There used to be a little novelty store near NYU called Starmagic. I think I bought a deck of Tarot cards there, and some slinkies over the years. Then it disappeared leaving only an empty shell of a room with weird conduit pipes hanging from the ceiling. Seeing it empty at night made me realize how tiny that store was and how crammed with silly-space-age-glow-in-the-dark-made-in-China-tchockes it was. Goodbye, Starmagic.
The Shutton Bop
If you get the title of the post award yourself 50 deadprogrammer points.
What Up?
Urban Dictionary is an awesome slang recourse. Thanks,
For instance there I learned that usage of “word” as affirmation probably originates from “the word of God.”
Monitor 451 or Ixnay on the X-ray
What I always thought to be just dirt on my screen or glasses, turned out to be a burned in picture of the login screen. Modern monitors are supposed to turn themselves off after a period of time, didn’t they? I thought that the login screen in NT used to jump around like a screensaver? Apparently not so.
A friend from the Fair and Balanced Network told me over lunch that the reason network logos are usually 3-d and rotating is because people used to get rather nasty burn-in on their TVs with static logos.
This got me thinking — what kind of statistics are out there about radiation exposure in programmers? I spend about 8 hours a day in front of an electron gun directed at my face and chest. And I’ve been having salivary gland troubles for a while. People worry about stupid cell phone microwaves. Monitors shoot X-rays. Now that is scary.
I am thinking now of buying a couple of flat panels for home and work. As expensive as it can be, it’s probably a good idea.
Jonathan Livingston Cellphone
This morning I heard a series of weird rhythmic squeaks on the elevated platform of the Q line subway.What kind of moron would pick such a nasty sound for a cellphone ring, I thought. Turned out it was a giant dirty seagull on the roof of a neighboring building. Brooklyn garbage-fed seagulls are amazing creatures.
Sometimes a Woodworking Tool is Just a Woodworking Tool
My wife giggles every time Norm Abram says “dado” on New Yankee Workshop. An explanation that “woodworkers use dado blades to cut joints” doesn’t help things. On the other hand that could explain why I find New Yankee Workshop one of the most relaxing shows on TV.
As I learned at Home Depot there’s another thing that bridges a gap woodworking and Freudian Analysis — Freud brand saws.
They make dados too.
By the way, notice the price of the blade. Doesn’t that prove that 47 is in fact the most common random number? Not convinced? Check out
Random bit of knowledge that I learned from Norm: there are saws that are for cutting with the grain that are called rip saws and those for cutting across that are called crosscut saws. Also Japanese saws cut on the pull stroke and European ones cut on the push. I am a big fan of Shark Corporation Japanese saws.
Something Is SKUwey Here
I found this some time ago in a sporting goods store. I wonder why the programmer made the tag printing machine print an error message on the tag itself. Probably to preserve the order of tags which are probably batched in relation to pallets of items.
A few days ago I was talking to a Radio Shack employee. It turns out they can print out a manual for most things they sell by just punching in it’s SKU number into a computer. I asked her if she knew what SKU (pronounced “skyoo”) stood for. She didn’t know. Can’t blame her -it took me a few months of writing an e-commerce application and hearing the word daily to inquire about it’s meaning. SKU is an abbreviation for Stock Keeping Unit.
By the way, in Radio Shack I was looking for a cheap lcd tv that I could use to hook up to the camera that is trained at entrance of my apartment building (it is hooked up to a coax cable that runs through the building). They had a tiny one for about $200, but I’d like a slightly bigger and cheaper one. B&W is ok. Any suggestions? I also need to find an affordable lcd tv for the bathroom. Come on, it’s the future now. We’ve been promised tv monitors and cameras everywhere. I am not asking for usable video phones, flying cars and robots bigger than a vacuum cleaner.
Is That A Genetically Engineered Banana Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?
Thank you for the link, raymondc_feed.
Quote from http://www.etichettando.com/uk/plu/plu.htm
“How to read a PLU code:
-For conventionally grown fruit, (grown with chemicals inputs), the PLU code on the sticker consists of four numbers.
– Organically grown fruit has a five-numeral PLU prefaced by the number 9.
– Genetically engineered (GM) fruit has a five-numeral PLU prefaced by the number 8.
Examples:
A conventionally grown banana would be:
4011
An organic banana would be:
94011
A genetically engineered (GE or GMO) banana would be:
84011 “
By the way, those genetically engineered fish are already on sale in Petland Discounts near me. Unfortunately I temporarily got rid of my aquarium (the fish are my father’s tank for now).
Lunchtime TT : Thought Tally
* I purchased and used caffeinated soap (nice and minty, but I don’t think soaping up provides a viable caffeine absorption pathway). You think I am not going to try caffeinated steak? I’ll let you know how it is.
(See my old posts Enema of the State and Steak ala Deadprogrammer)
* lynspin came up with a perfect answer to “YOURE GOING TO DIE FROM ATKINS”.
* Coca Cola marketoids were giving out cans of Diet Coke With Lime. This kind of reminded me of Pepsi Clear years back. I wonder what it would take to get a can or a bottle of that stuff these days. Just out of curiosity. Also I remembered a story about “Marshall Zhukov .. getting a stash of Coke smuggled into Stalin’s USSR with the caramel coloring removed, in clear bottles with a red star on the cap”. One of my co-workers told me about Pepsi Kona, a coffee flavored Pepsi which never made it into the wild from marketing studies. The whole cola flavor distribution thing is kind of weird. New York area for instance is not getting Diet Mountain Dew Code Red, but it’s available in Florida.
An Old Dream or One Of These Days, To the Mars, Alice!
LJ user avva mentioned in his journal that he is ashamed of the fact that there was never a manned Mars mission. Also our beloved overlord keeps talking about a Mars mission. So on my lunch break I dug around in my email and found an old dream of mine that never made Jesse Reclaw’s Slow Wave:
There I was on Mars with four other astronauts. I fell into a red sand dune (kind of like quicksand). I remember hating the guts of some other astronaut, who helped me out of it, because I could have easily gotten out myself. It just made me look bad on TV.
I was also tremendously pissed off at NASA. You see, their moronic plan of getting us off the planet was this: one astronaut would have a small rocket pack (and that wasn’t me). The others would grab his arms and legs, he would turn on the rocket pack and we would fly into low orbit. There we would find a small refueling craft (something like a barrel of fuel). With that fuel we would be able to reach our spacecraft in higher orbit. Faster, cheaper, better my ass — I thought.