Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
The Golden Ticket
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I signed a lease on an apartment in Astoria, in Queens. Astoria feels like San Francisco's Ingleside/West Portal with a bit of the Mission, only lots of Greek instead of lots of Spanish. Many thanks to Fog Creek and to John for their instrumental roles in getting me the place.
The shipping container gets delivered Friday morning; anyone in NYC want to help me move boxes for an hour?
I am getting used to the tradeoffs of living in New York. Various protocols are byzantine and efficient. One enters it after many players in all the markets have brutally competed and iterated through a lot of opportunities and loopholes, and though "[i]t is usually incorrect to believe that you are on the efficient frontier", businesses in NYC seem nearer the efficient frontier than in other cities I've visited.
The best preparation I had for living in New York was probably living in St. Petersburg for a summer and visiting Tokyo for two weeks. I learned how to get out of people's way.
In conversation, Adam and I decided that living in New York City is a skill with a big learning curve, like knowing Unix. Many people use it all the time without really mastering it, which is fine, because you only need to know the bits you use. And having a goal, or a set of tasks to accomplish, directs and facilitates one's study.
Off to change my address in a billion places.
