Tag: Television

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Dreamblog: Cosmo’s Revenge

I rarely have any recollection of my dreams, but when I do, I usually record them in my blog. Last night’s dream can be solidly categorized in slapstick humor / sitcom. It had pretty good camera work, but I am not sure if it had the laugh-track. I did wake up laughing though.

From what I gather, it was a Seinfeld spin-off or an unaired Seinfeld episode. The dream starts in Kramer’s apartment. Kramer is growing increasingly annoyed with his noisy upstairs neighbor. When the camera cuts to the upstairs apartment, it shows a young man simultaneously tap-dancing and dribbling a basketball. The noise finally stops just as Kramer goes upstairs to confront the noisemaker. A really nice spiraling camera work on the staircase follows. Then the camera cuts to Kramer inside the apartment seeing his antagonist sleeping on the floor, hugging the basketball. Zoom in to Cramer’s face and hands: he is grimacing and gesturing as if he is about to make a loud scream and spook the sleeper. But then Kramer’s face changes — he gets a better idea. He proceeds to the bathroom, takes a tremendous dump and leaves without flushing.

Ad:

Lucid dreaming is the art of recognizing that you are dreaming, and shaping your own dreams.(so far I am failing miserably in this department). Apparently it’s something you might train yourself to do (there are even devices you might buy to aid yourself).

Neverlate alarm clock has a separate alarm for 7 days of the week, and something no other alram clock that I know has – customizable znooze duration.

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Freedom Cuts

I have a friend who likes to remind me that my taste is highly atypical and should not be taken into consideration when coming up with new products. For instance, Fox cancels any show that I start to really like. Firefly, The $treet, Futurama – all mistreated and gone. The Simpsons weren’t cancelled, but somehow changed by Fox to become unappealing to me. Strange but true.

Right now Fox is promoting a new show, Prison Break. Recently they turned a little raised plaza in front of the Newscorp Building into a “Fox River State Penitentiary”, complete with signs, a barbed wire fence, and a whole bunch of dudes in prison jumpsuits handing out nailfiles and fake tattoos with the show’s logo.

There were also free henna tattoos as well as free buzzcuts. I was very much surprised at how popular the buzzcuts were with the office crowd.

Ad:
You know what’s missing from The Simpsons today? Bite. There’s no bite left in them. And I don’t know, something else too. It’s still there in the old seasons, but somewhere along the way either Homer jumped the shark both literally and figuratevely.

A relatively well known fact is that Groening started his career with a “Life Is Hell” comic which was about bulgy eyed rabbits instead of bulgy eyed humans. It had what the Simpsons is missing these days.

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Rank and File

Since a comprehensive list of Microsoft codenames already exists, I would like to move on to another taxonomy project that fascinates me. I would like to collect a list of weird titles so common in many big-name corporations. Here are some notes that I collected already.

Also I am adding a little note about certain not very publicized rules that the company has that might help you get better service, or so to say to hack the system. You’ll see what I mean.

Kinko’s
Every employee carries a title of “Co-worker”. Employees use the term Kinkoid instead.

Kinko’s hacks:
All Kinkoids seem to live in fear of “mystery shoppers”. The corporate mothership sends special agents that pose as customers, and then evaluate the Co-workers. On at least several occasions I asked for some collating and printing jobs and quoted long wait times by Co-workers, which strangely had a change of heart and did the work right away. Your job is to make a Co-worker suspect that you are a “mystery shopper”. How? I don’t know, but apparently I managed to pull it off a couple of times.

McDonald’s:
Generic title: Crew Member. There are special non-management Crew Members with many years of experience called Crew Superstars. Managers carry the title of Crew Leader.

Fast Food Hacks:
This is a little known fact, but almost all soda fountains have a special button that will dispense seltzer. So technically the soda choice include seltzer. Sometimes when I am not in the mood for caramel coloring and phosphoric acid, I buy a medium soda and then ask them to find the button (most employees don’t know about it).

Starbucks:
Barristas are known as Hourly Partners. I’ve seen a title of Coffee Master on a manager’s card.

Starbucks Hacks:
There’s an 8oz cup called “Short” as opposed to the holy trinity of Tall-Grande-Venti. It’s never advertised, but I successfully ordered it on occasion.

I learned a new trick, which I am not planning on using, but which surprised me. I found a tiny sticker which outlined Starbucks refill policy. It reminded me that Spongebob episode where Bubble Bass pointed out to the microscopic print on the Crusty Crab menu that outlined the refund policy. Anyway, it seems like the rule is that if you finish your drink within the hour, you can ask for a refill in the same cup at an unspecified reduced price. How will they know if you consumed your drink in an hour? There’s a label on the cup that records the time when the drink was ordered. You can also apparently bring in your own cup and have it filled at 30 cents off or so.

You can ask for free coffee grinds at any Starbucks store to use as fertilizer for your garden or farm.

Barnes and Noble:
This is a surprising one. All B&N employees carry the title of “bookseller”. Even computer programmers and janitors. Thank you, anonymous tipster for this slice of corporate weirdness.

Disney
Most employees at Disney World are titled “Cast Members”. “Face” characters, like Cinderella and the like are “Union Actors”. Disney weirdness is too huge to discuss here, there are whole sites dedicated to the subject. “No Disney Cast member at the Disney reservation center has the same name. If there are more then two with the same then they are given a name.” Whoa.
Thank you, Merlin!

Pacific Theaters
Ushers and the like carry the title of “Talent”.
Thanks you, Greg!

This calls for a gratuitous Spongebob quote:
“Squidward: Repeat after me. “I have no talent”
Spongebob: I have no talent.
Squidward: “Mr. Tentacles has all the talent”.
Spongebob: Mr. Tentacles has all the talent.
Squidward: “If I’m lucky, some of Mr. Tentacles talent can rub off on me”.
Spongebob: If I’m lucky, Mr. Talent can…rub…his tentacles on my…art… (smiles)”

Toyota Canada
Salesmen carry the title of “New Vehicle Advisor ”
Thank you, Aidan R.

WL Gore & Associates
Every employee is – you guessed it – an “Associate”.
Thank you, Joe Grossberg.

NASA
Gouvernment employees are called “Guvvies” and contractors are called “Swaliens” (because they are frequently from Swales Aerospace.

Thank you, anonimous commenter.

IKEA
IKEA employees have the same designation as Kinkos – “Co-worker”. I am not sure if this is a recent development or not.

If you have any information like this, please let me know.

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Morning Deadwood

People were filthy and smelly in the olden days. And HBO capitalizes on amazingly good historical dramas teeming with filthy, period authentic characters. First there’s Carnivale, a mystical drama set at the turns of the Century. It has everything : carnies, okies, tarot cards, old cars, Art Deco and Craftsman interiors, mysteries, psychics, telekinesis, Knights Templar, evil preacher played by brilliant Clancy Brown aka Mr. Eugene Krabs from Spongebob and a lot of filthy people. And absolute tivo-worthy show.

Then there’s Deadwood, set during the gold rush. A high quality historical show, Deadwood writers try to stay as authentic as possible, hygiene and all. Famous hacker JWZ is not a fan: “It’s like watching paint dry. Dirty, foul-mouthed paint, but paint nonetheless.” I guess he is just not used to “Milch-speak“, a very peculiar style of dialogue that the show’s creator and writer, David Milch uses for his characters.

Familiar to fans of NYPD Blue, Milch-speak is a rather weird . I real life I encountered Milch-speak being used by often smart people with difficult and important jobs, who although lacking formal education, try to sound educated. It’s rather hard to explain, but I’ll try. First of all, milch-speakers use a lot of long words, meanining of which they more often know than not. They often mispronounce them though. The sentence structure is strange and tortured. It’s almost overly formal, Victorian in nature, and at the same time involves elements of Brooklyn Yiddish. It’s like as if listening to a very profane Victorian Yoda from Brooklyn. The sentence structure often resembles programmer-speak, so many logical twists and turns it has. There’s also lot’s of irony and slang.

Here’s a quote from recent episode: “Bad news or tries against our interests is our sole communications from strangers, so let’s by all means plant poles across the land and festoon the c*cksuckers with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive.”

The character who spoke that line, appropriately named saloon owner and master criminal Al Swearengen, according to Entrepreneur magazineinspired David Tufte, a professor at Southern Utah University’s business school to use Deadwood as a source for his students.

Here’s Al staring at me from an ad inside special Deadwood themed subway train:

Subway seats wrapped in special plastic to resemble old-timey leather chairs. Add a lot of filthy passengers and you’ll get a full Deadwood experience.

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Monzy is Baaaaaaack!

The one, the only, the magnificent Dan Maynes-Aminzade started posting again. It looks like he does not believe in (or simply does not have time to set up) those newfangled xml feeds or html anchors, but he’s back and posting again. Scroll down to Monday, March 28, 2005 entry on monzy.com and be dazzled with his frat party science and engineering skills. Ice luge technology is not as simple as it seems.

Coming soon to deadprogrammer.com : “Deadprogrammer Visits Japan Part III : Day of the Tentacle”; “Dumpster Diving at the Flatiron”; “Ancient pre-Joel on Software Text Found at the Strand”; “Deadwood Train” and much, much more. Do not miss!

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Phi, Spongebob?! Phi !?!

Probably the easiest way to dramatically improve your snapshots is to learn about the rule of thirds. You know, divide what you see in the viewfinder by two lines into thirds horizontally and vertically and try to get more interesting parts to roughly be either where the lines cross or on the lines themselves. If your picture did not come out like that, you can usually fix it later with a crop.

Rule of thirds is actually a rough approximation of the golden ratio which is very well explained at Wolfram’s website. The pictures will look even better if you will use lines that are conforming to the golden section.

Just a crack of a difference: fat lines are thirds, thin lines – golden mean (I did not use the plugin when I cropped the photo).

I was playing around today with a plugin that renders golden rectangles, spirals and triangles. I checked some of my old photos – many seem to follow golden mean rather than the rule of thirds.

I was also thinking about writing my own Photoshop plugin like that (that one does not look like it’s worth 32 bucks to me), but Adobe has draconian new rules about who gets the SDK. So instead I decided to write this post.

I ordered a book about golden mean and related stuff from Amazon. Helpful Amazonian electrobrain is suggesting the movie Pi. The dang thing is pretty smart.

Meanwhile I got kind of curious as to how appealing the golden rectangle actually is. Let’s see.

Things that are strangely appealing. Spongebob Squarepants. Yep, the golden section cuts straight across his weird little belt. It’s also interesting to note that he is almost always drawn kind of sideways – in front projection the proportion would be off.

The Greek cup (about which I wrote at length before and mentioned in probably the only poem which I ever wrote. Yep, it roughly conforms to the proportion and “to serve you” is right at the division.

Now, let’s see. Ugly things. That picture of one of the ugliest buildings in Brooklyn. It’s waaaaay off. And so is the SUV in front of it. The older house on the left is good though.

Cars are tricky though. The most beautiful car that I know is Tucker Torpedo. It does not fit a golden rectangle either. But it roughly fits two. I tried to fit two rectangles onto the SUV in the picture and to the Scion xB, which is jarringly boxy. No go. Let’s see, but Chrysler PT Cruiser, a car which I actually like, fits two rectangles also.

This is all terribly crude and unscientific, but might hopefully be useful to you.

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Close To The Machine

While we are on the topic of vending machines, I gotta mention  hacking.

I remember that a trick with a coin with a little hole attached to a string worked on Soviet payphones, but I don’t remember seeing it used on soda machines.  I never tried it. Mr Krabs in a Spongebob cartoon about the origin of Krusty Krab did that, sot it’s probably an international “hack”.

At UGO one bright person tried to cheat the Coke machine out of a dollar by applying a long piece of scotch tape to the bill  and trying to pull it back out once the machine swallowed it. This broke our subsidized 25 cent machine resulting in an office full of pissed off people. That cost the company a few hundred dollars. 

Then there was an interesting machine at iXL – one that dispenses glass bottles of Snapple. There are 5 shelves, and glass bottles fall down and somehow surviving. Somebody figured out that that particular machine checked if the bottle fell to the bottom before taking the money. If one stopped the bottle by holding a flap that swings to protect the dispensing box at the bottom, the machine was tricked into thinking that the bottle did not dispense and let the user make another selection. Everything was fine, but one not very bright individual caught one bottle with the flap and proceeded to drop a second bottle from the top shelf directly overhead. The dispensing bin was immediately filled by glass shards and Snapple.

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Some American soda machines have a hidden menu that can be activated by pressing drink buttons in the following order : 4 2 3 1. I activated it once by accident (the dang machine was out of everything) and only now found a reference to this online. Some snack food machine can be induced to show its internal temperature, but I don’t know the key combination.

The company where I work now used to have two presidents at the same time. One liked Coca Cola and another liked Pepsi. Because of that we used to have two vending machines. Now they are both gone and we have only one machine.

And last is but not least : a weird “hack” that some of my classmates used to trick a proprietor of a soda kiosk in Odessa. They cracked a  broken fluorescent lamp open and rubbed the white residue found inside on a copper 2 kopek coin. The coin became silvery and could be easily passed off as a 15 kopek coin. What’s that white residue? Deadly mercury.

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Oh, Crap, Singing …

My favorite Simpsons songs:
Canyonero Commercial
Jebediah Springfield’s Theme Song
Hank Scorpio’s Theme Song

My favorite Futurama songs (get them here) :
Robot Hell Song
Poppler Commercial Song
Bureaucrat’s Song
Grunka Lunka’s Song
Xmas Song

Strangely enough I liked Katey Sagal’s singing in Futurama songs. I learned that she recorded a CD called “Well“. The damn thing almost made me puke. I don’t even know how to explain it. Sachariny songs, terrible electronic music arrangements. Ewwww. Her voice sounded nothing like Leela’s singing in Futurama. I went to Amazon now to get the link, and low and behold – ten years after “Well” she has another CD called “Room” out. Do I dare to buy it? She does have a great voice…

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Now, This Is Way Retarded

Animation cells. there are millions of them made while making cartoons. And most are amazing pieces of wall art perfect for any geek’s cubicle or bedroom wall. Fox sometimes sells Simpsons and Futurama cells as well as limited edition posters in one of the conference rooms at a discount to Newscorp employees. I’ve visited a few times, but still shelling out $150 – $200 for one seemed a little bit extravagant. I mean, for that kind of money I can get something more awesome.

Now, just this morning the best post-Soviet animation company Pilot was moving to new headquarters. What do they do with archives? They throw the entire thing into a dumpster without warning anyone. Animators and everyone else rush to grab what they can. What kind of fucking stupidity is that?


I absolutely loved early Pilot cartoons. I think I’ll check at the friendly neighborhood Russian bookstore if they have Pilot DVDs.