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Friday May 17th I took the day to meet some of the interesting tech companies present in New York. There are over 1,200 tech companies in NY (including CodeAcademy, KickStarter, Foursquare, MakerBot, ZocDoc, Guilt, AppNexus, Tumblr, Etsy, KickStarter, Automatic… and mine!), most between the Flat Iron and SoHo areas of Manhattan (Silicon ALley). So I chose a few that, for one reason or another, I was interested in meeting and talk to their founders.
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On Sunday, after returning to New York from the inaugural cruise, we went to Central Park to spend the afternoon and enjoy Japan Day!
Tents with huge lines to get free Japanese food (udon, okonomiyaki, gyozas, panda chocolate snacks, tea…), activities (calligraphy, kimonos, origami, yoyo-fishing…) and performances (karate, taiko…), all very well organized and full of mostly Japanese people in a very fun and nice event.
There were even so many cosplayers that it reminded me of Jing?
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All things must come to an end, so today we sadly had to disembark. After a nice breakfast and a last stroll through the ship, we disembarked very fast and easily, and in a few minutes we were back home in Chelsea (after going through the most absurd and disorganized taxi system I have seen in this country).
What`s my verdict? It is an exceptionally nice ship for a mass market, even considering its gigantic size.
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Day 2 of our cruise started waking up to the sound of the waves and with a buffet breakfast at Garden Café, which we took in an outside table.
The day was fully packed of activities, and given my terrible memory, I`m sure I would have forgotten some of them by now. But thanks to the fact that the cruise line gave us access to the net (although only for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), I was able to tweet my activities, and then use the TL to remember them easier.
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We were invited to board the Norwegian Breakaway inaugural cruise last Friday. A huge (146,600 tones and 1,062 feet for 4,000 passengers and 1,595 crew) and brand new ship.
It was a short inaugural cruise, 100 miles into the Atlantic Ocean, for VIPs (the bankers that financed the construction of the ship, Norwegian Cruise Lines executives, journalists, “star” travel agents… even Mayor Bloomberg). Many well known people aboard: artist Peter Max, who designed the hull and was signing posters, Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian (with his Ocean Blue restaurant as one of the 27 the ship has)… As we went through the very fast and easy boarding procedure at Pier 88, even President Obama flew over the ship in his helicopter!
Right after I accepted the IBM Beacon Award for Healthcare and Life Sciences given to my company (Kanteron Systems), I was video interviewed in the corridor. Here is the result:
One of the friends having dinner with us yesterday was a lawyer that used to be a Public Defender in NY. Of all the many interesting stories she had to tell, one struck me as the perfect example of all that is wrong with The System.
Once she had to defend a homeless man who was accused of stealing a candy bar from a drugstore. Since he had breached a non-trespass order from a previous similar incident, the prosecutor was asking for a 3 year prison sentence.
