First the West Coast... Now the East Coast

In September, I was in Silicon Valley for some security consulting work. As I said in an old post, I had a wonderful time exploring an area so dense with technology companies. Well, this week I was in New Jersey for more consulting work. While not nearly as pretty as California, I had another great time during a brief, evening tour of Manhattan with my uncle John.
We are working far enough from New York that I was only able to get away one evening. An hour and fifteen minutes on the New Jersey Transit train got me to New York Penn Station to meet John. He has been working with Canon for a few months now in their main office in Long Island and had not been to Manhattan in quite a while. We met in the bowels of the station and struck out for a lively walk in the surrounding area. The Empire State Building, Times Square, and Rockefeller Center were all within reach of our three hour tour. Thankfully, the weather did not start getting rough and there was no ship to be tossed.
We have a busy day today, so with that giant glut of links I have just given you, I will leave you with this tidbit about my excursion. After we got back to Penn Station, I was amazed at part of the process that is daily for New Jersey commuters. I purchase my ticket from one of the automated ticketing stations, and then tried to read the garble to figure out where I needed to go. Only after asking an attendant did I confirm my suspicion that the mass of people at 10:30 pm were all staring at the arrival/departure screens for a reason. Apparently, the procedure is to wait for your train's track to be displayed, then to proceed to one of the twelve or so possible tracks via six different stairwells down. The interesting, amusing, and rather scary part of it all, is that the proper track is displayed minutes before the train is scheduled to depart. Not fifteen minutes, or even ten minutes, but less than five minutes before my ticket said the train would be leaving, the display updated and hundreds of people thundered to the rather narrow stairs down to the narrow tracks to the narrow corridors inside the train to find a seat. Thankfully, the conductors waited for all the people to board, but I half expected the doors to just close and the train to start moving right on time. What a recipe for disaster, and this was many hours past rush hour!