Nana's Story

My Nana discusses her difficult life, including growing up in Austria during Nazi rule, losing her mother to cancer, losing the rest of her family to concentration camps, lucking out and escaping the Holocaust to live with an English family, and eventually coming to New York.

It's a story I had heard in bits and pieces growing up but not really in detail like this.

Feel free to leave comments on the YouTube page and I'll share them with her.

My iPod Thinks It's 1969

I don't really understand how this can be an option.

My iPod's battery apparently died a few weeks ago so I had to bring it back. It starts up and think it's about to turn 1970. (I wish it could have gone two and a half months sooner if it wanted to go to 1969.)

While this is an older generation iPod Touch, I feel like it should have known it's more advanced than the iPods (or whatever app/Internet device they used back then) of 1969.

Virtual Christmas Card

(Click video for HD.)

Are you seriously serious, Facebook?

134 friends wished me a happy birthday on Facebook yesterday. And because I’m old school, I don’t like to respond via comment but I like to go “wall-to-wall.” That means 134 thank-yous is on the agenda for today.

I think it was my 22nd post on a friend’s wall that caused Facebook to think I was a robot. And I apparently confirmed it for them because this captcha got me.

Upgraded to Courtside

I went to my third Hofstra Men's Basketball game in three days as part of the 2K Classic yesterday. If you tweet your seat location using the hashtag #WeAreHofstra, you have a chance at being upgraded to courtside seats.

You can probably guess what happened next because I'm not writing a post about not winning (also, you might've read this post's title)... That's right, I won, and got to bring my friends Mat and Joe down with me.

As soon as the cheerleaders (it's possible they were part of the dance team instead) who escorted us to our cushioned seats on the shiny floor walked away, a woman who works there came over to me and asked if we had the tickets for those seats. Really Hofstra??

Anyway, it was pretty awesome even if it did take some time adjusting to the new view and increased possibility of bodily harm.  At one point, one of the Marshall players went flying into seat maybe two or three down from Joe...  If a person had been there, there would have been an injury.

Here are some highlights, most of which was shot without any zoom.

Hurricane Sandy Video Journal

When Hurricane Sandy was on her way two weeks ago, I decided to shoot some video of the storm and revive my childhood hobby of playing reporter (but it's obvious here why I'll never be one). I know other people saw so much more and suffered (and are still suffering) much worse but this is the storm from my eyes on Long Island. The long blackout, the downed trees, the gas lines, the snow storm a week later... It's all here.