Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: February 2005

  • Can You Smell What Deadprogrammer’s Cooking?

    And now welcome to yet another edition of “Gastronomic Adventures with Deadprogrammer”. Since I wrote previous installments I’ve noticed that I am not the only blogger who takes the time to purchase and eat weird stuff. The Sneeze is home to outstanding section called “Steve, Don’t Eat It!”

    I’ve read an article (though I can’t remember who wrote it) about the fact that many gourmet foods are initially repulsive to most people. The first signal your brain sends you when your are having oysters, stinky cheese, scotch or caviar is “Dude! This stuff is spoiled, spit it out right now!”. But then, you consciously think, “Come on, brain, this is 25 year old Talisker we are having here. I just paid $225 for the bottle, you better relax and try to enjoy it. Yes, I know that it tastes like peat a little bit. It’s supposed to. It’s a good thing”.

    The ultimate gourmet food for which you need to fight with your brain is Durian. Available in most oriental stores in New York, this pointy skinned exotic fruit is widely known for smelling awful but tasting heavenly.

    Recently I purchased one on my trip to Avenue U, which is more and more becoming Brooklyn’s Chinatown. Here it is, sitting innocently on my Naked Chef-style cutting board.

    When you cut it with a knife, you find several sections filled with custard-like flesh and big seeds.

    I have to say that the smell was not as horrible as most places describe it. It was definitely odd, somewhat unpleasant, but not completely overpowering. I found it similar in strength and quality to the smell of expensive sulfur spring mineral water that you might find in many resorts. Nothing even close to the horrors that you might find in any article describing Durian on the web.

    The taste and texture of the fruit flesh was absolutely great. It had the texture and sweetness of a creamy custard, very smooth and buttery, tasting somewhat like pineapple, lemon and banana at the same time. It was very sweet, but not in a nauseating way. An absolutely unique taste, very, very exotic.

    I can also happy to report not having any gas or any other digestive problems widely reported as associated with the fruit in question. On the other hand I did not eat the entire thing as I am still trying to watch my carbohydrate intake.

    Apparently picking Durian is sort of a hit and miss experience. I had the most expensive kind my store had, an 89 cent/lb Mornthong variety. There are other varieties that are maybe stronger smelling and of lesser quality.

  • Objectivist Living With Style

    A Curbed article about the new “tower of penthouses” tower reminded me of the Enright House in Rand’s “The Fountainhead”:

    “He stopped. He saw the reproduction of a drawing: the Enright House by Howard Roark.

    He did not need to see the caption or the brusque signature in the corner of the sketch; he knew that no one else had conceived that house and he knew the manner of drawing, serene and violent at once, the pencil lines like high-tension wires on the paper, slender and innocent to see, but not to be touched. It was a structure on a broad pace by the East River. He did not grasp it as a building, at first glance, but as a rising mass of rock crystal. There was the same severe, mathematical order holding together a free, fantastic growth; straight lines and clean angles, space slashed with a knife, yet in a harmony of formation as delicate as the work of a jeweler; an incredible variety of shapes, each separate unit unrepeated, but leading inevitably to the next one and to the whole; so that the future inhabitants were to have, not a square cage out of a square pile of cages, but each a single house held to the other houses like a single crystal to the side of a rock.”

    Yeah, I guess Mr. Calatrava is no Mr. Roark. But still, kudos to him for trying.

  • iPhoto Retro or John Sculley’s Gift To The World of Photography

    I collect 20th century technology antiques. They are not expensive and don’t take up much space – perfect for my cubicle museum.

    My shelf at work houses a small, but growing collection of monstrous early cellphones. There are a couple of gigantic vacuum tubes (some from an early Univac), a core memory plane, a multiprocessor unit from an Amdahl mainframe, a weird hardwired logic unit from a forgotten computing machine. My latest purchase is rather interesting – the first consumer digital camera.

    A $700 piece of equipment in 1994 Apple Quicktake 100 cameras sell for just a few bucks on eBay. I first saw one mentioned in this outstanding livejournal post. This guy’s camera still had some images in it which provided a weird time tunnel into some office party in 1994. I guess the people in the photos were celebrating extravagant Mac purchases.

    I bought two cameras on eBay for just a few bucks each, and one came with a cable and a floppy with PC software. Not even hoping that it’d work I plugged in the serial cable, installed the software on my Win 2000 machine, turned on the camera and ran the program. It worked the first time.

    Here are the two Apple QuickTake 100’s that I purchased. I bought two so I could take stereo images and view them on my 100 year old stereoscope. In a couple of years I think I’ll be able to buy a couple of iPod photo thingies for a few bucks and do what this guy did.

    Times Square at night in full .3 megapixel power (compressed to 500 width).

    Times Square at night with lower resolution option turned on

    Snow storm in Brooklyn

    Considering how difficult lighting conditions were the results are respectable. Usability wise these cameras are lacking. Even though they look like those binoculars from Star Wars movies, they have a very nasty lens cover that is very hard to open without leaving a nice fingerprint on the lens. Taking portrait orientated pictures is rather hard.

    So here I am, paying tribute to one of the last Apple products of John Sculley’s era at Apple (note how Apple CEOs are arranged in a timeline at Wikipedia – just like kings). I wonder if Steve Jobs will ever consider making an Apple digital camera. So far the fate of Apple Newton shows that to Jobs anything ever touched by Sculley is taboo.

  • Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

    I am thinking about going to Japan for my next vacation. Time to tally my knowledge of Japanese. Let’s see…

    Nippon – Japan
    Sushi – Raw fish with rice
    Sashimi – Raw fish
    Sake – Alcoholic drink. Some call it Japanese vodka or rice wine, but what do they know. It’s technically a rice beer.
    Yakitori – Kebab
    Tempura – Stuff fried in batter
    Nori – Seaweed for sushi
    Wasabi – Pickled radish
    Agari – Green tea (in sushi restaurants)
    Miso – Soy paste soup
    Mochi – Ice-cream (or other stuff) in a dough shell
    Arigato – Thank you
    So Des – So it is
    Godzilla – Big radioactive lizard
    Sumo – Along with competitive eation, one of the few sports involving a lot of fat people
    Yokozuna – A champion wrestler. Tend to be overweight
    Sarariman – Office worker, formerely a Samurai. Probably.
    Samurai – A Shogun’s report
    Shogun – Samurai’s supervisor
    Bushido – Samurai’s Rules and Regulations Manual
    Geisha – A woman who entertains Yokozunas, Samurais and Shoguns. As well as Sararimen with a good sarary.
    Sensei – Teacher
    Kohai – What Wall Street types call a Rabbi. One who helps out somebody less experienced.
    Sempai – Someone who has a Kohai.
    Karate – Pronounced Kara-tey.
    Something-do – Way of something.
    Kendo – Way of the sword. Somehow really means fencing dressed skirts with bamboo sticks.
    Robot-san – Mechanical human being. Some take Samurai or Geisha form.
    Kinokuniya – Japanese bookstore chain
    Ringo – Apple
    Ringu – Ring
    Waifu – Wife
    Chambara – Japanese movies about Samurai
    Manga – What Americans call Anime
    Jedi – Another word for Chambara; also a person with high midiclorian count
    Terevision – A device for watching Chambara
    Harakiri – A suicide method very popular in Chambara
    Kamikaze – A suicide method not very popular in Chambara. Also a drink
    Kohee – 8 dollar coffee
    Yakuza – Legitimate businessmen with a lot of tattoos and missing pinkies.
    Meiwaku – Trouble, disturbance.
    Kawai – Cute
    Pokemon – A very kawai little critter
    Makdonurado – A fast food place where sometimes you get a toy Pokemon with you meal and your food tastes like it’s made out of Pokemons.
    Katana – A type of Samurai’s cutting sword. Also name of Larry Ellison’s giant boat.
    Katakana – One of sets of Japanese characters. Either the one used for foreign words, or the other one.
    Hiragana – Same as Katakana.
    Hai – Yes
    Beero – Beer.
    Ebisu – God of something good, maybe beer. Also a type of beer.
    Kappa – Demon of some kind, I think lives in water. Also a character in Mario Bros. games.
    Tanuki – A smart shape shifting demon with huge balls.
    Futon – Bed
    Tatami – Rug

    Uh… Yeah, I think I am done.

  • Web Archeology.

    While looking for some hardware in my junk pile I unearthed a stack of Zip disks with old backups. On them was a reasonably complete copy of the long lost “Dead Programmer’s Cafe” circa 1996-1997.

    I think this was the first version of the logo, back when I hosted my site at silly.com, my first Internet provider. My High School buddy helped me get an account there for which I am forever grateful. Believe it or not, but a shell account cost about 4-5 bucks a month and you could even do web browsing with Slipknot. Far out.

    The logo represents an alpinist scaling a Cray machine.

    This is a later version of the splash page when the site was hosted at akula.com . All the cool pages back then had black backgrounds and neon or chrome Photoshop effects.



    Later an espresso cup made an appearance on the coffee page and on the splash page together with an IBM card punch.

    These webpages served me well. A girl who lived in my neighborhood found my first homepage and sent me an email. We got married a few years later. Her friend learned that I knew minimal HTML and helped me get my first web job. Information Superhighway is great and the future seems to be indeed bright enough to require sunglasses. Thank you, Eugene, Julie and Senator Gore!

  • Drink At Joe’s

    Believe it or not, but finally there’s a coffee place in Manhattan that I can recommend. It is hard to believe that this lasted for so long. Read this famous NYT article by William Grimes to understand just how miserable the situation was. So when livejournal user mityanyc first told me about this new place I was a bit skeptical, but it turned out to be the real deal.

    The cafe is somewhat unimaginatively called “Joe” and looks just like any other espresso place in the Village. A small space with a few tables barnacled with PowerBooks toting hipsters and paper grading NYU professors, a shelf with pre-packed coffee beans, a large espresso machine, a couple of commercial grinders and a counter full of pastries.

    What sets this place apart is the fact that the owner, Joe Jonathan, actually spent some time researching the subject of proper espresso drink making. The machine is a La Marzocco. The coffee – from a very high quality roaster and is ground to order. The tamper (I think it was an ErgoTamper) perfectly fits the portafilter and the barrista actually knows how to use it. And guess what – every latte is served with a rosetta.

    For the purposes of this review I ordered an espresso ristretto and a small latte. The latte was perfect – “microfoam“, rosetta, sweet tasting milk. Very tasty. Espresso was passable – good amount of crema, not too bitter. The color of the crema was brown, without overextracted whitish inclusions, but also without “tiger striping” and that brown reddish glow. A very respectable result, similar to what I get at home most of the time. With a few tries and very fresh shipment of Schomer’s beans I get tiger striping/flecking and the espresso tastes better.

    I wanted to buy some beans to review, but they did not have any espresso roast left.

    While I stood outside taking a picture, two men walked by me, and one pointed to “Joe” and said to the other: “ah, so that’s the place that everyone’s talking about”. Indeed.

    Joes is located at 141 Waverly Pl., it’s just past Waverly Restaurant (see picture at the bottom of this post) that looks like the diner where Seinfeld characters hung out. The closest subway station is West 4th Street on IND. 6th Ave line.