Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: May 2005

  • Time to Get on the Top of the Rock
    or
    Can You Smell What’s Cooking at the Top of the Rock?

    There’s one thing that I hate about Chrysler Building. It does not have a public observation deck. I feel that any major skyscraper needs to have two things at the top: a restaurant and an observation deck.

    To the owners the public areas at the top are usually a pain in the ass and rarely pay for themselves. Having a lot of people from the street come up to the very top of the building, adding to the overall traffic is not fun for building management from the security standpoint. I remember reading about the co-op board of a posh building at 30 Central Park South trying to evict Nirvana, a top floor Indian restaurant with amazing views of Central Park. They complained about the traffic and the cooking smells.

    Because of this most buildings that used to have observation decks and restaurants closed them. Over a the Tishman Building Top of the Sixes turned into an exclusive cigar club. At the City Services Building the public observation deck, which was actually planned as the owner’s penthouse, was turned into a closed lounge for AIG brass. An at the Chrysler Building, the observation deck became Schrafft’s Restaurant, then it morphed into posh and private Cloud Club, and then closed altogether.

    When I was younger, I was not particularly attracted to the views from high vantage points. But for some reason at the turn of the Millennium found me deeply fascinated with skyscrapers and views from them. To this day I can’t forgive myself not visiting the observation deck at WTC. I probably did not have enough money to eat at the perished Windows on the World, but not visiting Top of the World still fills me with remorse.

    Because of this upsetting tendency of restriction and destruction public spaces high in the skies, I find this very joyous news: the rocket-like 30 Rockefeller Plaza will be opening an observation deck to the public. It’s going to be called “Top of the Rock.”

    Rockefeller Center has an interesting distinction of being one of the very few Rockefeller family projects that carry their name (the other big one being Rockefeller University). Most people also think that it’s built and named after John D. Senior, the Mr. Burns prototype and semi-crazy hander outer of nickels, when in fact, it was the mellow John D. Junior who built it.

    Since the Rockefeller name is not that popular, it’s common to see “Rockefeller Center” to be shortened to sexier “Rock Center”, as for example the menu of Yummy Sushi contains several sushi combos named Rock X, where X is a number of the combo.

    As much as I tried, I could not find out a more definite date than “sometime this fall”, but one of the free booklets that you can get in the lobby of the GE (former RCA) building has a little blurb and the logo. I like the logo. It’s all Art Deco-ey.

  • NYC Buildings You’ve Never Noticed : The Graybar Building

    Graybar building is one of the bigger, yet lesser known New York City skyscrapers. Located at 420 Lexington Avenue, it leans against and over Grand Central Terminal. In fact, I walked by it many times thinking that it was a part of Grand Central.

    The understated Art Deco design helps to hide the huge bulk of the building. Some of the sparse embellishments are striking and very unusual.

    The cables that hold the rain canopy in place are in the shape of ship’s mooring ropes, complete with rats and anti-rat devices. I did not notice this at first, but the rosettes from which the ropes emanate are decorated with rat heads. Freaky, huh?

    Bas relieves to the side of the entrances are rather conventional allegorical representations of communication – a dude holding an old-timey (but maybe slightly out of date in In 1927) phone with lightning bolts around his head and stuff and transportation – similar looking dude holding a truck. The other two relieves are of Deco-Assyrian looking Prometheus with fire.

    There’s an antenna at the top of the building. I could not find any information about it.

  • The Invisible Bum

    You just have to appreciate this beautifully engineered and architected street dwelling.

  • I Don’t Know if this Qualifies as a Mitzvah

    I am a big fan of a NBC’s failed TV show “The Restaurant“. If you remember, in the promotional clip Rocco says that 90% of restaurants fail in the first year. The author of this article claims that “the ridiculous myth about excessive restaurant failure rates is once again perpetuated and moves from industry scuttlebutt to everyday knowledge.” I don’t know the numbers seem about right to me – Rocco’s is out of business, right? I am just glad that I actually managed to go there once, eat lukewarm Italian food and have my picture taken with Rocco’s Mama.

    So, what happens with all the cups, plates and flatware from all the failed restaurants? Well, partially it’s bought by resellers, such as a wonderful little store located right at the beginning of Silicon Alley in Manhattan. It’s called Fishs Eddy and it sells a wide array of used commercial plates and flatware. For instance, have you ever wanted to steal a nice fork from an airplane? Well, Fishs Eddy sells airline flatware.

    They also sell some one of a kind items that seem to be specifically manufactured as novelties. Take these “Heroes of the Torah” tumblers:

    They seem to be made as a follow-up to a movie called Keeping the Faith, a story about a priest and a rabbi who traded “Heroes of the Torah” trading cards when they were children.

    There are of course no “Hero of the Torah” trading cards. That’s right, in real world they are called “Torah Personalities” cards. These were made in the late eighties-early nineties, and might still be manufactured. I dug up an image on eBay:

    There’s also a version called “Torah Link” that is available from torahtots.com.

  • Down The Gopher Hole

    Today, for some reason I remembered about gopher:// protocol. And was I surprised to find out that there are still gopher sites operating: gopher://erwin.complete.org/1/Software/Gopher/servers.

    Gopher is a pre http:// protocol that was created at University of Minnesota an named after its mascot, Goldy Gopher.

    Goldy is apparently not really a gopher:
    ““He’s actually a chipmunk,” said Sarah Compton, a student worker at the University’s Bell Museum of Natural History.
    …
    The museum has created a mock criminal lineup comparing five stuffed rodents alongside a stuffed Goldy Gopher.
    …
    Although this comparison makes Goldy’s mistaken identity seem obvious, other rodents have been mislabeled as gophers since before Minnesota became a state.”

    Well, it could have been worse. If MIT or Caltech geeks created it, we would have had beaver:// protocol on our hands.

    Browsing about a little I found this gem:

    “Happily, most web browsers will still understand Gopher, but they are at best suboptimal. No major web browser understands Gopher+, for one thing.
    …
    Because of security bulletin MS02-047, Gopher support is NOW DISABLED IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6 and higher. Rather than fix the buffer overrun in the Gopher protocol handler, Microsoft, in typical fashion, simply decided to disable it entirely. Instead of spending another paragraph or two on a droll rant about how high up their rear ends the heads of Microsoft technical designers are, we’ll just talk dispassionately about the impact of this security flaw: while the risk of an exploit is low in our very friendly community, it is not impossible, and the flaw is apparently damaging enough to be graded Critical. Nevertheless, if you want to reenable it, download the registry file from the clients directory here at Floodgap, or go into RegEdit, drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings, and enter a key named EnableGopher
    with type DWord and value 00000001. The reg file is available from gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/9/gopher/clients/ie6/iegopher.zip“

    Rooting around I found some protocols that I haven’t even heard of, like “Hyper-G“. Man, why do I like to dig up this obscure stuff?

  • Resolution 47 : UN Reiterates that It Deplores, Deeply Regrets and Strongly Condemns Deadprogrammer’s Smartass Photography

    I took a nice long walk after visiting Trump Tower today, and on my way finally got to see the ungracefully aging United Nations building. There’s this weird fence on a little terrace across from it, and the shot framed itself….

  • At the Towers of Madness

    I always dreamt of working in an office located high up in one of the Twins. So today I would like to publicly thank the Donald for giving me a slight glimmer of hope that I might still fulfill this dream. Also I would like to thank him for calling pile of shit architecture by its proper name – pile of shit architecture.

    The current version looks like the worst case of design by committee – absolute shit. The angles of the cut off roofs and the horrible spire that looks like a chewed up pen stuck next to a stick of modeling clay (that’s how they probably got the idea) are Lovecraftian in nature, looking as if the architects came from a place of perverted geometry.

    After work I went to take some pictures of Trump’s model over at the Trump Tower lobby. I have to give it to the Donald – his place is way photographer friendly.


    Trump rebuilt the Wallman Skating Rink after fighting the egos of numerous politicians and politically connected incompetents. That was a medium sized miracle. Now we need a supersized one.

  • TT : Misc

    Wow, who knew. According to Wikipedia, the order of the Teutonic Knights exists today as a charitable organization (they don’t seem to have a website though). It even has a grandmaster – one Bruno Platter. And I thought that Alexander Nevsky got rid of them completely. Or at least the Soviet era cartoon that I’ve seen made think so, because my education in that period of Russian History never progressed much further than that.

    —

    I noticed that at home I mostly use Outlook as a very slow and crappy spell checker for my blog. I only keep it around because of the spellchecker and because Gmail does not have an import feature. I tried importing with Gmail Loader, with the whole crappy export to Firebird thing, but that messes up most Russian emails and does not set the dates correctly. Why Google does now provide an import utility is beyond me – it would have completed lock-in for so many users. Also, I wonder, what’s the best software spell checker that money can buy?

    —

    Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters presents : Microsoft’s famous (mentioned in Microserfs and the Joel’s rant ) Ship-It award throughout the ages. I wonder if I could buy one of these on eBay :)

  • Do You Remember the Fear?

    By force of an old habit I read Livejournal blogs through the website instead of Bloglines. I immediately regretted that because once again almost made a mistake of writing about a private post. Livejournal marks private posts with little locks, and I once very stupidly discussed some non-public information about an LJ user without realizing that it was from a locked or “friends only” post. Eeek, I cringe just remembering that. Anyway, this time I got permission to post about this (even though I will try to keep away from “locked” posts as much as possible). Upc747 was very kind to let me use this photo of an old newspaper that he took:

    The Soviets are gone, but Iraq and Iran are still troublesome. And you know what? I’ll take the War on Terrorism over the Cold War. It seems like all the Generation X-ers and Boomers suddenly forgot the terrible, paralyzing fear of the global atomic war. Not the fear of North Korean or terrorist nukes or conventional attacks, but the dark gut feeling, the stomach churning certainty that the Soviet Union and the United States will annihilate the entire world in one final showdown.

    The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at seven minutes to midnight in 2002. It seems that in the years when the clock was at 9, 10, 14 and even off-the-scale 17 minutes everyone seems to have forgotten all about the fear of World War III. Do the people that say that the world at the turn of the new century is crazier than before remember the ominous 1984, when the clock stood at three minutes to midnight? The time when few people thought that the arms race will result in the collapse of the Soviet Union, but almost everyone was certain that the end of human race in nuclear inferno was almost assured?

  • Eyeballs vs Clicks

    I really don’t understand why Internet advertising industry is so centered on clicks. Everywhere else advertisers pay to put ads on billboards, magazine pages, TV and movie screens, all unclickable. They will even pay crazy money for tiny little logos on very fast cars going in circles. Or on outfits of athletes and even golfers. Yet when it comes to web advertising – eyeballs do not matter, it’s all about clicks. For instance, Vonage gets a really sweet deal – I never click on their ads, but every ad is a reminder to me that Verizon is ripping me off and I should really think about an IP telephony solution. When I will finally see that they have done something about providing a 911 service that is as reliable as a regular phone company’s maybe I’ll finally succumb. Or maybe their ads will do their dirty deed, I won’t have much problems finding them – their company name is also their web address.