NYC Trip Review

We left for LAX on Friday evening and got to our hotel, Hilton LAX, by about eight o'clock. There was some conference going on about aliens, UFOs, meditating and other odd things. We had dinner in one of the restaurants before heading up to bed.

We had to get an early start on Saturday morning. Our flight was set to depart at seven forty-five. We took the hotel shuttle to LAX. The Virgin America ticket counter was a pretty cool experience. It is separated from all of the others and has some nice mood lighting. When we boarded the plane, all of the window shades were down and it also had some cool lighting. It was a great experience. I expected some very attractive flight attendants like something out of the movie Catch Me If You Can to show up at our seats, but that didn't happen. The flight itself was pretty uneventful.

We arrived at JFK at about four o'clock in the afternoon. We found a cab and departed for our hotel near Times Square. The cab ride was not very exciting and took longer than I thought it would.

We stayed at the Hampton Inn Times Square North because I have had a lot of success with the chain when travelling for business. They are all clean and most of them are recently updated. You also can't beat a free breakfast. Once we arrived at the hotel we freshened up a bit and then asked the concierge where we should go to find some local restaurants. He suggested restaurant row on 46th Street, so we headed out.

There were a lot of different restaurants to choose from. We ended up eating at Ristorante Da Rosina. They packed people into every square foot of the restaurant. The Queen and I sat at a table that blocked access to another table, but nobody cared. The food was good, but the restaurant was just a normal big city restaurant.

From there we walked up the street to the Village Pour House for some drinks. I asked for a local beer and the waitress told me they stopped selling them. Two beers later when we were ready to go she came back with some Brooklyn Lager. It was an OK beer, but I had already had to Blue Moons. From there we walked to Times Square to take it all in. It was an amazing place. I have seen it on TV and in movies, but it is something you have to experience. When I was in NY the first time, Times Square was still a seedy place that you avoided so it was nice to see it like it is now.

We decided to stop in to Planet Hollywood and have a drink like tourists do. We sat at the bar and ordered a couple beers. We started talking to the bartender, Josh from NC, and I asked him if there was somewhere locals hung out near there. He recommended Bourbon Street Bar & Grill. We finished our drinks and Josh gave us a few more recommendations. He also put our ten year anniversary on all of the screens in the place. I got a picture of that with my iPhone.

We walked back to 46th Street to Bourbon Street Bar & Grill. The Queen found us a seat that was right behind a bachelorette party. We ordered some drinks and some food, alligator sausage and chicken wings. We ended up talking to the girls at the bachelorette party and having a good time. We left the bar very late and walked back to our hotel.

We woke up late the next morning after our long day. We decided to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We ended up taking the subway there. I had never ridden the NY subway, so I had to do it. We ate lunch in one of the restaurants in the museum and then started exploring. There was a lot of stuff to see. There are several building facades that are inside the museum as well as a complete Egyptian temple. I really liked the museum, but we were still exhausted. We took a taxi back to our hotel to rest before going to dinner and a Broadway show.

We headed out to eat and I really felt like a hamburger. We ended up at Chelsea Grill in Hell's Kitchen. The Queen and I both had gigantic hamburgers and fries. The food really hit the spot. We walked a short distance from there to the St. James Theatre to see Green Day's American Idiot.

It was a small theater, but the show was fantastic. We both really enjoyed the show. It was a short show, there was no intermission, but it was great. We bought some souvenirs before leaving the theater. A lot of people were gathered outside waiting for Billy Joe Armstrong to leave, so we decided to wait as well. After about forty five minutes he came out of the theater. I got some photos of him on my iPhone from a distance.

After the show we wondered around Times Square again and started looking for someplace to get dessert. We walked over to Rockefeller Plaza and still couldn't find anything. We started to walk back through Times Square to our hotel and found Junior's Bakery. We got a slice of NY cheesecake and red velvet cake and headed back to the hotel. The red velvet cake was better than the cheesecake because it did not have a graham cracker crust. I started planning for the next day at the hotel. We both knew it was going to be a busy day if we were going to see everything we wanted to see.

We started out early on Valentin's day and met with the concierge to map out our day. We walked to Central Park and took a carriage ride through the park. Our "driver" was Colim from Ireland. We told him we wanted a fun ride with lots of information and he did his best for us. It was a short ride and we did not get to see much of the park since it was covered with snow.

Next we headed east to Serendipity 3. The Queen had to have their Frozen Hot Chocolate. We got there about an hour before they opened for the day and decided to move on and come back at night. We walked back toward Central Park and ended up stopping in Bloomingdale's for a bathroom break. The Queen ended up shopping some before we left. We hit H&M next and The Queen did some more shopping. Our subway stop was right outside.

We took the subway to the Empire State Building. We waited in line to go to the Observation deck. It was very windy up there, but I managed to get some good photos and we even had an employee take a picture of The Queen and I with Manhattan in the background. From there we walked to another subway stop and headed to Greenwich Village to have lunch.

The Queen had to eat at Gray's Papaya, so we went to the original in the West Village. It has been in several movies. We both got hot dogs with everything on them. They were really good and the hot dogs snapped with every bite. We walked around the Village for a while and ended up at the arch in Washington Square Park. The arch has also been in many movies, so I took a picture of The Queen standing at it's base.

We caught a taxi and headed to the South Street Seaport. We bought tickets to a water taxi ride on Pier 70. We past ground zero on the taxi ride, but didn't even know it until we were on the water taxi. There was so much construction going on that you could not even tell what it was. The water taxi took us along Manhattan on the East River and then onto the Hudson River. We came back down on the New Jersey side of the Hudson and then past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. We then went back on the East River past Governor's Island and under the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges before returning to Pier 70.

When we got off the water taxi we walked to Wall Street and stopped briefly at Federal Hall and the The Stock Exchange before ending up at Trinity Church. We walked through the cemetery at the church and I took a lot of pictures. We then left and tried to catch a cab to SOHO for our dinner reservations. It was really windy that day and we had to walk for a long time before we found a cab.

Once in SOHO we realized it was early so we walked around some. We walked by DASH and decided not to stop in to shop. We ended up at some paper store and The Queen had a good time looking at stuff. We walked back to Osteria Morini just in time for our early reservation. The food tasted great, but the ambiance was a little lacking. The restaurant had rustic Italian decor and paper napkins and place mats. It also had some eighties music playing on the stereo. The food portions were small, but tasted great.

We caught another cab to Serendipity 3. We put our names in and had an hour to kill, so we went back to Bloomingdale's for another bathroom break and then walked around until we ended up at Urban Outfitters. The Queen shopped some and then it was time to head back to Serendipity 3. I ordered the peanut butter Frozen Hot Chocolate and The Queen ordered the regular. I am not a big fan of chocolate ice cream, but this tasted great. The Queen really loved it.

When we were done we walked back to the hotel and I picked up my tripod and we headed out to Times Square for some night photos. It was cold and windy outside and it was trying to rain. I got some nice photos and then we headed back to the hotel. When we got back we asked for some authentic NY pizza that would deliver to our room and got a recommendation from some of the employees at the hotel. When the pizza arrived I was disappointed that it was not the authentic thin crust. It was good, but not what I was looking for.

Tuesday morning we woke up really early and headed out to Rockefeller Plaza to try to get on the Today show. We succeeded! Al was the first to come out and shake our hands. He filmed some and then went back inside. About a half hour later, the whole group came out. Al, Meredith, Matt and Ann. I shook Matt's hand and got a photo of The Queen with him in the background. Meredith stayed outside and took photos with anyone who asked and shook hands with everyone. She was by far the nicest one on that day. I took a picture of The Queen with her and she told me that Meredith gripped her hand tightly and told her it was very nice to meet her. I didn't think she would have been the nicest one, but she was.

We went back to the hotel and had breakfast before packing and catching a cab to the JFK Airport. Our cab driver would not turn on the heat and even gave me a hard time about using my debit card to pay for the ride. He said if I used it I needed to give him a ten dollar tip and he watched me to make sure I did it.

The Virgin America ticket counter at JFK was not as cool as the one at LAX. We boarded the plane and headed back. Once at LAX we got our luggage pretty fast and went back to the Hilton to pick up our car. We were on the road about an hour after landing. Not bad at all.

When we got home, Chels and Meg were waiting for us. We gave them big hugs and started telling them all about our trip.

In hindsight, we packed a lot into this trip. We really only had two full days to see New York and we saw a lot. It was really fun and we both enjoyed it a lot. I would recommend a trip to New York to anyone.

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Am I a Negative Person?

I know I can come off as a negative person a lot of the time. I do not spend enough time telling people the positive things I like about them. I tend to focus on the areas that need to be improved. This is my focus on myself as well as others. I think other people sometimes tag me as being negative for this fact.

I am not a negative person, but I guess perception is reality.

One of my shortcomings is developing relationships with people. I have always been an observer. I am not the person that jumps right into a conversation. I would rather lay back and figure out exactly what is going on and try to determine what each person's motivation is. I enjoy listening more than I enjoy talking. I believe that this has made me a good judge of character.

I had a conversation with The Queen yesterday morning. She told me that she has not heard me say one positive thing about one of our girls in a long time. I got very defensive. I guess I have not been following my own advice of praising in public.

My only defense is that I have also not said one positive thing about our other daughter in a long time. I know that is not a very good defense, but it is all I have at this point. I really do need to work on building better relationships with people.

I think I do a pretty good job of this in my career. Although I have to have respect for a person before I build that relationship. I am not a two-faced person, so I cannot pretend to like someone. I can deal with them in a working relationship, but I will never pretend to like them.

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Great Advice

I am reading a book named UnMarketing. Yesterday I read what is the best business advice I have ever seen in print. It is something that I totally believe in and have been doing from the beginning of my business career. Praise in public and reprimand in private. Or better yet, assist in private.

As managers we need to focus on developing our people and making our companies great places to work. We can no longer expect our people to accept that they are lucky to be working for our companies. We must continually prove to them that our company is the best place to work. We must appreciate them and help them become better employees. If an employee fails, it is because of poor management.

I want to emphasis this fact. If an employee fails, it is because of poor management. Management either hired the wrong person because they do not have the proper interviewing or hiring skills or they failed to develop the employee. That is it! This is a pretty black and white situation in my opinion.

I am not saying that we need to pamper our employees and reduce expectations. Quite the opposite actually. I think we need to hold our employees to a higher standard, our standard. We should be performing our own jobs at a higher standard and that should trickle down to even the lowest level employee.

Sometimes there are external factors that come in to play and cause an employee to fail. A good manager will be aware of those factors based on the working relationship they have established with their employees. Once aware of those factors, a good manager will work to reduce their impact and get the employee back on track.

We need to stop propagating the us against them attitude and really start building teams. After all, as the old saying goes we are only as strong as our weakest link.

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The Cause of Human Suffering

According to the Buddha, the cause of human suffering is want. Not only is that true, but it is especially evident in our American society today. The current state of our economy has caused a lot of suffering. The whole problem started because of greed, or want.

If you look at most situations where there is human suffering you can link it back to some form of want. Whether the want is by the person suffering of the suffering is caused by the want of someone else. The want can be greed, power or just keeping up with the Jones'.

I have said before that we in the United States confuse wants with needs. I guess this problem goes all the way back to the time when Siddhārtha Gautama was alive, c. 563 BCE to 483 BCE. If we look back through history you can see that all civilizations confuse wants with needs as they start to peak and then decline. I believe that we are at that stage now. Unless something drastic happens to change our mentality, our country will begin a great decline and we will just be another country without power in the world.

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Why I Hate Nike

More than fifteen years ago I decided to switch my allegiance from Nike to Adidas. My decision was based on the fact that Nike uses sweatshops. I have been a loyal Adidas fan ever since. My only problem is that Nike has a lot of the sports teams wrapped up. Because of this I can't help but buy some Nike shirts to support my favorite teams. I hate it, but I can't help it.

My hate for Nike has grown in recent years as they have decided to mess with college football tradition and change uniforms. Now all they young kids are eager to see how Nike can change their favorite teams' uniforms. Nike's goal is to create more sales, which is genius from a marketing standpoint. I just favor tradition.

I believe they have stepped beyond what is appropriate with the University of Oregon. Their sponsorship of that team has created an unfair recruiting advantage. It is one thing for Phil Knight to give money to his alma mater, but it is an entirely different thing for his company to work for the university for free.

I hate Nike.

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Commitment

National Signing Day for college football was on Wednesday. This day has really gotten to be rediculous for these high school athletes. We have to remember that these kids are only in high school yet they are already being treated like they are superstar athletes. Some of them are great athletes, but they are still just kids.

In the last ten years or so more and more of these kids have been commiting to a school and then switching their commitment at the last minute. They cannot officially commit until National Signing Day, but they commit verbally as much as a year before they can make it official. Many times these kids who commit early change their minds and end up signing with a different school. That is not a problem unless they wait until the last moments to make that change.

I know that many people call college football recruiting a game, but there is nothing worse than a coach counting on a player's commitment and not recruiting other kids for that position and then the player changing his commitment on signing day. That leaves a hole in the coaches recruiting class that he has to scramble to fill at the last moment. That is what makes this a game. We are letting this generation of kids run this process with their lack of commitment and honor.

These kids do not need to commit to a school before National Signing Day. They can wait to make a commitment until they are sure of their decision and then stick with it. We are creating a generation of kids who will grow up thinking that it is OK to commit to something and then later not follow through. We are babying them. We are creating monsters.

There are a lot of people to blame for this problem. The media who is looking to capitalize on the popularity of college football any way they can. The college coaches who keep allowing and encouraging this to happen. The people that bear the most blame are the parents. We all know that our parenting skills have diminished as a nation. But to buy into the hype of your seventeen or eighteen year old kid is the most rediculous thing. Parents are supposed to have the level heads and help their kids make the corrrect decisions. By allowing kids to drop their commitments we are teaching them a lesson that will haunt them their entire lives.

We need to take a stand and become parents again and not allow our kids to run our lives. We need to teach them the life skills that will allow them to be successful. We need to create the next great generation.

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Citizen Revolt

We entered into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretenses. That is a fact that we cannot ignore. Information was tweaked to support the position of those in charge. While I think that it was a good thing to remove Saddam Hussein from power, the reasons we did so were not correct.

I recently watched two documentaries about the war in Afghanistan, Restrepo and Camp Leatherneck. I watched them because I wanted to see what was going on there. I know that the documentaries can present information as the film maker wants it, but I think they did open my eyes.

Many Americans complain about our personal freedoms being trampled when the TSA gives us pat downs or full body scans in our airports. Conservatives are up in arms that the government is trying to force everyone to have health care. The right wing complains that we are becoming a socialist state and that our government is getting too big. Of course the right wing politicians don't want their jobs or the jobs of their friends eliminated, just the useless government jobs like social services and mental health. How would we feel if our country was occupied by a military force from another country?

Afghan citizens have to deal with the fear of having an occupying force in the ground all around them. They are pushed around and forced to answer to these people from another country. One thing that is repeated in both of these documentaries is that the Afghan people do not like having the US military in their country. They don't like the fact that they have to answer to our young military. I don't blame them one bit.

In Camp Leatherneck it is stated that it costs one million dollars per man per year to have our marines in Afghanistan at that facility and nearby outposts. I don't know how correct that number is, but that is a lot of money! If that number applies to all branches of the military in Afghanistan then we are spending a lot of money on a war that we should not be in. We are also losing a lot of lives that we don't need to be wasting.

The Republicans and Tea Party like to blame our national debt on Obama's "failed" programs. I would like to blame them. They love to say that they favor smaller government, but the military is part of the government and we are spending billions of dollars every year to have our military occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. Those billions of dollars could be used for programs here in the United States our to pay down our national debt, instead of being wasted.

I think we need to cut back our military spending significantly. We should keep the essential programs including DARPA and ARPA-E because their research has given us a lot of the things we use in every day life. We need to lose our belief that we need to police the world, it only makes other countries hate us passionately.

With the unrest happening in Egypt and other countries, now is the time to reduce our role in policing the world and the time to bring our service members home. We are supporting the Egyptian people and are saying that it is their choice to fight for democracy. We are telling them that we do not have a say, but we will support their decision. We should be doing the same thing in Afghanistan and Iraq. We should bring our military home.

Here are some numbers to contemplate:





So the wars have cost us over one trillion dollars and our national debt is fourteen trillion dollars. We spend nearly as much on defense as we do on Social Security and Medicare. That does not make sense to me. These wars are not doing anything to protect us in our daily lives while Social Security and Medicare both do. Take a look at those websites for more information.

I would like to see us utilize Facebook and Twitter to insist that we end these unnecessary wars and focus on our population at home the way the people in Egypt have used them to tell their government that they are not satisfied. We need to rise up and take control of our country the way they have. Tell our politicians that we do not like the way they are wasting our money and our futures. We deserve more.

Use the hashtag #citizenrevolt if you want to see change.

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We Need Change!

My company is struggling with many issues. I could have told you a few years ago that this would happen, but nobody bothered asking me. At that point there were two people promoted to vital positions who do not have the skill set required.

I really do not know how the owner of the company is so blind, but he is. He loves to tell everyone that he can read people well, but he was sold a bill of goods by both of these individuals. His other major problem is that he does not like to get involved in the day to day operations of the company until it is too late. Everything is coming to a head at this moment.

I blame myself for this issue escalating to this point because I did not try to push for change. I don't mean to get those two people fired or demoted, but I should have pushed them for change and then tried to force them to stick with it. Some of their major issues is that they do not track the right information and they do not motivate their direct reports to do their job to the best of their ability.

Another major issues is that a few members of our management team are spending big portions of their day trying to cover for themselves. A few team up to cover for each other as well. This is bad for the company as a whole because we cannot progress if the issues are not being properly addressed. They cannot be addressed if nobody is aware of them and that is what happens when people cover for themselves and/or someone else.

I was not in the meeting when everything bubbled to the surface because I was on a business trip. I was let in on what transpired yesterday by our production manager. It is ironic that I was thinking about some of these issues and how to address them while on my trip.

In my conversation with our production manager I really tried to coach him on the things that he should be doing to improve is department and keep him out of the line of fire. There are four departments in our company that need a lot of improvement and his is one of those. His department is not the worst, but after the two major departmental issues are solved his will be next in line.

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