Liberty Helicopter does a great job of showing people the sights by air and offers lots of packages for every budget, starting from rides 6 minutes in length up to 45 minutes.  They use state of the art aircraft called the Eurocopter EC 130 and well trained pilots. My dad and I took a short tour of South Manhattan on a cool December evening and felt very safe.

Our tour was 8 minutes long and cost $110 per person.  Since it was the last flight of the day and the weather was poor, the pilot extended the trip a few minutes.

Liberty Helicopter also offers New York helicopter service and transfers if you are looking for something more than helicopter sightseeing.

Brooks moments before taking off

We had to wear lifejackets because the flight was over water. In addition, we had to go through a security scan exactly the same as you do when you board any flight these days.

Headsets are provided for all passengers and cameras are allowed on board. You can book the whole bird for yourself if you like, but we opted for the more economical “share with others” option.

Seats are comfortable and suitable for six foot, two hundred-plus pound guys like me.   The actual flight experience is very smooth and calm.  There were no sudden jerking or dropping sensations.

Seconds before lifting off

Actually, the experience is incredibly fun being inside a helicopter.  In fact, you’ll have to remember to not let the helicopter ride itself overwhelm the reason you’re there in the first place, which is to take in the view and sights of New York by air.

South Manhattan Looking at Ground Zero

If the cost of the helicopter ride is prohibitive, the next best option in my humble opinion would be the observation deck in the Empire State building.

For admission to over 40 of New York City’s best attractions (including the Empire State Building) I always check out New York Pass for the best deals.

Here is a short video clip of my experience:

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It is a VERY BIG RED.

This red wine has even exceeded my appreciation for the Heartland Shiraz I reviewed a few weeks ago.

It’s so big and luscious that I can only think of one term every time I have a sip: black cherry jam. Not the kind that Smuckers would make. But rather one that your grandmother would make with cherries as big as plums.

Like those Lapin cherries.  Have you ever had Lapin Cherries?

Nugan Estate Front of the Bottle - Am I BIG ENOUGH FOR YA?!

I know what you’re thinking…Brooks is on a huge Aussie Shiraz kick right now. And you’re right. The wines coming out of that region are awesome.

The other reason is that the people deciding what to buy in our government run system are picking wines that are really good from Australia. We have a huge selection of well merchandised, priced and displayed Australian reds in our liquor store.

This red should be winning awards left and right. The label says that you’ll get pepper in addition to other flavors - I didn’t get much pepper…probably because my palette is fried from eating so many spicy things.

2006 Nugan Estate Shiraz Back of the Bottle

If you want a REALLY hot and spicy red, check out my Seven Sinners Syrah review.

Anyway, this is a wine for special occasions or a night together with that special someone. It doesn’t borderline on a desert wine, but definitely will evoke that cherry jam flavor.

I totally loved this wine. If you like robust, full reds, I highly recommend you find this one and try it - it’s NOT going to let you down.

I promise.

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These color codes simply tell the web page how to display a specific color to your monitor. Do you see a color that you like? Want to use it for a project that you’re doing?

Use color detector to find out what it is.

A screen capture of Color Detector in action: What color is white? fffff, Dear Liza

Recently, I needed to find out what the background color of my post pages were so that I could configure my Google AdSense background to match the rest of my site so that the ads didn’t look took intrusive.

I used color detector.

You can get it for free here, by a software publisher called Cosmin.  Unlike Pixel Ruler, there is no annoying nag screen that pops up when you close the program, even though Color Detector is Freeware.

Simply run the program, point the mouse cursor anywhere on the screen, and the color detector window will display the RGB values, HTML hex code, and the color name of the color of the pixel pointed to by the mouse cursor.

Color Detector has won a few awards and is a tool that no self respecting web perfectionist should be without.

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Pixel rulers for us ‘netizens are about as necessary as having a hammer or screwdriver around the house. I am always using a pixel ruler to measure something on my site or something else on a screen.

For example, the other day I was embedding a Flash video player into a post that I wrote on a cigar review that I did.  I needed to measure how high the player controls were because the sizing of the video made everything look squished.

So I whipped out the Pixel Ruler and measured the vertical depth of the Flash player controls, which happened to be exactly 20 pixels.

Pixel Ruler in action!

Then I went into the control panel for the player size and increased the vertical height by 20 pixels, saved it, refreshed the page and bam!

The video looked perfect.

The above Pixel Ruler is free to install and use.  It will float over your screen and will with all of your applications.  You can also rotate it horzontally or vertically.  The widest you can make it is 1300 pixels and you can change the color of it as well.

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This was the Robusto version of the VSG - with a 50 ring size and five and half inches long.

For the money, this has to be the best cigar that I’ve enjoyed yet.  It’s as good or better than the Exodus and the La Flor.  You’re going to get cocoa and pepper on the palette. It’s not a mild cigar, but it doesn’t have edge either. It’s smooth.

It’s box pressed and is square, which I found had very practical value when I had to put it down and it didn’t roll away!

Brilliant.

The Dominican tobacco is grown by the Fuentes family for Ashton and the wrapper grown exclusively by the Oliva family.

Strangely, this cigar did NOT put out a lot of smoke and held the toast longer than most cigars with this ring size.

Here’s the video review of the cigar, while being stalked by a bee.

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It kind of reminds me of the search engine I reviewed a while back called Cuil.

After doing some research, I’ve learned that they’ve only been around about a 18 months and are driving about 2,700,000 visitors a month according to Compete.com as of this post.

By comparison, it is estimated that Google gets about 132,000,000 million visits a month.

What makes Mahalo different is a few things:

1. They say that they are a human powered search engine that is different from the others that use software and algorithms.  They claim to produce “hand crafted” results for you.
2. The result pages are great! You will get pictures, text, videos and other media. In addition, I found links to some very cool stuff that never came up on comparable Google or Yahoo! searches.
3. They claim to list quality websites and links you wouldn’t find at other search engines over low quality spam sites with excessive advertising.

Their whole process is mildly reminiscent to me of the early days at Yahoo! when people were categorizing stuff on the web by hand and then it just got to big to handle, so they automated it and the rest is history.

Having said that, I did a search for BMW M5 on Mahalo and was totally impressed with the result page that I got.

If I was going to make a page about that car based on stuff from the web, it would be very similar to what I saw.

In comparison, I did a search for Brooks Van Norman, and the result page said “we’ve never heard of you”.

Why am I not in here?

While I almost closed my browser at that point, until I saw a link that said “Create a Brooks Van Norman page”.

So I did.

…by merely adding the link to this blog!

We’ll see if those human editors think I’m good enough to be listed in their cool search engine!

Anyway, I like Mahalo.  I would call it a Web 3.0 search engine - a social media based search engine with morals.

Let’s watch and see if they can scale…

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I am always excited about about travel, especially to New York. My grandfather got out there every time he could according to my dad. So much happened there.

So much is happening there.

Whether it’s your first time or your tenth time, there’s always something to do, see, eat and spend your money on. The thing that I like about New York more than anything…is how easy it is to get around. Metro, cab, by foot…it doesn’t matter.

It’s an easy town to get around in. However you do it, just bring good shoes.

We stayed in Mid Town at a fairly decent hotel and took in as much as you can in 3 days.

• Times Square
• Grand Central Station
• Rockefeller Center
• Liberty Helicopter Tour
• Central Park
• Soho
• Canal Street
• Mid Town

For admission to over 40 of New York City’s best attractions (including the Empire State Building) I always check out New York Pass for the best deals.

We also went up to Hauppauge by train to visit a new friend whose art we’ve been buying - Maria Noma Bliss.  Maria picked us up at the train station and opened her home to us.  Hauppauge is a beautiful two hour train ride north of New York.

While up there, we drove down to Terrytown - another small suburb of the Big Apple - and also did some shopping at one of the best outlet malls I’ve ever seen - Woodbury Common.  In fact, I would suggest you skip shopping altogether downtown and make a day trip to this outlet mall call.

The deals here defy description ON EVERY BRAND NAME GOOD YOU CAN THINK of.

Just get yourselves up there and do it.  You’ll thank me.

While just outside of NYC, near Terrytown, I couldn’t believe that I actually saw Sleepy Hollow cemetary.  Yes, it DOES exist!

…it reminded me of that whole Halloween story about Icabod Crane and the headless horseman. I think I will watch the movie again soon. 10 days before Halloween.  How fitting.

While up in Hauppauge, we went out for dinner and dined next to Paul Teutul Jr. from Orange County Choppers. I didn’t get the chance to talk with him, however on the next day while driving, we drove past their original shop and also saw the new one, which is quite a production.

Here are just a few shots.  (Click on any of them to view them larger, in a slide show)

new york sleepy hollow cemetery

new york october building

Amazing culinary ability for sale at Dean and Deluca

new york mid town outdoor market

new york empire state building

new york canal street

Ruby Foos restaurant in Times Square - good food when your feet are tired

Brooks enjoying a glass at Noma's studio in Hauppaugue, NY

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heartland shiraz front

I haven’t.  In fact, the more I drink wines, the more I realize how much I like them.  And also how much I don’t know about them.

Recently, I tried a wine by famed Ben Glaetzer called Heartland Shiraz. This stuff is very very good.  I like big, bad, huge smooth wines.  The kind you need a knife and fork to drink. The kind of wine that if Chunky Soup did a commercial for, would sound something like …”drinks like wine and is bigger than a huge, heavy meal”….or something like that.

This wine is is big AND smooth.  Bigger and smoother than Boris Karloff and Barry White put together.  Even people who don’t like red wine will like this product.

Anyway, what you need tonight is Heartland Shiraz.  Just get it. And drink it with someone you care about. It’s awesome product and I’ve had a few bottles since these pictures were taken.

heartland shiraz back

This is a great bottle to take out as a gift or to drink when you’re tired of slurping three buck chuck.

It’s fantastic stuff (as is anything Ben Glaetzer makes).   In Western Canada, you’ll pay about $27.00 a bottle.  I saw some in California on my last trip for about $14.

Heartland Shiraz is one of my favorite red wines.

Let me know if you like it or if you’ve got something better!

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Paypal has a service called WebSite Payments, which I got set up in a few minutes.  You have to be a PayPal user, but that doesn’t take very long to set up either.

All you need to do is log into your PayPal account and click on the Merchant Tools tab in the middle of menu bar.

From there you go to left side of the page and select WebSite Payments Standard and then configure your buttons based on how you want them to look.

The HTML code is automatically generated when you are finished configuring. All you need to do then is just put that HTML code in your web page, update it and you are ready to begin accepting payment.

It’s really that simple.

The DOWNSIDE to this solution is that when someone clicks on your button, they are taken to a generic PayPal page which won’t look like your site.  That site isn’t very clear about what to do next - the options are either to log into PayPal, or to continue without logging in.

If you depend on conversions from a web page that looks and feels like your site and is on the same domain, then I suggest you look into PayPal’s next best solution called WebSite Payments Pro.

Because this solution, while simple and easy, DOES not look very good after the buyer clicks your buy now button.

Here’s a video on how and why I chose this solution for my blog:

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It is free and very simple to use. All you have to do is go to the socialmarker.com home page and drag the social marker icon to your toolbar in either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Social Marker Logo

Then, anytime you want to promote a page (such as your own), you just highlight whatever text you think would be appropriate to submit to the social media sites and then the social marker tool bar button and you are taken the Social Marker website.

When you are at the Social Marker website, your bookmark details are pre-filled except for your tags. Fill in your tags and then hit the submit button on the top right side of the page.

I`m not sure how long the social media sites would tolerate this kind of aggregation service, but as long as the content is legitimate, I can`t see this one going away or being blocked soon.

On one of my pages here at BrooksVanNorman.com, I tried it and found that it was in all of the social media sites that I submitted to.

Bam.

You gotta like that.

Here is a short video clip of how it works.

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