Years ago I considered moving to Hoboken, NJ. I was interested in the workings of the stock market at the time, but I wasn’t planning to move there for that reason. I had just graduated with a BFA, fresh out of school. And fresh out of a girlfriend too.
Serious artists moved to NY. Some went to Pratt for grad school. I’d bump into them on the subway, or at Black Betty, where my friend Bruce performed. It was his idea to get out of Florida. We drove up without much of a plan, a world of opportunity waited, just beyond honking gridlocked traffic. We listened to Electric Ladyland that day, which I bought because of a writeup in WIRED. Our destination: a cobwebbed brownstone in Crown Heights, his grandmother just passed away. I found an Internet cafe in East Village.
Gustavo Morales got me a tour of DoubleClick, a former coworker from a Florida ISP called Mercury.net. This was before the dot-bomb and DoubleClick was in full swing. Gustavo thought he could get me an interview. I remember one of the cubicles had some Rothko postcards tacked up. Gustavo was selling ads and he gave me a quick tour of a couple of DoubleClick’s offerings. Maybe I wouldn’t get a job there, but seeing that room of servers glassed up high in a Manhattan skyscraper, with a patio overhanging the Husdon, it seemed the Internet was finally reaching its potential.
The brownstone didn’t work out, Bruce’s mother wanted us out ASAP, they wanted to sell it. Had I known that, I would not have given up my unbelievably sweet apartment in Florida. Now I had bad luck with roommates before, and Bruce was broke, so I wanted my own place in NY. Or nearby in NJ.
I remember walking through railroad apartments, two blocks back from the Hudson. The one I liked, about $1200. The real estate agency wanted tax returns. I got my hair cut in Hoboken at an authentic barber shop, first time I had my neck shaved with a blade, like you see in the cartoons. My train trips under the Hudson were uneventful, I timed how long it would take to ride the train to work, I don’t believe in long commutes. The most annoying bottleneck would be waiting for the train. The plan was to find a job somewhere downtown.
Now I can’t remember the details, but I heard somewhere this part of the city was rising in value due to some NJ loophole which enhanced its geographic proximity to Wall Street. But living in NJ was still cheaper than living in Manhattan, as far as I could tell. Today I was just surfing the web and found this link which explains some of the details surrounding this matter of distance when it comes to trading stocks super-fast on technical data:
Rick Bookstaber: The Arms Race in High Frequency Trading
In terms of throughput and latency, the standard tricks are to get your servers as close to the data source as possible, use really big lines, and break data into little bite-sized packets. I was speaking at Reuters last week, and they mentioned to me that they were breaking their news flows into optimized sixty byte packets for their arms race-oriented clients, because that was the fastest way through network. (Anything smaller gets queued by some network algorithms, so sixty bytes seems to be the magic number).
That same week a pickpocket got me while shopping downtown, for pants. So I lost a new Motorola phone that I just paid too much for, two hours earlier. I wasn’t careless either, I specifically bought a backpack with a zipper to prevent such an eventuality. Surely I would hear the zipper and turn around. Instead I was overwhelmed by a crowd of loud tourists, and robbed. Then something clicked: I decided New York was out of whack with reality.
Back in Florida I rented an entire house for less than what I would have paid for that little railroad apartment. Victorious. However, the house had no washer/dryer. And those pants I bought downtown were soon after stolen from the laundromat. What can I say, people like my stuff.
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