Well, to my great joy and amusement, The Daily Show had a recent segment on June 1, 2011 that caught my attention. Jon Stewart rattled off about 8 of his favorite pizza places in New York, so I had to pause the show a dozen times and save every location.

Now, a couple days later, it seems like a good idea to share the NYC pizza place map with you, my friends, so here you go.

The actual video (with ads) is on The Daily Show website. It’s called Me Lover’s Pizza With Crazy Broad. He starts the list around the 2:40 mark.

Feel free to let me know if I missed any locations or got any of them wrong.

I’ve been building websites full time since the mid-’90s. For over a decade I got used to pretty steady jobs that paid a decent salary. I always did a little freelance work here and there, but it wasn’t really something that I considered doing full time. (When you have a wife and two young kids, you find yourself preferring stability over risk as much as possible.)

Well, around a year ago, that stability ceased to exist and I was faced with some interesting life decisions:

Do I look for another “real” job? Or, do I try to make it on my own?

If I become my own boss, do I start to ramp up the freelance gigs? Or, do I build some kind of web service that people will pay for? Do I have a good enough idea that could be sustainable?

Most of you who read this blog, will know me as “that photoblog guy”. I created a site called Photoblogs.org way back in 2002 that got some notoriety in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, etc. That was my first real taste of what the internet and online communities can do. As a programmer, I can just think up an idea, put it on the web, and see if it will fly. Pretty neat.

As time went on, (around 2003) I was getting ready to start a family and I didn’t want to take on any unnecessary risks, like starting my own photoblogging company. I already had a great job and my wife and I were in the process of working on our life: a dog, two kids, a couple of cars, and a mortgage. We eventually got the whole enchilada and it’s actually been quite rewarding. I never knew how much there was to learn from being a husband-dad-person. (It’s not always easy, but I feel like I appreciate and understand life better.)

Anyhow, as I was busy being a stable family guy, several amazing web-things were invented. A few have absolutely changed the way I see the world. Favorites include: Flickr, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Techmeme, jQuery, HTML5, Cloud Servers, CentOS, and the iPhone/iPad.

So much is possible in today’s world (at least on the web where I feel at home). The technology is pulling and accelerating at an exponential rate and we’re only just at the beginning of it all.

A year ago I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself. I wasn’t sure if I could make it on my own without having a “real” job. So far, I’ve been able to do some freelance work and make a few deals with some companies and individuals. I’m busy, working from home, taking care of kids, programming, immersing myself in all those innovations listed above, and (best of all) apparently keeping my head above water.

Recently I was jogging with my 3yo daughter in the big-wheeled-stroller-contraption and I decided to write down some of these thoughts and send them out into the world. I started this blog as a way to talk about “things that I’ve done lately”, so this is just a little overview of what’s been going on since I last posted.

I may elaborate more at a later date. In the meantime, thanks to anyone who’s following along.

Over two years ago I shut down one of my favorite projects, Weekly Shot.  I had a feeling I might bring it back sometime, though, since there was such a great community of people who gave the site life.  (It also had some interesting philosophies that I think set it apart from most of the other weekly photo challenges.)

At the time I wasn’t able to maintain Weekly Shot and provide the oversight that it deserved.  Now I’m able to focus more on projects like these, so I’m excited to work and play in this area again.  I’ve always seen these types of communities as experiments (and I mean that in the best possible sense).  It’s fun to try out new rules and ideas and see what resonates with people.  Sometimes we come up with good ideas and sometimes… not so much.

It’s all part of an ongoing process.  That’s why the tag line of my personal blog here is “Create. Learn. Repeat.”  That basically encapsulates the way I like to interact with the world.

Thanks

A big thanks goes out to Tom Foster for giving me the opportunity to create Weekly Shot in the first place.  Without his initial support the site never would have been built and without his generosity it never would have come back to life as it has now.

Get Yourself an Invite

Since I relaunched the site on Thu, Jun 24, 2010, there has been a lot of growing interest.  The site is invite only, but I have opened up a way for people to request an invite from me personally.  If you would like to give the site a try just head over to Weekly Shot and read the instructions in the sidebar on the right.

Update: If you are one of the original members of the site, then your old login/password should still work.

Update 2: I’m working on a way for old members to change their username, if they want. (Several people have asked for this, since they don’t use their same handles anymore.)

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Photo by Alexandre Buisse

A few days ago Delicious led me to The Cult of Done Manifesto.  The basic idea is that breaking projects down into small deliverable parts, and then delivering them repeatedly, is a key to creative success.  Try not to worry about the details as much.  Instead, focus on getting done.

For those of us with perfectionist tendencies, this is a good habit to remember.  Endlessly tweaking little pixels to the left or right can be your biggest enemy, because it stops you from being done.  Just give yourself a time limit and call it done when time’s up.  Now you’re free to move onto something else!

A few of my favorites from the Done Manifesto:

#2.  Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

#6.  The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

#9.  People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

I was particularly struck by #9.  People aren’t right just because they have dirty hands… but, it seems to me, the people with the dirty hands end up being right more often, simply because they have more experience.

So now, I’ve finally created a text blog:  Something I’ve started but never finished for a few years now.

The goal of this blog is to:

1. remind myself, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”
2. share some of the things I’ve done
3. make sure my hands stay dirty on projects I care about

I told myself I’d be done with my first blog post by 3 pm, which is coming up right now.

Photo by yakobusan.