On The Turning Away

While making up for lost productivity today - and since it’s Friday, we’re working to bring you the latest dine-out à la New York Subway.

Taste of Subway, a website delineates restaurants, eateries near…where else, subway stops in the city. In a way, it’s just another info-aggregator - it lists restaurants within 200 meters of each subway station, linked to Yahoo! Local Search. The aggregator sites have sprung up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Citysearch is one of the first and has established itself as one of the most comprehensive info depots in dining and night life. If citysearch is foodies’ bible, chowhound carves out a niche for value customers, people who want to get more bang for their buck. A cursory look across the spectrum, there’s Slice, an exlusive list of pizza parlors in the city, ethnic dining guides like kosher dining. There’s something for every palate, every budget.

The design/concept behind “taste of subway” seems a bit counterintuitive to locals, though. Perhaps tourists will find it more helpful. After all, in a world of information overflow, the law of diminishing returns sets in.

If you dialed RCN’s customer service number today, you would probably suffer the same fate as we did for most of the day. If you were lucky to get through, you would’ve been greeted with a recorded message informing you that there was a “fiber cut” that affected New York area and even the toll-free service line was not spared.

The outage lasted about EIGHT long hours - talk about lost productivity! And the convenient timing - the U.S. House of Representatives late Thursday voted 269 to 152 to kill an amendment, the so-called the net neutrality amendment, to the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE), despite a last-minute push for the measure from many technology companies. After the House defeated the net neutrality amendment, it passed the underlying bill, a wide-ranging broadband bill focused partly on speeding the roll-out of television over Internet Protocol.
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