Update 5: No more invites available for the time being, I’ll wait until the ones I sent have been activated, which hasn’t happened yet. I guess the latest wave (pardon the pun) of invites released to current users overwhelmed the team. Be patient, they will arrive...

On a different topic, I am now running Windows 7 and enjoying it very much so far.

Update 4: Still looking for a deal on Windows 7, 32 bit Home Premium... Any students out there not needing to upgrade or blessed with a Mac?

Update 3: Patience everyone, none of the invites I sent have been processed yet. As I said, it might take a few days. You’ll get an email from wave-noreply with the subject « Your invitation to preview Google Wave ». Make sure to check your spam folder as some people have reported finding that email in the spam...

Update 2: Those of you who have already received my invite are welcome to drop me a wave for testing purposes...
vmounier ( a t ) googlewave ( d o t ) com

Update: Ok, invites are going fast, so I’m going to up the game a bit. I’d really like to upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. If anybody can get me a good deal, there’s still an invite waiting.

For lack investigating time, I can’t say I’ve played with Google Wave much since its limited release a few weeks ago. I would describe Wave as a fusion of email, chat, social networking and online cooperation tool. It retains Gmail’s famous conversation-based style and indeed, like Gmail years ago, it is being made available as a beta to a select crowd via an invite-led viral campaign.

I’m not much of social networking freak myself, so my testing of Wave will be aleatory. I wish it was somehow integrated with Gmail, which would in my eyes make it much more useful. Still, Google is storming the web with cloud applications and communications tools, and with Google Voice having just been launched and the Chrome OS soon to follow, one can be sure that Wave fits snugly into a grand scheme that would, and probably will, consecrate Google as the leading worldwide online player.

Their task was digging to anchor the foundations of the future Brooklyn Bridge towers into the bottom of the East River, incarcerated for hours below the surface in enormous watertight pressurized caissons. Their average progress rate on a hopeful descent towards firm bedrock was a mere 6 inches a week. It was the end of the 19th century. Crossing the bridge would later cost 5 cents.

DCS, also called the bends, can be described as the formation of air bubbles inside the body following depressurization. Recreational and commercial divers are thoroughly familiar with the risks associated with pressure changes, but theoretically, DCS can also affect someone flying in an unpressurized aircraft and astronauts - the latter probably being more than happy to assume this slight risk in exchange for space walks...

In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge construction, at least three men died of DCS; but records were poorly kept and other casualties might easily have gone unnoticed. Washington Roebbling, the mastermind behind the project left in charge after his father’s early passing, was struck himself and left incapacitated. He finished supervising the 13 year-long process from his house, his wife insuring the liaison with the engineers.

When it was opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the whole Wild Wide World. Today it is just the longest bridge to be called Brooklyn. Was it worth dying for? Not unless you’re a visionary - and these workers most certainly weren’t, quite the opposite. Their vision must have been that of bread on a cheap table, period. But because of their sacrifice and the dedication and hard labour of so many others, we now have a cool way to walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, enjoying one of the most spectacular cityscapes worldwide. In fact, the only place I can think of that would top the skyline view from the Brooklyn Bridge is the magnificent Bay of Honk Kong.

We now have a cool way to walk, as I think I just wrote in my modern English. The folks who built this bridge would not even have understood what I mean by that. Cool? Why, is it a bit cold up there? And once enlightened, they would have remained skeptical. How could we call such a marvel of engineering, the fruit of 13 years of incredibly hard work involving over 20 casualties and requiring 3600 miles of cable wire - « cool »?

Easy. You just need to be a 21st century child. To have seen a man walk on the moon. To have flown across the ocean in a giant coach along with 300 others just below the speed of sound in 5 hours. To have been granted a view through space to an event horizon located over 46 billion light-years away. To have explored the human anatomy from a front-row perspective with miniaturized cameras. To have decoded the human genome. To be able to write this today in New York and have you read it from half-way across the globe, instantly, on your iPhone.

We are a spoiled species. We tend to take it all for granted. Still, the Brooklyn Bridge is so freakin’  cool.

Getting there without wheels isn’t so casual. It involved in my case a remote subway station, lots of walking and advanced dead reckoning. I had spotted the very nice perspective from the Kosciuszko Bridge on I-278 (above), on our way back from the Long Island nurseries, and even though the overpass had no pedestrian path I’d decided to come back and scout the vicinity for a similar view of distant Manhattan behind a hilly foreground of memories.

It turned out the best angle was to be found within the cemetery itself (below.) I walked around for a long time, alone, and shot many a silly picture of the Manhattan buildings emerging behind a forest of graves. It’s a beautiful - if a bit strange - sight that probably very few New Yorkers have enjoyed.

Until it’s too late, that is.

As I sip my coffee at a terrace, a warm autumn day lighting up the wide Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, Harlem is asleep around me. Its Dutch roots forgotten, the renaissance of the 20’s a pale memory, later crime and drug records having painfully been filed and put aside, the city finally seems at peace. She speaks in hushed tones, subdued by heavy gentrification and a new found love for peace.

A man with a perfect Easter Island statue profile walks by wearing a brightly coloured African suit and open sandals, hurrying on some mid-day errand. I imagine him having a deep voice and maybe speaking some French. He doesn’t fit my expectations of this place. But then again nothing does.

The young black woman who served me my double espresso with a bright smile wore her baby behind her in a cradle board while working behind the coffee shop counter. People are sitting at small tables around me and inside, sharing cups and laptop computers, wearing headphones and microphones, smiling blindly to distant interlocutors.

The streets are indeed surprisingly wide in Harlem, as Marie had described them. The southern parts almost have a Parisian feel with their long avenues of nice buildings looking like hôtels particuliers, with the exception of those ugly street-facing fire escapes, which - thank god - were never invented in Europe.

I look around me while rubbing my eyes. The scene seems password-protected, and I haven’t cracked the code. What am I not seeing? Something is missing, something previously written to a chapter of my preconceptions by history and media and now having been lost in a new superficial reality.

I should come back when my imagination is healthier. And my head. Maybe, then, will I see through the curtain and figure out where Harlem has gone.

Once a year, Atlantic Street is blocked off between below Henry all the way to 4th. Nearby stores and others not so near send in a crew and set up little street kiosks. Everything goes, from food to drinks to arts to hats to music and events. Then hundreds of thousands of people flock in. The place is jam-packed. It lasts all day.

So the crossing is actually a long one-way, slow-paced drifting ride along the human tide. You eat, you drink, you stop, you drift, you eat. It’s one way because after a full-street-length crowd overdose, you probably don’t have the guts and energy to go back the way you came, so you take a shortcut on an adjacent street. The calm there soothes you.

Street food is just that, yet the sardines were quite excellent! Of all places, a Brooklyn street festival isn’t where I would have expected to find such good fish. An island, maybe. A small fishing village in the middle of nowhere. But here... Go figure.

The good old winged dolphin logo was reborn and modernized, another thing I’m quite fond of despite its age. Entry date display was upgraded from the original template’s calendar icon to this very sleek CSS-based system that uses a mapped single image.

I hope that the overall result is a nicer-looking, cleaner and yet more focused interface, with less visual disruption when switching from the blog to the main galleries and vice-versa.

Some posts about recent New York micro-events and mini-expeditions soon.

There were walks along the banks of the East River, Brooklyn side, at and past sunset. A sad realization there, as it turns out that the entire Promenade - which is built right on top of the BQE highway - shakes permanently so badly that there is no way to do decent tripod-mounted long exposures.

And of course there was a ride almost to the end of Long Island where, after a working visit to the nurseries, we detoured towards the beach and found a jewel. Set on the north shore of Long Island, very close to the tip, that stretch of sand was nearly empty of human presence and trash, and caressed by the tiniest waves of pristine and tropical-looking water.

But picture this: Google, in its rather obvious ongoing campaign to steal some of Microsoft’s monopoly and fame, has just released a very clever plugin called Google Chrome Frame. Once installed, the little beauty allows someone browsing the web with Internet Explorer to actually experience web pages as they would be seen on Google Chrome - meaning the right way. The plugin simply turns IE into a standard-compliant, nice-playing browser. Wow.

The idea, to quote TechCrunch, is both hilarious and awesome. I find it quite satisfying to see most of the industry rallying against IE, because I am le tired of getting headaches trying to make my pages IE-compatible or of finding ways for them to degrade - never mind gracefully - decently. In this sense, Chrome Frame seems like a godsend. Drawbacks are likely to surface and the plugin will without a doubt have its share of detractors, but I think it’s a fantastic idea, even if only in its hilariousness.

From a designer’s point of view, going the Google Chrome Frame way is a two-step process: the addition of a simple meta tag is enough to make a page compatible, and then a slightly more complicated piece of code allows for browser detection and prompting the IE user to install the plugin.

Make no mistake about it, this is all in a very, very early development stage. As it has become customary with Google, the project was made available to the guinea pigs, I mean the developers, in order to leverage their time and speed up the gestation. But the newborn looks impressive and is sure to make many heads turn. It should be noted that Chrome Frame isn’t really a browser plugin but rather is installed - and thus eventually removed - like a program, to and from the Control Panel.

If you’d like to see it in action - provided you are indeed still running some version of Internet Explorer (my heart goes to you), you can go to my new sitemap and install the plugin. Because of its beta stage, Google Chrome Frame doesn’t yet seem to reload the page correctly once installed, so you’ll have to close and restart your IE browser. But at that point, what a difference. Notice for instance that suddenly, IE is rendering drop shadows and rounded corners correctly!

So the million dollar question is: who will install this? It can be argued that a good percentage of the people who are still using Internet Explorer do so because of an inherent fear of change, of the unknown, of computers and complicated installs. If switching over to Firefox is too intimidating, installing a plugin might still appear to be too much trouble and be skipped. Time will tell.

The latest stage, as it is, was two-fold: I created a succinct « Rules Of Conduct and Copyrights » page, linked to from the main menu. It explains my candid expectations in terms of visitor behavior - yes, I allow myself to have some, and so should thee - and covers copyright issues.

The second part was a redesign of the site map to make it accessible from the blog without having to go through the main site’s overlay design - rather dark and immersive but out of context, it’s just dark. I found a very clever CSS graphic sitemap layout and tailored it to my needs. The truth is it doesn’t play well with Internet Destroyer Explorer, but I really don’t care any more - and neither do a growing number of web designers. Now, to be honest, my first beta tester was Marie and she went: « Uh? » Oh well, I like it, I guess that’s what matters.

Last but not least, I have finally taken the time to research, understand and implement a CSS « pullquote » feature for my longer posts which showcases a key sentence in a large block as seen above, magazine-style.

Oh, and we went on a very nice expedition all the way to the very northern tip of Manhattan, but that will be covered next. What did you do today?