4/01/03 Richard takes over the lounge; Katie Tabb and her cat; VAKTRAK:








This evening, Richard and I went up to our "Lounge" to see if we couldn't connect Richard's DVCAM video deck directly to the huge wide screen TV up there. Richard is having a whole bunch of people from the crew of his student movie over to the apartment of Thursday to see the raw footage for the first time. And I suggested, because there's not a whole lot of room in our apartment for 7 people, that they have a "screening" in the Lounge. This was a test for that day.



This is Richard looking for his S-video cable that he "bought specifically for this deck." In the end, he borrowed one of my extra ones from my "Wire Box."



Richard's hands are full.



We take the elevators UP to the 24th floor.






Here's the lounge. It is essentially a beautiful and huge apartment that was left for public use. It has a pool table, a huge flat panel wide screen TV, and access to a large roof deck.






We plugged the DVCAM deck into one of the many composite inputs on the front of the TV, which was very convenient. Set up was fairly easy as it auto-detected the presence of our input, which I've never seen a TV do before.








It works. Richard happy.


Then an old camp friend of mine, Katie Tabb came over to see my apartment and hang out a bit. As it was fairly late at night by the time she was to leave, I escorted her back up to her parent's place on 92nd and Amsterdam. We chatted a bit more in her lovely brownstone with her lovely cat.




And then I went back home on the local 1 train. While waiting for a downtown 1 at 96th street, I noticed something funny.

I looked to my left and saw headlights coming towards me. I then looked to my right, and on the same track, I saw HEADLIGHTS COMING TOWARDS ME! So I whipped out my camera, in case I was to have the only photo of a head-on late-night subway collision.


The left is on the left, the right is on the right. Pictures taken within seconds of each other.


The presence of uniformed MTA workers clued me in to the possibility that this was not an impending disaster. So WHAT was coming uptown on the downtown express track? I kept waiting.


It got closer, VERY SLOWLLY. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. And then I saw 4 lights! Not the usual 2 headlights of a subway train. This thing had two extra headlights!





This is the back of what I was looking at: The VAKTRAK. It is, essentially, the Vacuum train. It moves at like 1 mile per hour, and supposedly sucks the garbage off the tracks... though, when it left, there was still garbage on the tracks. So what gives?


Click here to see a movie of the slow train's slow approach.


And here are some shots of it's profile:












So, in the end, there was no collision. The downtown express train switched to the local track right before pulling into the station. And the uptown VAKTRAK actually stopped in the station for a while, allowing me to take these pictures, and then reversed, heading back downtown. An earthworm with two heads.