Yesterday, Sean and I made a short excursion downtown. We left around noon and got lunch at Teriyaki Boy near Times Square. The place has some decent curry and always plays J-Pop. The weather was surprisingly good yesterday. The skies were clear and my down coat was almost making me sweat. I snapped the following picture sometime after lunch. A hotdog cart was producing a lot of smoke that caught the light quite well.

Sean and I walked over to the New York Times building to check on the line for tickets to the taping of the Engadget Show, the main thing we were downtown for. It didn’t seem bad. Since we already had reserved tickets, we decided to spend the 3 hourse we had before the show to take a walk around midtown. We headed southeast. Along the way, I snapped quite a few shots of famous midtown buildings. Here is the Empire State Building:

The Chrysler Building:

The GE Building AKA 30 Rock:

The Pan Am Building. Now called the MetLife Building:

The Empire State Building again:

One First Avenue I saw a new Audi A4 and commented how the headlights look just like the ones on the R8 supercar. Right at that moment guess what Sean notices a few cars behind the Audi A4. An Audi R8.

On 1st Ave and 35th St. there was an interesting dive bar called the Pine Tree Lodge. I haven’t been there, but it has great reviews on Yelp. Maybe I’ll check it out sometime this year.

The Williamsburg Bridge from the north.

Interesting advice scribbled on a barrier in front of the construction site of the new buildings in the UN complex.

Protestors in front of the UN calling for democracy in Belarus.

An statue in front of the new UN building. Does anyone know what it is supposed to represent?

There was a huge flock of pigeons and seagulls above a parking lot on 1st ave. Weird.

A white bicycle marking where a cyclist died. It is pretty sad. Cyclists have to fight to survive in New York even though bicycles are the most practical transportation.

There is another Pinnacle in midtown! It seemed a little more run-down than the one near campus. A sad fact considering that our Pinnacle isn’t that great.

We even passed by the Harvard Club and Penn Club. They are places for alumni to hang out and stay when they are in New York. We went to see the Columbia Club, but sadly Columbia shares Princeton’s crappy club. Columbia actually used to have its own club, but sold it in the 70s for financial reasons.

Then finally we arrived back at the New York Times building around 4:00pm for the show. It turned out that there were still many tickets left. So, our guaranteed tickets didn’t matter.

Sean and I got free Engadget CES shirts while waiting in line. I don’t think Vinny got one because he came later and was further back in line.

We sat at the absolute front of the show. Here is the editor in chief of Engadget, Joshua Topolsky interviewing Erick Tseng from Google about Android.

This is from later in the show, when Nilay Patel and Paul Miller came to demo some of the gadgets from CES.

They showed the Plastic Logic QUE ebook reader. I really wanted this ebook reader for a while, but after hearing that it cost more than three times as much as my Kindle, I was no longer interested.

The best part of the show was the demo of the AR Drone quadricopter. It is controlled by tilting an iPhone and has onboard cameras so you can see where it is going. The cool thing is that it looks at the ground below it to sense the terrain and is able to hover by itself and balance on its own.

I took a video of the first part of the demo.

Here is another video from later in the demo that Vinny took. Skip to the 50 second mark if you want to see me almost get killed by the Drone.

At the end of the show the guys from Engadget gave away two Nexus Ones and a bunch of official CES bags full of free stuff they picked up. Sean and I didn’t win anything, but Vinny did. Too bad the bag was full of iPhone accessories since Vinny doesn’t have an iPhone.

Finally, at the end of the day, we headed over to Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for dinner.

For those of you who don’t know, some people think that Shake Shack is the best burger place in New York or even in all of America. I’m not too sure if it is the best, but the food is definitely delicious. I had cheese fries and a “Shroom Burger” which they describe as

crisp-fried portobello filled with melted cheese and onions, topped with lettuce, tomato and shack sauce

Sounds delicious right?