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This month marks the two year anniversary of my move to New York City.  (Give or take a month).  I honestly believed that after twenty-four months I’d accept any excuse to leave this city.  Turns out my assumption was  wrong.  I love it here.  I guess that says something about preconceptions.  In fact, not only were a lot of my negative assumptions about NYC wrong, so were my positive ones.  And I place the blame solely on Law & Order.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Law & Order.  I think all three of the versions are fantastic.  (Though I’m partial to CI.  If I were the type to stalk, “Goren” would often find a shaggy computer nerd rifling through his trash.  And that would be wrong. Right?)  The problem lies in the fact that I believed I was getting the inside track to life in the “Big Apple”.  What a fool I was.  So if you’re a fan of the show, and think you’ll fit right in on your next vacation, let me dispel a couple of the myths.

Fact 1 - Not all joggers get murdered in Central Park.

Me in Central Park a couple of years ago.  Note the lack of dead bodies in the background bushes.

When I first got to NYC I was thrilled and terrified of finding (or becoming) a victim in central park.  You see it all the time in beginning of an episode.  Some poor schmuck decides to go jogging, walk the dog, or just take a plain ol’ stroll through the park at 2 a.m.  And then..Bam!  Dead.  Or sometimes they’ll really switch it up and the jogger/dog walker/stroller finds, instead of becomes, the next contestant on Dr. Rodgers’ autopsy table.  Either way it was enough for this naive Montana boy to spend his first couple of months roaming the park looking for adventure.  Maybe I didn’t seem casual enough, or maybe it was my inability to bring myself to jog, but the most exciting thing I saw was a really intense game of ultimate frisbee.  (Is that illegal yet?)  I even went as far as to purchase a Chihuahua with the hope that he’d help sniff out a mystery for me, getting me one step closer to that green interrogation room.  Unfortunately, the only thing that little mutt led me to was a bunch of frantic squirrels.  I left him with a hungry looking bum. ‘Nuf said.

Fact 2 - Nobody’s too busy to talk to a cop.

This one always got me excited.  Another typical scene from the series shows some citizen just doing his job while being questioned by one of the NYPD’s detectives.  He could be stacking boxes in a warehouse, setting up fruit in a bodega or drilling some five year old’s teeth in a dentist’s chair.   Regardless of the situation, after four or five questions the person being questioned gets an annoyed look on his face and says something along the lines of, “Look, I’ve got a lot of work to do.  Are we done here?”  WOW!  I mean, I can understand getting annoyed when a co-worker interrupts your thought process to ask for your stapler or something.  But to blow off a homicide investigation?  That’s brassy.  I’d always assumed that getting pulled aside by a cop to help catch a psychopathic serial killer would be an exciting thing.  But not New Yorkers!  They’ve got better things to do, like making sure toilet paper gets properly shelved.

While I haven’t been witness to a murder investigation, I have been able to participate in a couple of minor infractions. One time a guy was pulled over for cutting off another car, and everyone one within a one block radius dropped what they were doing to crowd around to give their two cents.  I think I was the only one fighting the urge to whip out my cell phone to snap pictures for Facebook. Where was that trademark New York indifference?  When the attention seekers were climbing up the building at work, I didn’t hear one coworker say, “Look, I’ve got code to write.  If we’re done here…”  Where was the sense of superiority I’d been looking forward too?  I felt so disillusioned.

Fact 3 - Nobody actively seeks out New York hotdog stands.

Have many times have you seen McCoy step out for a hot dog from a street vendor? Answer…only like a BILLION times!  “Oh boy,” I thought.  “That must be the greatest thing in the world!”  I’d heard that New York has some of the best restaurants in the world, and you know a lot of them have to deliver.  But if McCoy is willing to forgo fine dining for a stick of meat that’s been soaking in discolored water for hours, bathed in street fumes, and served by a sweaty, hairy-armed stranger?  Well, it must be pretty frickin’ fantastic…right?   Wrong.  After many attempts (and as many strange looks) to get coworkers to step out with me at lunch for a quick “street dog” I finally went solo.  After spending my 2 dollars and a heavy application of mustard and ketchup…  Suffice to say I began to wonder if maybe the bum hadn’t received a better deal than I’d thought when I left him that Chihuahua.

These are the more obvious ways in which Law & Order has pulled the proverbial wool over my eyes.  I’m sure there are many more (like the fact that more New York homicides occur on Law & Order per year than in real life) that I haven’t broached, but I think you get the point.  I know you probably feel like your world is crashing down around you.  But take heart, it’s not like the X-Files lied to us and there aren’t really aliens among us…right?

I sometimes wonder if I’m detracting from the experience.  Would better, more interesting, connections be made if I filled out my music preferences?  Would long lost loved ones be able to reach out and find me ending the torment that is a Nick-less life?  Clearly, I’m not that worried…yet.

Let’s use Flickr as an example.  I love to peruse the random photo album.  It’s definitely one of my larger time wastes.  If I find a photographer who I really enjoy and decide to follow him, does it matter if he’s named John Smith or l33tfotog?

Maybe this is why I’m not as worried about the web identity issue as other people.  I like the idea of what a provider like OpenID could bring to the table…it’s just not a major concern for me.  Of course when I start to think about the idea of “identity reputation” then having a single centric “identity” becomes more appealing.

If I was a psychologist I might say I have control issues or I’m scared to “put myself out there”.  Both of these could be true, but at the end of the day a name is just a name.  If I’ve never met you, John Smith from Smithtown NJ, age 35, graduate from Smithtown High then you’re just a “person on the net”.  Just like MrMightyGuns from BodyBuilding USA, age awesome, graduate from the School of Hard Knocks.  As for myself, I’m comfortable in that fact that to some I’m just another guy on the net with a funky name but the people that actually do know me…well…they know me.  Funky name or not.

There’s a whole other blog post here about web identity vs “real” identity that I don’t think I’ll get into.  Suffice it to say that yes I know if one of my pseudonyms uses the word “ass” I’m less likely to get a call from my mom asking me if I was “raised to use that kind of language young man!” than if I were to use it in say…this blog…crap…oops…double crap!

Working on the TimesPeople project has thrust me deep into the pits of what is now called the “social web”.  Where I once was a casual participant, now I sign up for each new service that crosses my path.  I use a lot of the major players, (facebook, twitter, friendfeed, del.icio.us, flickr…) and the little guys…not so much.  (Which is probably why they’re the little guys.)  I love the mash-ups, can’t get enough of the third party clients and each day I find myself more and more fascinated by the sheer force of this internet phenomenon.  And in all the hustle and bustle…I forgot I had a blog.

“Blog?…What?”, was my response when I was recently informed that my site’s database was acting up.  “Ooooo…my bloooog.  Huh…haven’t touched that in a while.”  It wasn’t until later I started thinking, “Why don’t I use it?”  It’s just another avenue for communicating with other people.  (Of course it’s a one way conversation.)  So I decided to start it back up.

For the most part I had just used my blog for wpf tips and samples.  Since I don’t really do much work in wpf at the moment I’ve moved that old blog to http://wpf.nickthuesen.com and installed a fresh new version of wordpress on my www domain.  What will I blog about?  I don’t know.  Anything I feel needs to be said, but can’t fit in a twitters tweet, a tumblr’s tumbl (?) or any other freaky word we come up with.

Oh and lastly I’d like to thank Anjali Bhojani for letting me jack the picture of myself (at the top of the page) out of her flickr feed and http://www.wiredstudios.com for the wordpress template I found and modified.  (And will probably modify some more because my css/html skills ain’t what they used to be.)  And lastly I have to give credit to my wife Lindsay for providing a new title and caption for this blog.  Hmmm…is this a blog or an awards ceremony.

UPDATE:  DOH!!  I just went to the wiredstudios site.  The template I had found…is the one they use on their site.  I wonder if this is a web faux pas or something.  Either way, I’m going to have to break out the css book so don’t get to used to this look.

UPDATE UPDATE: This is probably confusing now if you are reading this post for the first time…but…switched out template with a modified theme by Chris Pearson. Thanks Chris.