ThoroughlyR

I'm looking at booking a trip soon and I have the choice of flying through NYC with a 5 1/2 hour layover. Making sure that I have plenty of time to get through security/customs, that leaves me about 4 hours to check out the NY tech scene.

What can I do in NYC for 4 hours?

Before now, I've pretty much read my technical books in front of my computer so I could stop whenever I wanted to play with some cool new function or whatever. It's occurred to me that this could be terrible for my productivity and I'm going to start reading away from my laptop. Then, between reading and coding, I'll write down exactly what I want to accomplish and this will hopefully save a lot of time.

I'm looking for a neat side project idea, preferably something to do with geolocation and audio. I had an idea of showing a graph with people in your area that are listening to the same radio channel as you are, but Pandora doesn't have an open API and I'm too cheap to pay for IHeartRadio.

Any ideas?

I want to start applying to companies looking to hiring junior developers, but I don't seem to meet the requirements for any of them.

I don't have a college degree. I don't have an amazing GitHub account. I'm not the best programmer in the world. I'm certainly not a "rock star" or a "ninja".

What I DO offer is passion and the ability to learn quickly. What else do I need to convince a company to hiring me?

I'm interested in a very specific kind of work. I want to consult in many different fields, applying concepts from math and computer science to solve hard computational problems. Are there any readers that do (or know someone who does) this or something similar?