If you’re in New York City for a week, I would highly recommend getting a 7-day Unlimited MetroCard ($29). A single ride is $2.50, so just two trips a day makes it worthwhile.

However, you can’t use an Unlimited card at the same subway station for 18 minutes. This can be a problem if you use a subway station entrance that allows you to go in only one direction, and you pick the wrong one. So instead of exiting and re-entering in the right entrance (which will lock you out), just get on the next train and go to a stop that lets you cross over. (I found this out the hard way; only the persistence of my traveling companion got us in.)

If you’re flying into JFK Airport, I recommend taking the AirTrain to Jamaica Station. Once you get to the station, you’ll see a set of fare gates and banks of MetroCard machines on either side. You’ll need to get a $5 MetroCard just to leave the AirTrain system, so you’ll have to buy that before the fare gates.

But you can’t buy a 7-day Unlimited MetroCard at either of those banks of machines. Instead, proceed to the subway station at Jamaica (which, by the way, is called Sutphin Boulevard–Archer Avenue–JFK Airport, not Jamaica) and buy a 7-day card at its machines. From there, you can take the subway (E line) all the way into Manhattan. It will take about an hour.

If you want to spend a bit more money to save time, you can also take the Long Island Rail Road from Jamaica to Penn Station in Manhattan, which takes 30 minutes. If it’s the weekend, buy a CityTicket for the LIRR, which only costs $3.75 (a regular ticket is $8.75, off-peak $6.25). You can buy LIRR tickets at the ticket machines before the fare gates at Jamaica.

Enjoy your trip!

This encouraged me to dig a little deeper. The term “Pasteboard” was inherited from Mac OS X’s ancestor, NeXTSTEP, which used it in its user interface (see The Complete Guide to the NEXTSTEP User Environment for an example). “Pasteboard” is still used in Apple’s documentation for programmers. However, while NeXTSTEP may form the technical foundation for OS X, the classic Mac OS, which always used the term “Clipboard,” is the basis for Mac OS X’s user interface, so “Clipboard” has mostly won out.

So why does the X11 application use the term “Pasteboard”? I can only speculate that the X11’s developers wanted to the distinction between X11’s CLIPBOARD and OS X’s Clipboard as clear as possible, and that computer geeks, who are likely the only ones who would use X11 in the first place, would be familiar with the term.

• I wanted to use Helvetica Neue for all of the text, but it wasn’t included in Inkscape’s Fonts drop-down list. I had to copy the font from /System/Library/Fonts to /Users/my_username/Library/Fonts for Inkscape to load it. None of the other fonts in the system folder had problems loading.
• I also could not use Helvetica. Whenever I chose it, Inkscape kept switching me to Sans. I never figured out what was wrong.
• I tried to copy some objects from one Inkscape window to another, but the pasted objects were converted into a bitmap. This is because X11 synchronizes its CLIPBOARD and PRIMARY buffers with Mac OS X’s Pasteboard* as much as possible, and something got lost in translation. I turned off the synchronizing by going to X11 → Preferences… → Pasteboard tab and turned off Enable Syncing.
• I wanted to import an EPS file which contained vector graphics, but Inkscape can’t import EPS files directly. Instead, I opened the file in Preview and then saved it as a PDF. Inkscape then imported the PDF perfectly.

Hopes this helps others using Inkscape on a Mac!

* The clipboard on Mac OS X is called a pasteboard? Bleh!

While the plans certainly make a statement, I’m more an urbanist and not usually fond of buildings surrounded by lots of parking lots or open space, since they don’t tend to be very energetic spaces. So I’m actually lukewarm on what I’ve seen so far. I’m also left with a lot of questions:

• How accessible will the open space be to the public?
• In the slides that Jobs presented, Pruneridge Avenue disappears. Where does it go? Is it eliminated? Does it go underground? Does it become a private street, serving only the underground parking garage?
• What are the plans for the existing redwood grove and the historic Glendenning Barn?

I’m sure that the final result will be pretty close to what was presented — I can’t imagine Cupertino giving Apple a really hard time. And even though it would still be a corporate office park instead of a more urban neighborhood, it would be a really nice office park, better than what is there now. By the way, I grew up in Cupertino and I still live nearby, so I know the area very well.

And I echo Mayor Gilbert Wong’s desire to open an Apple Store in Cupertino. Too bad the city’s Vallco Mall is such a basket case.