Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: August 2003

  • Post While Waiting For Defragmentor: Blogger Exultant

    My favorite modern science fiction writer, John C. Wright, Esq. , also started a livejournal, . I must warn you, that Mr. Wright is as controversial as he is brilliant. A retired lawyer and journalist, Libertarian turned Conservative, a self described Christian Atheist and Stoic he is nothing like a common livejournal blogger.

    I strongly urge you to buy Year’s Best SF 3, a book containing a short story called “Guest Law”. This story made me a big fan. Copies of Year’s Best SF can be had for as little as 50 cents + shipping at Amazon.

    Unfortunately Mr. Wright’s other short stories are rather hard to obtain, but you absolutely must get his Phoenix Exultant trilogy books. I’ve read the first two volumes and I can’t wait for the third one to come out.

    The only thing short story of Mr. Wright’s that is available online is a William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land tribute titled “Awake in the Night“. Now, I am a staunch detractor of the fantasy genre. And I absolutely hate fan fiction. In this case I am willing to make an exception. Yeah, yeah, you heard me say that. But even though
    “Awake in the Night” is a very good read and it revealed to me Night Land books which I will definitely pursue, I still wish it was an original Wright story instead of a tribute.

  • Lunch Time Post I : Now, About That Lunch…

    finally started a blog. To offset this sign of weakness he is planning a round the world trip in his airplane. Maybe he’ll finally visit me in New York and we’ll go out for lunch. I haven’t had lunch with anybody other than my wife or co-workers in a very long time.

  • I See a Gondola. Impulse Speed, Engsin. We Are Off to the Races!

    News in photography from : How to take “Panasonic” pictures.

    From The drama with tandems, gondolas and POGs in Sears.

    Now, store display, design and marketing always fascinated me. So I did a bit of digging around:

    Apparently this is a gondola (the long shelves) with end caps :
    (from http://www.leggettsfg.com/)

    Tandems seem to be Sears specific type of shelving. I wonder, who invented gondola shelves and why made that person name them so.

    I found Glossary of Aftermarket Terms and dug this stuff up:

    SKU: Stock Keeping Unit. Refers to each single item carried by a retailer. Every color, style and item having its own vendor or vendee number has its own SKU.
    Keystone: A markup of 100% or more.
    Loss Leader: A high-demand product such as motor oil or spark plugs, sold at cost or below to draw customers into a store.
    Velocity Price: Pricing system based on relative movement within a product line (usually discounting faster moving items more deeply than slower movers).
    Ad Slicks: Black and white reproducible artwork used for packaging and advertising.

    When I was working on online stores, I once asked in a meeting what SKU stood for. Interestingly enough nobody knew the correct answer. I looked it up on the Net later.

    You know those strings of items that festoon the shelves that we now know are called gondolas?
    (image from http://www.hubert.com)

    Apparently those are called “impulse strips”. When will they come up with warp strips?

    Now, this is an interesting name for a suprmarket layout:
    (taken from http://www.discountshelving.com)
    (Illustration 1) Racetrack Layout
    Racetrack Layout consists of a main aisle that will lead customers from the front area, around the whole store, and leads them at the check out counter. It is designed for two-way traffic that directs customers to what they are looking for.

  • The Engineer’s Itch

    On Saturday I’ve got the Engineer’s Itch. You know, the itch to take apart something that is working perfectly well and try to improve it. To scratch it I added a second video card and a monitor to my computer.

    All I had in my box-o-junk was an old video card and a crappy 15 inch monitor, but even with that a dual monitor desktop is absolutely awesome. It works really great with Photoshop – I can move all the annoying toolbars to the left screen. I also moved the mess of shortcuts, install files and folders with junk to the left. Now my main desktop is very clean and organized.

    It’s great for having multiple browser windows open, doing some reading during long and annoying installs (you can have a non-resizable window on the first monitor and another one on the second). Ok, next step is to buy decent lcd monitors and setting them up like that. I don’t want to go back to a single monitor setup.

  • 999

    The scary thing about the newer Rockefeller center buildings is that from Times Square they look kind of like the perished World Trade Center towers. If you add outright “satanistic” “999 Pharmaceutical” and “DOG” ads and a jet plane trail, the picture becomes even scarier.