Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

Fooling around with a WordPress plugin named GeoPress The post photo is a shot of the Miyares Farm on a recent spring day after cutting the grass. This plugin makes it trivial to associate maps in my case Google Maps within WordPress blog posts. The plugin is trivial to install and configure as it is with all plugins I have experimented with for WordPress. The actual documentation though informative and easy to follow leaves a lot to experimentation to actually figure out the simple steps to instrument a relevant map with your post. If you select the GeoPress option to have a map show up on each post, both the editing and viewing of the map as you edit the post and its appearance on the post when published works with little to no thought required.
Figuring out how to get the map to show up (what markup) is required when you don’t have the option of a map on each post is what I am struggling with right now.

INSERT_MAP
[tags]GeoPress, Miyares Farm, Julio Hernandez-Miyares[/tags]

Enjoy the sight of tons of steel being raised to the top of the currently under-construction Bank of America Skyscraper in Mid-Town Manhattan. If you enjoy watching this, please drop me a note as I am under the impression I am the only one that takes an interest in this.

[tags]Skyscraper, New York City[/tags]

Heartland Brewery

Originally uploaded by julio.miyares.

I met a few friends and colleagues at the Heartland and Brewery down at Union Square Part near 14th Street in Manhattan.
Though I frequent the one near the office in Midtown Manhattan across from Radio City Music Hall on 6th Avenue, this was the first time I have been to the Union Square location.
I would say its a big difference. Not in the sense of the food as its the same. In the sense of the clientele. The downtown location is definitely hipper (except for myself and one of the pals) and represents the cross-section of the beautiful New York downtown crowd including our waitress. The midtown location is frequented by “suits”. Not that there is anything wrong with that but .. if you are looking for a more New York like crowd, go to the Union Square one.

[tags]Julio Hernandez-Miyares, New York Connoisseur, Restaurant Review[/tags]

Brooklyn Diner near Times Square, New York

Originally uploaded by julio.miyares.

I am a heavy user of Yelp and like to see myself as a contributor, check out
Julio Miyares’ Yelp Reviews or else, look at that widget on the right hand side of the page cycling through all my reviews.
Nevertheless, I wonder, how much traffic is the self-proclaimed “New York Connoisseur” shunting over to Yelp when perhaps I can build and then keep that traffic to myself. I started thinking of that when I noticed that Super-Developer Dossy Shiobara was posting his superb Restaurant reviews both on Yelp and then on his own blog. Check this one out on a Turkish Restaurant find
The fact that Dossy appears to feel everything he finds in New Jersey is of 5 Star quality is immaterial to this. Instead, I like the fact that with good SEO which Dossy has in spades, perhaps those looking for the rare plums of good eats in Jersey will stumble upon his site.

Well, I am going to start the same technique here on my Musing site. I will “double publish” of course. I want my fans on Yelp to continue to benefit from my culinary wisdom.

What does the Brooklyn Diner post have to do with anything? Well that is the restaurant I was going to review but I will leave that to my next installment. Its been a long day.

[tags]Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Brooklyn Diner, Yelp[/tags]

In my never ending quest to try out various social networking sites, I have been spending time with Julio Miyares Fotolog. This is one of the top photo sharing sites worldwide especially outside of the United States. It is more about blogging and sharing select photos then photo storage such as Flickr. That is an oversimplification both about Fotolog and Flickr but is a simple way to describe what each attempts to be.
Though I have not personally encountered such, Fotolog apparently has growing pains that cause site instability and frequent outages. Furthermore, in comparison to Flickr, appears to have a lack of many basic features such as Search and tagging.

Nevertheless , as the following link describes, Fotolog overtakes Flick , Fotolog is the 26th most popular site on the web compared to Flickr’s 39th place.

Makes you wonder what truly drives traffic to popular sites. Since the relative rankings of Fotolog to Flickr is surprising to me, I am going to continue to invest time in building up my Fotolog social network trying to discover the secret of it’s success.

[tags]Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Fotolog[/tags]

Columbia County Stream near Hudson, New York

Originally uploaded by julio.miyares.

We are in that part of spring as we barrel into summer where the days here in Columbia County, New York are often gray, rainy and gloomy.

This photo taken on Saturday May 19th, 2007 on the way back from visiting the temple (Wal-Mart) in Hudson, New York.

This spot largely deserted as most are in Columbia County as it seems everyone is on their way to or at Wal-Mart.

The day is rainy and quite lugubrious which is absolutely fine with me. Perfect day to spend by the fire (yes it is still cool up here) and work on some PHP coding I have been doing recently. PHP has become persona non-grata of sorts lately in my place of employment but for building web-sites, there is nothing better then the combination of Apache,PHP and mysql.

A raw view of incipient Cuban Artistic Creations workshop, Hudson’s latest and soon to be most exciting artistic endeabor. Principal Maria Victoria de Bernard, famous Cuban Folk Artist and sole proprietor of Columbia Artistic Cleaning is in the midst of setting up the workshop. The premise is simple. Find furniture of all types throughout Columbia County, usually at yard or barn sales, rehabilitate them with a Cuban Artistic touch and then sell them at lower prices then the outrageous prices for similar non-styled furniture found in Hudson, New York.
Ms de Bernard, who long ago swore off working for the man especially when it meant being told what to think, what to do and how to do it is in the process of lining up investors in her art business. The initial funding will be devoted to securing the necessary wood-working equipment to be installed in the Workshop as well as other incidentals as marketing, publicity, her own Web-Site and initial stock of furniture in need of re-furbishing.

[tags]Maria Victoria de Bernard, Columbia County, Hudson New York, Cuban Folk Art[/tags]

new Dork in Video Program

Originally uploaded by julio.miyares.

A work aside from the Miyares Farm here in Columbia County, New York.
Monday May 7,2007, Nathan returns to an un-named Internet Portal which is in the Top 4 in that space on Earth.

Here he is hamming it up for the camera in simpler times during the 2006 Video Program and a few months before his brief sojourn to the other side.

Nathan has also become quite a blogger though he has to do some work on his SEO to be quickly found on Search Engines.

[tags]Julio Hernandez-Miyares,Nathan Folkman[/tags]

Miyares Dog

Originally uploaded by julio.miyares.

Springtime in Columbia County, New York Series

Now this is the life! Chewing on a bone on a comfortable spring day 2007 on the Miyares Farm, employee # 0004 otherwise known as Tsar takes a break from chasing squirrels and other vermin and acting as co-receptionist.
Miyares Farm Dogs

[tags]Columbia County, Dog[/tags]