, little legs were getting tired. (And Nanu seemed to be getting pooped, too.) So we headed back down to Chelsea, with one of us hanging out the taxi window to greet passers-by.

Short legs are getting tired by this point

City girl on her way home

It’s good to have goals, and it’s even better to measure progress against them.

Even Nanu knows that. That’s why Diane, our dog walker, measures performance every day on Nanu’s Key Performance Metrics dashboard.

It’s all very demanding & intense.  So much so, that sometimes a performance slip-up warrants an explanation.

Take Sept 27th, for example.  A less-than-perfect performance came with the caveat: “Too much rain for her to poop.”

Seems like a reasonable justification to me.  And that’s exactly the excuse I’m going to use the next time my  TPS reports are late.  Good inspiration, Nanu.

Sites scrambled like the dickens when Facebook launched its Like button a few months ago, plastering the button all over their content. But now they’re finding out what happens when FB goes down and you don’t have a contingency plan.

As an example, check out what just about every article on CNN looks like now.  Where the ‘Like’ button would normally be, there’s a gigantic “Service Unavailable – DNS” error shown.  Ouch.

FB outage causing all kinds of headaches for other sites

The NYT handles this a little better; the Like button is still shown and you don’t get the error until you click it. But still – this ain’t purty.

Facebook seems to be back up now. But I wonder if the outage is going to cause some of these major sites using the Like button to assess what contingency plans they could enact should the FB API fail again. It’s a relevant question to ask.

A couple of weeks ago Paul and I crossed the great divide (5th Ave) to venture East and have dinner in the Lower East Side. Dinner at The Orchard was ok- (great flatbreads but a suburban mall-like decor). It was the walk back, when we discovered the beer room at the Whole Foods on Houston, that was the highlight.

The Beer Room has more than 1,000 different types of beer, many refrigerated but even more on shelves. A handful are also offered on tap at any given time, and they also sell home brew kits if you want to do it yourself.  This place is worth a visit.

About 1,000 types of brew, including a few on tap

Kits, drums, and capping equipment for the DIY crowd

Thank you, that is all.