Blogging since 2002
Wow. This is a frickin’ Flowers for Algernon situation. Ripley the Cat has 622 Livejournal readers at this time. I have 45. Well, either the cat had intelligence enhancement or I am retarded. Or both.
Maybe Tilde the Cat should guest-blog for a while. If she’ll refuse, I can ask Gary the Cat, my second never before mentioned in this blog cat.
For a while now I’ve been trying to organize all of my notes. For years I had great hopes of finding a perfect electronic organizer. My first love and biggest disappointment were devices created by Jeff Hawkins and Celeste Baranski.
I owned my share of Palms and Handsprings, even the first Handspring phone module, but the damn things just kept crashing, running out of charge, loosing data and breaking exactly when I needed them the most. Also, the phone module was probably the worst cell phone I ever owned. Arrrr, just the memory itself of the scurvy thing be driving me nuts.
Funnily enough, three or four of my co-workers who did not even want to listen to my raves about Handspring in those days now own latest Treo cell phones which are a little less terrible, but still not as good as what I use these days. What high technology do I use? I use an ugly brick of a cell phone with Verizon service which is easy to use, keeps charge well, never crashes, is comfortable to hold and manages to get reception even in some shallow subway stations. For a phone book and notes I use little black books made by Moleskine.
Because of its slowness and bad text recognition my Tablet PC is sitting on a shelf waiting for a Linux installation, but I am trying to organize all of my notes and transfer them from random pieces of paper into neat new Moleskine notebooks. Tilde the cat keeps a watchful eye over them.
The most useful thing I did this weekend was organizing my papers. It’s kind of like therapy for me. The amount of paper crap that accumulates on my desk is amazing. Junk mail, bills, magazines. Well, I’ll describe my organizational system for you. It consists of three stages.
1) Intake: basically heaps of paper on all flat and not flat surfaces in my apartment. Care must be taken to hide paper receipts from Tilde the cat, or she’ll file them in her stomach. Receipts are a delicacy for Tilde.
2) Stage one: a stack of three milk crates with folders inside. There are these special bound folders books that I bought at Staples that have partitions for various bills and documents. There is a special folder where I file stuff for the Tax Man throughout the year.
3) Stage three: big plastic boxes where I file away older stuff.
Among other things I found an old box that held Christmas cards and tip envelopes from my job as a doorman. Among them was a card from Professor Samuels. Disturbing, huh?
Also disturbing is the fact that I learned about the particular Staples where I usually go on office supply buying binges. In the past it used to be a Waldbaums supermarket that burned down in the seventies. 20 firefighters were standing on the roof dousing the fire when it collapsed. The ones that fell in the aisles mostly made it, but 6 that landed on the shelves (yes, yes, those gondola shelves) died (I don’t really understand why, but that’s what I’ve read in Bay News).
Disturbed enough? No? Well, I recently learned that Bryant Park used to be a cemetery. There.
silly kitty
silly fishy
I was always addicted to coffee. In the Soviet Union, a country of tea drinkers, brewed coffee was a rarity. The most commonly available coffee was instant, and even that slop was very scarce. I still remember the time when our distant relative from Australia sent us a big parcel, which among other things contained a humongous can of Folgers instant coffee. I was able to beg my mom to share it with me from time to time. Among the things in the parcel was a pair of extremely thick Levis jeans, but that’s another story. Oh, and that relative was a mayor of a small town in Australia. Also another story.
In any case, the first time I tasted non-instant and non-Turkish coffee was probably in the US. I continued drinking instant, sometimes with lemon ( coffee with lemon is mostly unheard of in the US). Then I learned that coffee could easily be purchased in bodegas 24 hours a day.
My tastes were becoming more and more refined. I purchased a cheapo steam powered espresso maker for $50 and learned the art of making espresso with. Even with the crappy equipment I was able to make half decent espresso and cappuccino once in a while.
After I purchased a semi-decent pump machine for $150 I stopped drinking drip coffee altogether. Then I purchased a semi-professional pump machine for $650. It was very nice, but broke after a few years of service. It’s possible to get service for commercial machines of that firm, but not for the consumer products. The machine sits in a box in my bedroom, and every night Tilde the cat mutilates it’s cardboard box. That is the punishment of the espresso gods for failure. Yeah.
Meanwhile I rediscovered the bodega (deli) coffee. Most bodegas have commercial Bunn brewers and grinders. The coffee is fresh.
There are a few coffee customs that are very specific to New York.
The first is that the expression “coffee, regular” refers to a small cup with sugar (usually two spoons) and milk. The second is the cup in question. Most frequently the cup is either a Sherri Cup Company “Anthora” design or one of it’s clones or relatives. If you’ve seen a film or a show about New York, you’ve seen this cup. It’s very very distinct. It’s blue and white, it features a Greek pattern and the words “we are happy to serve you”. The official name “Anthora” is a misspelling of “amphora”.
From http://www.caffmag.com/caffmag/features/grk_cup.html
“The design has been around since 1963,” said Wayne Meadowcroft, Sherri’s vice president of sales and marketing. “At the time, most of the diners and delis were Greek-owned, so the design, which was by an employee, Leslie Buck, was a natural.”
While ownership of diners has expanded to include other ethnic groups, the cups are not unique to Greek-owned restaurants. At Italian pizza shops, in Indian diners and Jewish delis, the cup of choice is almost always the same and can be found stacked high in plastic covering near the coffee pots.
This Leslie Buck must have felt like that woman who designed the mac icons.
In any case, there are variations of the “Anthora” design floating around. See the clone gallery here (it’s really worth a look. Clicky.)
After I lost $30 pounds on Atkins diet my wedding ring started to slip off my finger. Of course, I am not Frodo, and wearing it on a piece of string was not an option. I used to leave it on the dressing table a lot, and finally it disappeared. Who stole Precious is not clear, but Tilde the cat is a likely suspect. So my wedding band is hopelessly lost.
It was a titanium ring. It looked like this:
Interestingly enough, the company that makes these rings is located in Canada. I wonder if they were inspired by the Engineer’s Ring.
I have a somewhat unhealthy fascination with titanium. I love that metal. SR71 Blackbird planes, Akula class subs, and if you are a Star Wars geek, TIE fighters are made mostly of titanium. I own a titanium watch and eyeglasses frame. I used to have a titanium pda case, but I lost it too :( Titanium is almost indestructible, but easily lost.
Well, now I need to replace the ring. I am thinking of choosing a different, fancier design. Probably one of these.
I was also thinking about a more exotic material for the ring, like iridium, but nobody makes them.
By the way, titanium rings are machined out of a single block of titanium. You can’t really smelt titanium, so resizing the rings is out of the question. Imagine how much skill is needed to machine interlocking rings out of a single block:
I am a little weird when it comes to organizing stuff. I am kind of like this dude in Chekhov’s “A Man in a Case”. I like cases. In particular, I like custom cases.
For instance, if you purchase an expensive telescope, chances are it will come with a case. This case will be a box filled with a special kind of foam. This foam has a pre-cut silhouette of the scope and accessories. This way everything fits exactly.
This reminds me of the Kazbek-U Soyuz spacecraft couches that are custom made for each cosmonaut.
A chair made for Norman Thagard at the National Air and Space Museum.
I’ve seen cooler chairs in a museum in Moscow when I was a child, probably from Salyut or maybe even Vostok missions, but I can’t find any references.
Anyway, back to custom cases. I really want a case for my bedside table. It should hold my glasses, keys, wallet, watch and wedding ring. This may look comical, but is rather convenient. I can’t just leave all this stuff on the tabletop because Tilde the cat likes to play with things. Tilde already “disappeared” my nice titanium wedding ring. I don’t want to just put everything into a box because I don’t want my keys to scratch up my really, really expensive glasses.
So anyway, the are three steps in making a custom case. Get a box. That’s easy. Get some foam. That’s a bit harder, but you can get it a good photo store like B&H or Adorama. Now comes the hard part. Cutting the foam.
My first attempt failed miserably. I tried cutting the foam with a sharp blade, and I could not make any straight cuts. Then I tried to cut the foam with a hot knife. That generated a lot of stinky smoke and the results were not very good. But finally I found a solution on the Net.
It’s really ingenious.
What you need to do is soak the foam in water, wring it out and then freeze it. Frozen foam can be easily cut with a knife or drilled with a drill or a sharpened pipe.
Here is the article.
Of course, it’s best to use multiple layers of foam to create the relief effect like this:
