Month: August 2004

Security is starting to be beefed up more if you could imagine that around Madison Square Garden. I arrived at Penn Station about 6:45 this morning and there was a much stronger police presence. I also saw some secret service agents in Penn Station which I hadn’t seen earlier. As I came out onto 7th Ave. from the main entrance you also noticed more officers and more Sanitation trucks. They are using them to block of sections of the street. They are also keeping a more vigilant eye on pedestrians now. I walked out of the building to take pictures of the very low flying Coast Guard helicopter that had been circling for an hour or so. During that time I walked through one of the barricades to get to a Starbucks. When I came out with my Iced Quad Venti Latte I decided to take a couple of shots since I was at the corner of MSG. After the second picture I gained the attention of the police officers nearby, who promptly inquired what I was doing. My reply was “Just getting a coffee and taking some pictures”, at which point I was escorted towards my building. So things are definitely getting much tighter around here I can only imagine what Thursday will bring. Well enjoy the pictures I shot today on my Moblog.

Ciao

Well anticipating a nightmare trying to get to one of my clients today which are situated two blocks from Madison Square Garden I decided to take the early train out of White Plains at 5:59am. When I got into Grand Central I noticed that security wasn’t as heavy as it has been over the past couple of weeks which surprised me since the Republican Convention kicks off today. When I got off the shuttle train at Times Square that’s when the police presence became evident. They watched everyone getting of the shuttle and boarding trains at going downtown to Penn Station. When I got off at 28th St. since I didn’t want to deal with the barrage of policemen at Penn Station I was surprised at the police presence and the barricades that were put up. They have concrete dividers and fences up all around the Garden and nearby streets. I happen to have a letter that should get me into my clients building since they are within the blocked off area. Since I got in early I was actually able to get up close to the garden and snap some pictures with my Cannon 10D. They actually came out pretty good and they will be posted on the “Moblog“ section. You can reach the Moblog section by clicking the link above in the menubar. I decided to situate myself right next to a cop so that I wouldn’t have to worry about one walking up to me and asking me what I was doing. The cop I was next to watched me open my bag and take the camera out, at which point he asked me who I was with as if I was affiliated with some news agency. I just let him know I was working locally and decided to take some pictures. He was pretty cool about it and we chatted a bit about all the mad hours he and his fellow officers had been putting in over the past week or so. I was speaking with the president of the company I am visiting today when I noticed outside of his windows what seemed to be a sniper perch on top of the Rotunda at the Garden. I decided to climb out the window onto a type of patio area and take some pictures with my telephoto lens. Under close inspection of the photos it seems as if it’s more of a coffee hangout rather than a security detail. If I was one of the delegates attending this I would want these guys watching the surrounding building windows rather than chilling. So enjoy the pictures, I will venture out during lunch and take some more pictures, it may be a little tougher though I noticed from the window that they are limiting foot traffic near the garden.

I have just finished a lot of background coding to the site. I have also upgraded the software used to create the main Blog. I went with a commercial program over the open source alternatives for its vast feature set and support. The software I went with is ExpressionEngine made by pMachine. If you’re looking to create a Blog you have to give this software a look at it is a great piece of software. The forums have been updated so log in and give them a whirl. I will try to complete the “Photo Album” section over the next week. Once that is finished I will complete the family & friends section which will be password protected.

Check back over the next couple of days, due to the frequent post that will be made here. One of my largest clients is 2 blocks from Madison Square Garden. There building is in the blocked off zone, so it will be interesting to see the troubles I have to get trough and get to their building. There was already a large police and security presence there last week. I can only imagine what it will be like with the Republican Convention in full swing. I will bring my Cannon 10D along and snap pictures off and send them directly from the site.

Well, let me go for now to continue coding. And check back for all the changes coming.

Ciao.

Well it is somewhat relocated, still in the same location just on a different box. When I decided to add a forum to this website, I ran into one real big problem. It ran fine locally, however when I tried to access features of it over the Internet from a remote site it would just hang. At first I thought it was a security problem with Windows 2003 Webserver Edition. So I built a new box with Fedora and Apache and low and behold the same problem. At that point I focused on my firewall which has an intrusion detection module and sure enough that was the culprit. On a previous version of the forum software I am using there was a vulnerability, so to protect my web servers from being compromised it was dropping those requests automatically. So after turning those rules off on the firewall all was operating properly. So I guess I could have left it on the other box and all would have been fine. However, the new box is a dual processor box running on Linux so it should be able to handle a lot more requests due to the low overhead without breaking a sweat.