A few days ago I noticed Google added Rochester to Street Views. Surprisingly It’s one of the larger areas that they’ve covered and is very detailed. They even covered parts of Wayne county including my parents house.
While looking at the streets they covered around where I work I found this little gem (pictured below). Apparently their GPS is a little off sometimes.
Saturday I participated in my first Flickr meet up. It was a lot of fun. Myself and a group of 12 or so other photography hobbyists met up at Dinosaur BBQ in Downtown Rochester for a hearty lunch. Then we were off to explore the Abandoned Subway. If you don’t know anything about the subway I suggest checking out the RocWiki Page and reading up a bit. It’s actually quite interesting and may become a part of downtown Rochester again soon.
The slideshow below showcases all the photos the participants have shared. These are not only my photographs, they are the photographs taken by all participants of the event.
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649
NOTE: If you cannot see the above slideshow please view the original post or view the slideshow directly.
No matter what people tell you there is a lot to do in downtown Rochester. There are lots of museums, parks and weekend activities. Last Saturday Rachel actually had off so we went downtown on the bus and took our bikes along for the ride. The idea was to ride around and see some things we normally take for granted in Rochester. This was the first time with the bikes on the bus and every time we hit a bump I peaked my head up over the seat thinking I’d get to witness them shattering all over 490. Luckily they made it in one piece.
Our first stop was the Center at High falls where we got an awesome 10 minute taxi cab tour of the city including the now closed silver stadium! The Center also hosts a photography gallery on the 2nd floor which we took in and learned that Rochester’s main street completely flooded in 1865. From there we headed out across the footbridge to take in High Falls itself and then we were off for lunch.
While eating inside, the Hail started and WOW! I went outside to grab a few pictures and got nailed with one in the leg. It left a mark! Don’t worry, as always in Rochester Ny, If you don’t like the weather just wait 10 minutes, it’ll change. It did, but not much. We decided to play it safe and hop the next bus.
This trip was short, but not for lack of things to do. Next trip we’re heading to the Eastman House, Memorial Art Gallery, Susan B Anthony Park, among several others. We’ll also be making the trek up to the lake along the river if we have enough time. If not, we’ll catch it next time!
Utilizing the bus and our bikes to make these trips is very satisfying. I only wish they ran on Sundays too.
Ever wanted to know your Twitter trends? Well now you can generate a cloud of all your tweets using Tweet Clouds. My Cloud is below. Clearly I need to stop replying to @npike so much.
Now that you know the words you use most frequently, wouldn’t it be nice to know how you used them? That’s where Tweet Scan comes in handy. In fact the tag cloud Tweet Cloud gets you has links but they go nowhere (every one just links to #, I’m not sure what that’s useful for…). This following is the Tweet Scan search results for Rochester for my username only.
The wind in Rochester was incredible today. I’m not sure how high it got up to but it knocked over some newspaper stands just as I left work and I was greeted with flying newspapers.
Thursday RohrBachs opened their new brewery downtown with a bang. They had a grand opening that included free beer and free food! The food was great and I will definitely be picking up some pierogies from The Pierogie Guy. The beer was, of course, excellent. One of my favorites is always the RohrBachs Scotch Ale which is what we had on tap at our wedding but they had many other excellent choices available such as Nate’s Pale Ale and their Vanilla Porter.
To christen the new downtown brewery Mayor Bob Duffy spoke at the event. It was surprising to see him there as there is trouble with passing the New York Budget this year because of all the scandal surrounding the governor. However; Duffy is taking the renovation of Rochester seriously and he took the reopening of a downtown Rohrbachs brewery personal. That he’s neighbors with the owner of Rohrbachs obviously has nothing to do with it.
A short time ago I found a website that has lots of historical photos and postcards along with time-lines named Vintage Views of Rochester. Apparently I’m the last person in Rochester to find it, but i thought I’d share it anyway. The following is a postcard depicting the aqueduct (broad street) as well as the building I work in (the large brick building in the center of the postcard).
A true Web service is only as good as it’s users make it. I just recently discovered Yelp and luckily they have a Rochester page. I have recently been trying to find a website that lists local restaurants along with ratings. Yahoo and Google business results return too many chains that aren’t of interest to me since they’re available anywhere. I’ve been looking for results that are more locally oriented such as the listings found within a Frommer’s guide.
Fortunately Yelp provides everything I’m looking for in restaurants and even has lots of extra categories such as Night Life, Beauty and Spas and Shopping. I was interested to find they also have a list of romantic restaurants which is always difficult to find in Rochester. In order of highest ratings these are the following Rochester romantic restaurants on Yelp:
The only one of these that Rachel and I have been to is Tapas (which was excellent and I’ll be sure to rate it thus). We haven’t even heard of any of the others. There are a few missing from this list, like the Triphammer Grill, that we have been to but it’s always great to find new ones.
If you’re looking for new restaurants or shops to check out, look no further than Yelp.
My niece’s brother, Jeffrey Mullin, was recently shot and killed in Rochester NY. It’s always extremely sad when someone so young passes away but when it’s from such a violent act it hits twice as deep. Unfortunately Rochester is one of the most violent cities in America and we live and work right smack dab in the middle of it. People here often dismiss the murders in Rochester to the gangs and somehow believe it doesn’t happen to good citizens. Try telling that to Cassandra, my niece. Somehow I think you will come away with a different opinion.
It’s time to wake up Rochester. We need more police presence and we need better schools. According to the 2006 census there’s roughly 200,000 people living in the city of Rochester. There were 54 Murders here in 2005 and 50 so far in 2007. That’s roughly 1 in every 3700 people. Put another way, thats almost 27 people for every 100,000. That’s almost four times the national average (which is only 7)!
The Democrat and Chronicle has a piece entitled Not Forgotten where they list each of this year’s murders and have short slide shows dedicated to them. I think this is important. I think people forget that these murders are more than just statistics and that every one of the people lost was important to someone.
I copied Jeff’s slide show for my niece and I thought I’d share it with everyone, so they could learn a little bit about Jeff instead of hearing about number 50.
I’ve also uploaded the original in case anyone wanted a copy to share.
We’d been trying to rent ratatouille from redbox for a few days but it was out literally everywhere in Rochester. Finally I found one available at the Perinton wegmans on Wednesday so I rented it online. Yep Redbox now allows you to rent movies online. Well, not streaming or anything unfortunately, but you can reserve it at a Redbox location online.
Ratatouille was a great movie. There was more humor in it than usually is found in the new animated movies. I found myself thoroughly enjoying it. The trailer is below.
[metacafe]http://www.metacafe.com/watch/663432/ratatouille_trailer_tv_spot/[/metacafe]
Randy Aldrich 