Matt and Norah's Infinite Playlist

The celebs! Oh, the celebs!
Get ready for another filibuster, folks. I've been burning the candle at both ends (and holding a match to the middle) for a few weeks now. Now that my mind, like my candle, is a melted mess, it must be time to tell my three-week supply of tales. And sitting on a 4-8:30 p.m. nap, I just might have the vigor to do it.

Without further ado (and if there's one thing the Reichmanifesto is known for, it's piling on the ado), it's time for my NY celebrity update! What, you thought that "Oh, the celebs!" line back there was just to fill seats? No ma'am, I've got celebs in spades. For those of you keeping score at home, as well as those of you who can't stomach the whole Reichmanifesto, but don't want to be lost at the water cooler tomorrow either, here is the updated list (with ensuing narrative on deck):

Bob Costas
Tiger, Phil, et al.
Tina Fey
Steve Carrell
Norah "!!!!!" Jones (of "Future Missus Reichman" fame)
Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (of Diggnation fame)
Anil Dash
The voice of Jafar (of "I love your beard; it's so...twiiiiisted" fame)
The voice of Douglas Yancey Funnie (of "I Need Mo' Allowance" fame)
Barack-A-Doodle (his caravan, anyway)
Marissa Mayer (of Google fame)
William Sadler
Tyra Banks
Guy who plays Roy on the Office (new update: his name is David Denman)
Tiki Barber
Donald Trump
Glenn Beck
An actress from a telenovela on "Univision"
Kyle Monson, my boss/the bassist for Mere, who plays the "Higher" song on a Haier commcercial.

Guess which celeb I'm most excited about? I'll give you a hint: It's Norah Jones!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Guys, I don't even know where to begin (pictured above, by the way). I've harbored a crush of depressing proportions for as long as I can remember (my memory only goes back to 2002). I'm not even kidding, now I know what it was like to be a middle-school girl during the JTT/Devon Sawa days/daze. Anyway, I happened upon an unassuming little bulletin, buried in the back of the Onion (I hardly ever read the AV Club; 'twas fate), announcing a radio show featuring Noritah at Le Poisson Rouge downtown.

Seeing as how I didn't have a ticket, I camped outside the little club a few hours before showtime, with a roast-beef samich, two Wild Cherry Pepsi's, a box of Shock Tarts (I refuse to call them "Shockers"), and Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days" as company. After some gut-wrenching limbo, a portly version of Tracy McGrady sold me a ticket and let me through. Now here's the thing: when people say "Dude, we were right there, inches away!" that usually means "Dude, I was awash in a sea of general admission, nowhere near the stage!" But this was an intimate little joint, and I pounced on the closest seat at the closest table, and as the girl sitting next to me in the computer lab is my witness, I swear that I could touch the front of the stage from my seat. I downed an expensive and watery Cherry Coke, folded my arms, and waited.

Guys, she was (is) an angel. An angel with a little NYC edge, that is, with short hair (with a dyed streak) and a small tattoo on her wrist. For some reason, I always expected her to be shy and quiet, but she was the ideal blend of cool and humble; almost like Mary Hatch on "It's a Wonderful Life"--the sweet girl that knows she has grown up to be quite a catch, but still gets a little nervous around George Bailey. The Radio Happy Hour comprised an interview with Norah, a three-part skit with Norah, and two Norah songs in between ("My Old Man of the Hour" and "Little Room"). The answer is yes, her voice really is that good. If, for some reason, Norah spurns me (not gonna happen, but if) and elects not to be my wife, I will just have to be astronomically wealthy and hire her to sing me to sleep every night. Plus, she held her own in the busting of chops during the skit/interview. Sigh.

PCMag Coworker Joke Break:

Brian: I think it may be time to reunite my early-90s comedy troupe, the Internuts. We had a 28k smileup connection.

Laarni: He's frozen, like Walt Disney. In animated suspension.
Whitney (right on cue): I think you mean "suspended animation." "Animated suspension" is what you call Cirque du Soleil.

Brian: Pew Research should stick to investigating what it knows best--onomatopoeias for laser guns.

Steve Carrell/Michael Scott/Agent Scarn and I are basically buds now. I'm 87% sure he touched my backpack. See, on my way to see my coworker Chris Phillips play with his rockin' band at B.B. Kings, I stumbled upon a confused/excited herd of tourists in Times Square; a block of road, specifically the median, was roped off. Turns out Steve Carrell and Tina Fey (grainily pictured above, thanks to my camera that broke right after I took this) were shooting a scene for the forthcoming "Date Night." Bombshell Tina had big hair, a blue dress, and her usual cleavage, while The World's Best Boss sported a snappy black suit.

We (the herd and I) stuffed into the sidewalks, watching the duo stroll through six or seven takes up and down the median. A band of mustached palookas lined the sidewalk to ensure that the gooseneckers didn't bleed into the road, where they would have blended right in with the hired extrys, and all Hell would break loose. After a few minutes I had had my fill, and tried to leave. Like a salmon swimming in a stream where a bunch of other salmon are trying to watch a couple really famous salmon, I made little progress. I heard the security apes reminding the people to stay on the sidewalk and keep moving, as they had been, but now with feeling. I felt a big surge from behind, and just as I turned around to tell the apes that I wanted to keep it moving just as badly as they did, but rough-housing would get us nowhere, Steve and Tina rushed past me to a tent set up next to Sephora. I thought they were still on the median doing their thing, and there they were, no more than a foot away, and if my backpack theory is correct, zero foots away! I tell ya, I just can't seem to keep these celebs off me.

Latest PCMag Doin's Break:
How to Offload Your Cell-Phone Pictures
Father's Day: Geeky Gifts for Offbeat Dads
Bing TV Ad: Bing Rescues World from Google Ruin

My dad texted me yesterday to tell me U.S. Open tickets were going for $10 bucks on StubHub. I bought a ticket (lousy $15 StubHub last-minute processing fee), hit the hay at midnight, then woke up at 3 a.m. to head to Penn Station. I wasn't sure how long it would take to get out to Long Island, pick up my ticket at the StubHub station at the Holiday Inn, and get down to Bethpage, so I erred on the early side. Saw a guy who really got worked over in a fight on the subway. I think he was on his way to the hospital. I got there at 5:30 a.m., and the security guys told me I was the first spectator there. The first!

I couldn't quite decide on a spectator strategy, but I figured my "kid in a candy store" brain would rush me to all the wrong places at all the wrong times, so I decided to install myself on the front row of the grandstand on the right side of the 18th green, and stay put. Great choice! Since the bottom half of the field worked through most of the back nine yesterday, we had golfers on the green in just a few minutes past the 9 a.m. horn. I sat with a bench full of bulldog-shouldered New York guys. No offense to Johnny Miller, but you can't beat the "I sawr his baul shoot to da right in de cabbage, no freagin' way he's hittin' outta dat" commentary. It was hilarious, and definitely spiced up the dull stretches.

I'll tell you, watching these guys pop their irons onto the elevated green was like watching a giant game of billiards. Rocco Mediate had the shot of the day, plopping the ball just a few yards from the pin, then pulling the string so she rolled backward just a foot away (birdie). Rocco is still a fan favorite after last year's Open, and got a standing ovation. Tiger was larger than life. He shot an uninspiring par on 18, but the guy looked like royalty out there. If it isn't my most star-struck moment of my life, it's up there. The crowd cheered Phil all the way down the fairway, and was heartbroken when he missed his birdie putt just an inch to the right (everybody missed to the right, it was like watching a horror movie--"Don't go in there!").

My highlight? On my way to the port-a-john, the path was a complete quagmire, so the grounds crew was spreading hay all over the place. A cute Bethpage employee walked past one of the crew guys, a good-ol' boy farmer type, and said "Hey." Then he said, "Good joke." "What?" "You know, hey...hay." "Oh." Classic exchange. I wanted to to pat him on the back and say, "Forget her, brother. The right one's out there somewhere."

I am tired and so are you. The end. For now.

Costco-Sized Post: DC, PC Mag, and Much, Much More!

This just might be my most ambitious blog post yet. So much ground to cover, and coming into the thing with an empty stomach and tired eyes, as well. Like Jordan fighting flu-like symptoms. A fool's errand? Maybe. But I didn't choose this task. It chose me. So here it goes, in possibly the worst formatting I could have ever chosen (but I'm neck-deep in it now, and there's no turning back. Plus, now I'm curious to see if my text can reach the bottom of my photos). C'est la guerre! Text sequence will correspond to photo sequence, but on the juxtaposition thereof I place no guarantee. Suggested bathroom breaks will be marked in yellow.
Warshington, D.C.
Rachel, Jamie, Erika and I took a trip down to Obama Town over Memorial Day weekend. First off, the two-bit, no-good, snake-in-the-grass Megabus pulled the wool over my eyes. I polled my coworkers for travel suggestions, and everybody seemed to land on Megabus and Bolt Bus, but warned against the economical but wholly unreliable Chinatown bus lines. Bolt was booked solid (we decided to go to DC just the night before), and Mega was going fast, so I snagged some Saturday morning tickets just in the nick of time. Done. That night, as we were arranging our itinerary, we looked up our departure location, and noticed that it was actually just half a block away from Chinatown. "Don't worry, it's not a Chinatown bus. It's Megabus' affiliate, Eastern Travel, we're fine." "Then why does it leave out of Chinatown?" "It's not a Chinatown bus." Despite my stubborn insistence, Eastern Travel was indeed a Chinatown bus, masquerading as a reputable people-mover under the Megabus name. Scallawags! I was pretty nervous trekking down to Canal Street that morning, fearing a 13-hour journey in a three-wheeled jalopy full of chickens, stolen purses, and ornate parade dragons. Fortunately, our trip was mostly without incident, apart from the 90 minutes it took us to actually leave Manhattan because we went to Penn Station to pick up more passengers even though Penn Station is a heckuvalotcloser than Chinatown to our house but it didn't give us that option on the Megabus Web site, now did it?
Anyway, we got to Obama-Rama all in one piece (quick aside: back when we first started hearing about him, I always forgot whether his name was Barack Obama or Obama Barack, and don't try and tell me I'm the only one. Anyhow, when people mention "the Obamas" it still kind of carries over and it sounds like they're saying "the Georges" or "the Martys" and it sounds funny). Let me just say that Saturday evening was absolutely my favorite part of the trip. It was cool and crisp, the crowds were minimal, and we seemed to have the gloaming draped monuments to ourselves (relatively). It was really marvelous, and the new WWII memorial was enough to send shivers up my spine. People talk about the people and politics in DC being such a mess, and they are, but a visit to our nation's capitol really is inspiring. All the memorials of men and women that weathered wars, living existences so starkly different from mine that they might as well have lived on different planets in a different universe, well, they have a way of sucking the selfishness right out of your soul. The Jefferson Memorial is still my favorite, I have to say. It was interesting that, since my last visit (which was sometime between the ages of 8 and 12), the buildings had not swelled in size in my memory, as youngish memories are wont to do. Quite the opposite--I had forgotten how immense everything really is in DC. And how about that Washington subway system? If I were a political pundit, I would make a tired crack about how the fancy, expensive DC subway system is actually very inefficient, and thus a typical use of our tax dollars. Seriously though, compared to the NY system, the DC system is infinitely cleaner, with high-ceiling-ed stations, fancy-schmancy turnstiles, track-side warning lights for approaching trains, and LED displays to tell you how far away your train is. The problem? It's expensive, slow, and only occasionally gets you from point A to point B. It's more like point A to point 2, and you have to walk back over to the alphabet to get to B. The NY system is greasy, grimy, cheap, and fast, and you really can get anywhere. It's like comparing Denny's on its slow nights (almost always) to a Waffle House.

(bathroom break)

Yikes, I burned right through those first photos. So Sunday was full of great visits, but they were made in a considerably less peaceful fashion. It was about a million degrees, and a googleplex-percent humidity. I'm a Georgia peach, but this was bad. We went to the DC Zoo, which was awesome, except that the entire country showed up without consulting us first, which made the sweaty factor almost unbearable (your forearms slide past so many other sweaty forearms that you end up grossly basted in salt and runny sunscreen, even if you started the day without any). During our visit to the reptile house (which was, and I didn't think it was possible, even more humid inside), I completely stopped caring for whatever flora and fauna lied beyond the condensation-coated windows. They could have had a unicorn/manticore cage match in there and I wouldn't have noticed or cared, I just wanted out. But the zoo had its highlights, the ornery, growling tiger being my favorite. Then we went to the Holocaust Museum, which was educational, horrifying, inspiring and unbearably depressing all at once. Walking through the concentration camp traincar was especially chilling, and once again made me feel like a complete waste for worrying about my own troubles and woes. We arrived fairly pitifully at the Museum of Natural History, hungry and depressed, and couldn't quite buoy our spirits back up until we went to the museum cafe, where a Coke and a giant blue-whale cookie finally infused some life back into me (which I mention not entirely as an irreverent segue, but to say that the discouraging evil felt in that Holocaust history was palpable and actually physically taxing).

Monday morning we made our way to Virginia to meet Verlan, aka Verlan the Generous and/or Ellen DeGeneres, who took us to Arlington National Cemetery. When we arrived, Pres. Obama was just leaving, and we stood on the roadside watching his motorcade pass by. I pretty much saw him. I mean, I saw a few black limousines and several black SUVs zoom past, and I looked in the windows and saw shapes of people, one of whom had to be Mr. Baracktober, so my eyeballs in all likelihood registered his image. In a few years' time, this story will transform into me hoopin' it up with Obama and his pals at the White House. When that day comes, you never heard otherwise, ya hear? We watched a bit of a memorial service at the Tomb of the Unkown Solider (where I found out that there are actually three real soldiers buried there) and that was definitely my most meaningful (if not the only meaningful) Memorial Day of my life. I spent half the time thinking of Admiral Greer's (James Earl Jones) funeral from "Clear and Present Danger," which, being the only military funeral I have in my memory bank, still gave me plenty of patriotic pause. Odd and slightly stupid, but there you go. Monday's excursion on the Beijing Bullet was 10% tardy and 90% hilarious. We got to the hole-in-the-wall Eastern Travel station and were told that, even though we had arrived 20 minutes early, and even though our ticket says arrive 15 minutes early, and even though we had a printed reservation for the 5 p.m. bus, our 5 p.m. bus was inexplicably full. The Chinese fellow that delivered this news was straight out of an anime cartoon. He was short, bald, and extremely agitated, but not in a furious way. More like a "Three Stooges" desperation. His English was very limited, and the more excited he got, the less English he spoke, which was difficult because passenger after passenger came in, just like us, saying "Hey, wait a minute," and the scheduling conflict was obviously not this man's fault, but was his to deal with nonetheless. After a few minutes of trying to explain that we would have to take the 5:30 bus, he randomly started shouting "Fi Turty!" at every passerby, probably even at locals just passing through. That afternoon probably took a few years off his well-meaning, tightly-wound soul.

(bathroom break)

The PC Magazine Laboratory
It will be less wordy from here on out, I promise. My growling stomach and strobing eyeballs promise, too. Editor's note: I am seconds away from biting my mouse cable in half and punching the daylights out of this computer screen--Blogger can't decide where it wants to put my words in relation to these photos, so it's just spilling them willy-nilly all over the place and occasionally deleting the photos with no explanation. So I'll just label my paragraphs, 1-10, to correspond with these remaining 10 photos. Whew.

(1) So I work at the coolest place ever. Even though I'm on the editorial staff, not the reviews team, my work station is in the PCMag Labs, where they do all their testing. I keep a tidy area, and take flak for my post-lunch toothbrush and toothpaste on the top shelf, but so what? I recently found out that the phone to the left of my monitor is mine, so I made a goal to make a call sometime soon. I think when I do, it will be appropriate to speak in code, given my setting.

(2) This is Dan Evans' delightful domain. He reviews videogames, and occasionally, being the eager, helpful intern that I am, I volunteer to assist him in his duties, be it Guitar Hero, Punch-Out!, or Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Not that I'm really into gloating (because I'm not), but I suppose I do find a smidge of pleasure in swapping war stories with the other BYU interns.

(3) The guy in the orange is PJ "I have every letter of the alphabet in my name" Jacobowitz, the camera analyst, and the guy in the blue is Cisco Cheng, the laptop guru. Both brilliant and entertaining. PJ's the one whose camera video reviews have really gotten my acting career off the ground (shoot! I should have referred Will Sadler to PJ's reviews so he could discover me my talent!).

(4) Cutting-edge computers as far as the eye can see (assuming your eye can see about 30 feet). They're beauties. I just wish I had the tech chops to play with them.

(5) That's me waving my ID card (hidden inside my mini duct-tape billfold) in front of the sensor that majestically opens the glass doors to the labs. I was absolutely in love with these doors for the first few days (actually, I didn't have an ID card for my first few days, and you need one to get in and out, so PJ had to let me out to go to the bathroom, then stand vigil until I returned). Not so much anymore, although I'd be lying if I still didn't feel like a big shot every time I came and went. My main gripe is that the doors sometimes malfunction, randomly opening and closing (noisily, and right behind me) for no reason, up to 10 times in a row.

(6) I sure wish this paragraph were next to its matching photo, but Blogger can't seem to manage that. Anyway, we're down to that first screen shot now. As I've said before, braggadocio doth offend my humble soul, not to mention it undermines my stalwart professionalism. But if I were prone to boasting (once again, which I'm not), I would do it like this: My How-To story struck gold! It takes a good deal of luck, but once a story gains a little momentum on blog aggregators and feeds, it can really explode. I figured my day in the sun would be brief and relatively shady, but my story somehow got picked up by Googlenews, StumbleUpon, and digg, somehow gathering over 75,000 views. That overshoots my SSB story by quite a margin.

(7) & (8) Screenshots of digg and StumbleUpon. Apparently my story was at the top of the digg homepage, but I never saw it. Looking at it now, though, it has 663 diggs and 1344 Stumbles.

(9) The very next day, I was lucky enough to write a story on a particularly hot topic (the Palm Pre) and got to be on the homepage again. "From the Palm Pilot to the Palm Pre" wasn't a lightning rod like the How-To, but it had a brief stint on the digg homepage and got enough hits to give me something that I guarantee won't happen again anytime soon: In photo (10) you'll see that I had two of the most popular stories on PCMag.com on the same day! Hooray! Part of me wants to erase all this because I feel really lame going on about it, but heck, I'm excited about it, and with journalism in the toilet these days, these moments may grow fewer and farther in between.

The End! Chipotle time.

Worst Sno-Cone Ever

This really boggles my mind. A sno-cone server in a Wichita zoo accidentally (pronounced "AX-i-DENT-ully," like we don't really believe it) poured commercial degreaser onto the shaved ice instead of blue razzberry. That it happened is believable enough, I suppose (similar colors), but the fact that four people got sick from it is puzzling. That means they got past one bite! Unless they all took a giant chomp simultaneously, which is unlikely, it means they took enough bites to a) get sick, and b) distance themselves enough from the sno-hut that they couldn't say, "Hey, wait a minute, this isn't blue syrup, sir, can I have a new one?" spit it out, and prevent a repeat occurrence. To be fair, I've never tasted commercial degreaser, but I'll wager a whole jug of it that it doesn't taste like blue razzberry.

Here's the whole story on USA TODAY.

The Hours Aren't Great, But the Pay is Decent

I was looking for a part-time job on Snagajob.com. One of these things is not like the others.

Item!

My celeb (short for celebrity) resume just doesn't know when to quit! I mean, I practically shook hands with President Ba "Rocko" Bama on Monday (I'll get to my DC trip in my next post). But this morning, I got on the subway (a heretofore barren wasteland for celeb sightings) and saw three black gentlemen gearing up to sing a tune for the subway car. No, this isn't leading to a 75% Boyz II Men sighting, but that's something to shoot for. I noticed a distinguished-looking fellow with a mile-wide smile anticipating the impromptu concert. I saw him and did a double-take (less experienced celeb-spotters would have required a quadruple-take, at the very least) and said, "Hey, are you an actor?" He said, "Yes, are you?" Then we both had a laugh. Then I said, "Hey, were you in August Rush?" and he said "Yes, I am." Then we talked for a bit, and he told me he's from Poughkeepsie (a geo-lexical accomplishment in itself) and he's in town doing a Broadway show called "Exit the King" with Susan Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush. Then I sheepishly asked what his name was, and he politely told me "William Sadler." Then my stop came and he said, "Why don't you star in my next movie about up-and-coming journalists who are awesome at basketball?" Actually, he said it was a pleasure to meet me, and I said "likewise" like a courteous adult, and I went into work feeling like a million bucks. Mr. Sadler is a top-notch chap. My only regret is that "August Rush" was the only thing with him in it that popped into my mind at the time. How did I miss his role as Wild Bill Overbeck in "Rocketman?" Here's my newly updated NY Celeb Resume:

William Sadler
Tyra Banks
Guy who plays Roy on the Office
Tiki Barber
Donald Trump
Glenn Beck
An actress from a telenovela on "Univision"
Not to mention my boss, Kyle Monson, who's the bassist for Mere, who plays the "Higher" song on a Haier commcercial.

In other news,



The thing is, professionals like me don't get excited when their story (The Best How-To and DIY Sites) goes on the homepage, but I'll go ahead and post a snapshot here just to show how ironic and dry my sense of humor is, plus I'll say "The article is okay, nothing special" to show how humble I am. Because this is small potatoes to me, even if it might seem exciting to you guys. No big deal. Speaking of deals that aren't big, we were on the Glenn Beck show again on Memorial Day. My third television appearance (well, my face's second, but my arms' third) in a month here in NYC! Not bad at all.

Irritations, Etc.

I'm glad you asked. The answer is yes, stickers on baseball hats and the Omniture billboards along I-15 irritate me to no end. First of all, don't even get me started on the way these pipsqueaks are wearing their ballcaps these days. And their music! Youth is wasted on the young. But seriously, even Curtis' cap's fragile perch annoyed me, and he was working with a) a 90-degree angle hair edge and b) cartoon physics, and it still bothered me thinking how often it must fall off his head. Kids these days don't so much wear hats as they do keep a hat hovering near their head, at the ready, in case they need to wear one in an emergency. 

At any rate, needless to say, the brand sticker-on-the-brim is hilarious to me. Or irritating, depending on my mood. The first several times I saw it, I figured the hats must have been recently purchased. I thought that for a very long time, actually, because I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea of purposefully allowing stickers to permanently live on my hat. It was always humiliating when I was foolish enough to forget to remove the long and skinny "32x32 32x32 32x32 32x32 32x32" stickers on a new pair of jeans.

Some PCMag stuff:

6th-Grader from San Antonio Wins 2009 Doodle 4 Google Competition
Assistive Technology: Low Vision Doesn't Mean Low-Tech

Starring in PJ Jacobowitz' camera video-reviews is my bread and butter. I come in about 1:30 in.

On the Glenn Beck Show!

Watch for the kid in the blue!



Two things:
During the taping, I had the driest mouth in the universe. My lips felt like cotton balls. So there was plenty of lip-licking. Also, it turns out it's really hard not to laugh for no reason when you know the camera is pointed at your section and you're in the background, like when you remember a funny joke during church or something. I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to not start giggling randomly whenever the guys around me talked. That, along with the Triscuit mouth, made for some funny pensive/worried/amused/nervous combo faces. Be sure to watch his show on Memorial Day, I'll be on that one, too.

Also, here are a couple PCMag items:
NASA on YouTube: Atlantis Mission Videos
My Favorite 12 Google Maps Mashups: Friday Time-Waster Special (this one was #2 on Yahoo's Sci/Tech Buzz for awhile on Friday afternoon)
My bio on Appscout/Gearlog (now I'm official)

Also, I just found out about this:
Matt Reichman and Matt Payne Honored in Hearst Journalism Competition
I wasn't quite sure how to tell Rachel, the reporter, that I wasn't especially excited about a tie-for-seventeenth-place finish out of a field of 87 entrants. I mean, it's better than 87th, I suppose. I just thought it was hilarious that 17th place came down to a tie. I think that's when you know you need more decisive judges. It must take them forever to pick a movie on their Hearst Journalism Competition Judges' Night Out at the Movies.

Back in the Saddle Again!

This is why my journals (editors note: embarrassingly, Matt first wrote "diaries") are always so short-lived. I get busy for a few weeks, then get behind for some reason or another, and then the OCD lurking somewhere inside me can't stand to skip over the lost time, so I wait and wait and wait for that perfect moment to fill in the gaps. And of course, that moment never comes. So I give up. But Reichmanifesto deserves a better fate, if nothing else because I paid $15 to get the dot com domain name for a year. So to recap, here's what's happened (I'll give a dollar to anyone outside my immediate family that reads all of this, including the links. Come to that, I'll give a dollar to anyone within my family that reads all of this, including the links):

1) I stormed out of the Daily Herald, shouting phrases like "the people have a right to know!" and "journalistic integrity" and "the news never sleeps, so why should we?" Actually, the Daily Herald was 100% awesome, and I miss it. Here are my last stories for UV Weekly:

Adam Pasion
Broke City
AF Symphony: Salute to Youth
Symphony's 50th Season
Lipizzaner Stallions

2) I graduated (I got one single B in my entire BYU career ... until I got all B's my last semester)
3) I moved to New York City (Hey! I'm walkin' heah!)
4) I started my internship for PC Magazine (pcmag.com)

I've also delayed posting the million bajillion things that I've done since I got to NY because I actually haven't snapped a single photo yet. Somehow, the act of uniting my camera battery and battery charger (Two of maybe 12 items currently in my possession out here) at the wall socket is impossible for me. Every time we go do something cool, I reach for my camera and remember that I haven't charged the battery. Sigh. Someday. At any rate, I hate to talk about NY without photos, so I'll steal some from a friends blog, and I hereby resolve to do better at taking the occasional photograph and posting it here. Pinky swear.

Here a few bites from the Big Apple:

So I work for PC Magazine, which doesn't actually publish a printed magazine anymore. It's just PCMag.com now, along with its satellite blogs, including Gearlog.com, Appscout.com, GoodCleanTech.com, and a few others. As an editorial intern, I write for PCMag, Gearlog and Appscout. In no particular order, here's what I've done with my first two weeks at the 'Mag:

PeeWee PC Releases Kid-Friendly Tablet
Paid Search Ads Cash In on Swine Flu Epidemic
Vote for Oodles of Google Doodles
PageTweet: 140 Extra Characters...Sort Of
Star Trek For Non-Trekkies: A Primer (this one got some real mileage)
Google and YouTube Get Hitched
MyDinos Virtual World for Kids: Free Beta Invite! (go to mydinos.com! I'm quoted at the top of the homepage!)
Lyrics iPhone App: Hum Along No More
Famous Twitterers: Celebrities' First Tweets (co-author)
Franz Ferdinand, Allman Brothers Get the Rock Band Treatment
Stanton Turntables Turn Vinyl to Digital
OtterBox Defender Series Cases
Eye-Fi Adds Photobucket, Picasa, and SmugMug Video Uploading

I also manage the new "PCMagafterhours" twitter feed, for the Twitterers among you.

I'll wait to tell you how awesome my building/work area are because I'd prefer to have pictures to go with it. I'll also hold off on my living area (Columbia's International House on 123rd and Riverside). Here are some random NY observations that happen to be floating around in my head right now:

- You can't beat sports for universal fraternity. I've met some great folks here while watching the NBA playoffs. You can always count on a few of us to be in the TV room watching the games each night, and, as in war, friendships forged during series like the Bulls/Celtics just might last forever.
- So far, I've seen (nay, stood mere inches away from) Donald Trump, Tiki Barber, Tyra Banks and the guy who plays Roy on the Office. The Holladay House's expertise in instantly identifying crossover role players from "Lost" and "24" in other shows has given me a sharp eye for celebs and quasi-celebs. Stay tuned for more.
-NY sure has some weird smells. I went to the Bank of America ATM the other day and it smelled like a Subway sandwich with extra vinegar. How about that.
-Here's the thing about NY crowds - I thought I would be miserable here because I absolutely hate crowds. You can't pay me enough to go to Six Flags anymore because I hate everybody there. But folks don't bother me so much here because everybody is doing there own thing. Whereas at the DMV or Six Flags or the mall, everybody is competing with you for the same space during the same activity, the New York streets are crawling with Falafel vendors, bums, high-paid executives, lousy street guitarists and 7,000 other occupations. Somehow, that makes it better. Not that I particularly enjoy stand-up spooning five other Subway passengers on my way to work every day, but it's just not quite as bad as I thought it would be.

More to come. Tell your friends that Reichmanifesto.com is back and New-Yorker than ever.

Jumble

Check it out - BYU on the Onion! Well, a photo, anyway.

Daily Herald stuff

The Yarrow

David Archuleta

Draper Temple

Oquirrh Mountain Temple

Videogame Study

Links

I don't know if anyone ever really clicks on these, but I guess listing them on my blog kind of serves as a personal catalog for me, so I'm just going to keep throwing them up here.

From the Daily Herald...

The Skinny (about Kyle!)
Disc Break (about Sigur Ros!)
Mama's Baby Boy
The Osmonds Second Generation
BYU Modern Dance
Noteworthy
Holi Festival (Festival of Colors)