sounds like it swung more to the North and hit Massachusetts harder: Snowstorm Saves Its Fury for New England

Yep. Watching the news all the talking heads are second-guessing the decisions made, 20-20 hindsight being what it is, everybody overreacted. On the other hand if they'd done nothing and NYC had been hit head-on, then they'd be complaining about that. I'm glad to see they made a decision. There may have been a few over-the-top edicts, but as Cuomo said earlier today, plowing the roads was easy this time because there were no broken down cars in the way.

I don't much like de Blasio, but I will not fault him on this decision.

A good discussion of the uncertainties in prediction is at: Snowstorm’s Forecasters Were Mostly Right
Even if the model gets it right in terms of amount of snow, even a slight variation in storm track makes a big difference in how hard a given spot gets hit.

Another discussion with more details about the various models, with a more technical discussion is at: Blizzard Questions, Including Why a European Weather Model Excels at U.S. Forecasts

This storm was pretty much a non-event. The kids were home from school, so I worked from home and took them sledding.

Good fun.

We had a standby crew at the firehouse all night that did nothing but eat too much and sleep. With the roads shut down, there were no car accidents. And with the power on the fire risk was no greater than any other night. (We get one to two real working fires a year in town. When the power goes off we respond to a ton of CO alarms from people who don't know how to use the generators safely.)

More interesting was when we had a freezing rain two weeks ago. FDNY EMS had a backup of over 600 calls, and volunteer squads from Long Island and New Jersey responded mutual aid to help out in the city. That doesn't happen very often...

The Capital Weather Gang at WaPo has an interesting compilation of how the professional meteorological world is looking at the forcast for this storm:
Wisdom on the state of weather forecasting and the embarrassing New York City blizzard forecast

Some big questions to think about:

What is the best way for meteorologists to communicate the uncertainty in forecasts of severe and life threatening weather events to government officials and emergency planners?

Assuming they understand that range of uncertainty, how should those planners use those forecasts? Plan for the worst case? Do nothing and hope for the best case? Take a middle ground?

Likewise, how should we as individuals respond to those forecasts?

One had better prepare for the worst case, or at least a very bad case, because, sooner or later, that is what one will encounter. Even at a distance,I understood that there was a possibility that conditions might not be as dire as predicted.