The Times has an Article about the design of the PATH station at the world trade center. While I have mixed feeling about the selection of Leibskind as the architect for the whole site design particularly after I keep hearing about all the issues he is having with the developer and the state, I am absolutely thrilled that Santiago Calatrava is designing the train station.

I am most familiar with Calatrava’s work from visiting the Milwaukee Art Museum which he designed new addition for. His architecture made an otherwise mediocre museum spectacular. It was incredible to explore and interesting in every corner. The museum is said to resemble a boat, although to me it was more like a spaceship. That sense of travel in architecture should be great for a transportation hub.

The PATH station will be the most important part of the complex for me, since that is how I will arrive from Jersey. It is also a key point of the site:

No matter how the design turns out, the terminal will be the architectural face that the new trade center presents to most New Yorkers, since it will be on Church Street, closer to the spine of Broadway and landmarks like the New York Stock Exchange. Freedom Tower and the memorial, by contrast, will be on the west side of the 16-acre site. And the office towers planned on Church Street may be many years distant.

More people will spend more time in this part of the complex than any other. I am glad they will get a good architect.

I am getting into this Friendster thing a little late, I know, but I find it incredibly fascinating. I signed up about a month ago when I got an invitation from Hebron, but have just really gotten into it. I only have 6 friends, but they are diverse enough that I already have more than 100,000 people in my personal network. I do have to admit that Amy seems to be responsible for half of that.

I know Friendster is officially over, but it seems to be like one of those trends that don’t seem to know when to stop. Like Electroclash, Williamsburg, The Atkins Diet, and, well, blogging, everyone knows its finished but people are still doing it because no one has come up with a suitable replacement.

I haven’t contacted anyone on the site except my actual friends, but I find it fascinating fining all these people who are somehow related to people I actually know. I especially like it when someone is connected to two or more of my friends who don’t know each other and aren’t related.

Unfortunately the servers are often very slow. I realize its a free site and that servers cost money, and I think things will speed up once they start charging, but they people will quit in droves and a lot of the fun will be lost.

They could also use better searching. Right now you can narrow the search results by distance from you, gender, who people are looking for and a few other criteria. Although this doesn’t really work. I often look for single women looking for men, but it often brings up women in relationships or otherwise not looking. But I want even more detailed searches. I want to look for people related to at least two of my friends or no more than 3 steps away from me, or only through people with less than 200 friends. Databases can create all sorts of powerful relationships and search criteria, they should allow us to use it to its maximum potential.

This is my entry by the way, which you can’t read unless you are one of the 103,523 people liked to me.

Bush still sucks.

I don’t have anything interesting to say politically, I just felt the blog needed some red.

It’s the biggest tech news of the day:

iTunes for Windows

Welcome, windows users to our wonderful mac music experience. Buying, ripping, organizing, playing, burning and of course iPodding all in one simple, clean application.

Of course there is the store too, which I have been using insanely over the last few days. They have recently added lots of new stuff, including music from independent label like Thievery Corporation.

See that last link? It should lead you directly to Thievery Corporation’s itms page. Here is how you get it: Right click (or control click) on a link in the itms (iTunes music store) and select “Copy iTunes music store URL”. Then paste it. But be sure to change the http:// to itms://. Seems to me a minor error. The http:// link will still get you to the right page, but at least in Safari, it will close your current tab. It happened to me when I was testing a previous draft of this entry. Of corse I lost that posting entirely. This is the more quickly posted, sloppier version.

Also as side note, I can’t seem to figure out how to recover pages from Safari’s cache. I found the cache easily enough at ~/Caches/Safari, but it is so obfuscated that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

I am a total geek and have tons of gadgets. My main one is my laptop (although it is the slightly older titanium version), which I use constantly. Going with me everywhere is my ipod (which just got even more useful) and my older PDA/phone by handspring (its the Treo 180). I’ve got a new digital camera which I just love. I’ve got a digital video camera as well, which isn’t used nearly as often, but still gets used for the occasional final cut pro edit or video experiment.

i was thinking about all of this when I read this interesting article in the times about people buying cool gadgets but never using them. They usually are too complex to set up or they just aren’t useful for people. I found that odd since, while I have tons of gadgets, I use them constantly. I throughly research each gadget before buying them and make sure I know I will need it. Some of it may be buyers guilt. I know that I used my video camera a lot right after buying it, in some ways to justify the purchase. But I still use it, albeit not as often. In fact since I just purchased my camera, I may be “done” on new gadget purchases for a bit (although I may get a flash to go with it), but I feel I have a lot of cool, useful and powerful little electronics.

Weight: 161 lbs
Holding steady.

I haven’t fallen off the wagon; I am still on Atkins. But little has changed. My weight has remained the same for about 2 months. I am clearly in a plateau. But I don’t mind, really. I am nowhere near my goal of ~145 lbs but my pants are 32” and loose. I am still technically overweight by BMI measurement but not by much. I look and feel good. I will probably try to loose more weight this winter to show it off come spring and summer, but I’m in no hurry.

It never gets old seeing someone I haven’t seen since before the diet and getting compliments. It really has been a dramatic change and it makes me thrilled.

In diet news, I found this interesting article via Atrios of all people saying, among other things, that people on low carb diets may be able to eat more calories then those on regular or low fat diets and still loose weight. It is a direct challenge to the principal that “a calorie is a calorie” that many nutritionists hold. That makes sense. I seem to be eating more on Atkins: I am getting a 1/2 pound per meal of meat or fish and a good size helping of veggies. Of course I have no starch and I am working out, but I still feel as though I am eating more.

It’s sure been a while; over a month. No, I don’t know what I was thinking.

• Sam is doing great with his cart. He got a great review picked up by Gawker.
• My brother, Dan, who just moved to New York, got a job as a social worker at the place he really wanted to work.
• Hebron is busy on a film shoot in Delaware.