#22
#23
Deadprogrammer’s Top 5 Books Read In 2004
Best books that I’ve read in 2004:
The Bug by Ellen Ullman (here’s my writeup)
Time and Again by Jack Finney ( mentioned here)
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin (to be reviewed soon)
Flicker by Theodore Roszak (to be reviewed soon)
Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York by Randy Kennedy (to be reviewed soon)
That Tactical Sensation
Today I am going to explore the geek/NYPD cop connection. Let’s see:
Geeks have Dockers Mobile Pant. I am not sure why Dockers marketing people all of a sudden decided to use the singular form of the word, but I guess they wanted to play on the connotation of “panting”. “Mobile Pant(s)” are dorky and ugly khaki pants that somewhat lessen the bulges from cellphones and pdas. I used to own a pair, and can’t say that I liked it much.
NYPD has “Patrol Tactical Pants”. Most New York newspapers ran gushing stories about NYPD being oh so very fashionable with the introduction of these pants. You can still find regurgitated bits of those stories over at Gothamist blog.
Moving on. Geeks have their Darth Vader lightsaber replicas. You can purchase a a cool plasma one with crazy effects or in a true Jedi manner build one out of a Heiland photo flashgun, just like the real thing.
Traffic cops started to appear with red led lit batons – mmmm, dark side color :
You can purchase your own pair of “Patrol Tactical Pants” over at Galls. They also have duty jackets (these are perfect for fishing), buckle less belts (these just look neat) and gloves.
Police gloves are cheaper, look and fit better than most good quality civilian gloves. I always hated wearing gloves because taking them off when I need to pay for something, use a camera or a phone. Some police gloves are made so that you can pick up a small coin in them easily. Just look at these: “enhanced tactical sensation”, cut resistance and “Water-resistant kangaroo leather palms”? Can you say the perfect winter fishing glove?
They also have more esoteric equipment:
Cold Water Immersion Suit – for NYC sewer diving
Rhino® 14″ Wheel Immobilizer – for that dumbass whose car alarm wasn’t letting you sleep all night
Holding Cell and Holding Cell Bench (perps sold separately) : as a gift for everybody’s favorite night club owner
Festival of Lights NYC Bodega Style
This extremely kosher picture was taken from a bus window. I hope you’ll like the way I cropped it. There’s something evil in the little light in the right hand corner, don’t you think?
MT tells me this is post 777. Woo-hoo for procrastination!
The Codename of a Rose
One of the many things that I find endlessly fascinating are software product codenames. You might remember my old post about Talisker – I owe the discovery of my favorite scotch to a Microsoft codename. I was planning to put together a list of all the codenames myself, but as it is typical of me, never got around to it.
Recently I was reading “I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier” and came up upon some Microsoft codenames that I did not know about before, such as Merlin for Microsoft Encarta. The book is full of interesting MS trivia, but unfortunately I seem to have misplaced it.
I decided it was time to put together that list of codenames, but it seems like since I wrote that post a list like that was put together by somebody else. He heh. Netmeeting’s codename is “Oprah”.
Sadly enough I never worked on a project that had a codename. I did come up with some myself, but many of those were unprintable.
Another Disjointed Post In Which The True Owners Of America’s Senior Citizens are Revealed
I have about 30-40 very exciting posts planned, but don’t have the time or willpower to actually sit down and write them. Besides, I should really be working on two very interesting projects.. Three very interesting pro.. No, actually five. The Spanish Inquisition should really give me some Ritalin. Anyways, meanwhile I need to dash off a small observational post. I mean without these and cat pictures a blog is not a blog, right?
I am using SharpMT, a very nice little Movable Type client, to write this. I hope having a client that is similar to awesome Semajic will improve my blogging frequency. But I am very much annoyed at the fact that in this day and age almost all of what The Joel calls “real-time spell checker(s) with wavy red underlines” do not understand html markup and wavy-underline all a href= ? I mean, the spellchercker in this MT client is bad enough to not understand the word “blog”, but Outlook and Outlook Express are not any better.
Hmm.. Where was I? Oh, right, observational post. Last Monday was a miserable rainy day. I was already a little late for work when I boarded my train. The train was slow as usual – people who are already late are not in a hurry, right? And then the conductor uttered the two words that make every NYC Subway rider groan. “Sick passenger”.
You see, if somebody faints on a train the train usually stays in the station until an EMT arrives. The EMT arrival times are amazingly fast in NYC and MTA even has a few of its own paramedics stationedat major stations, but the delay in getting the “sick passengers” of the train makes the trains stack up and forces the dispatchers to rerout them sometimes causing major delays. There is a passage about the “sick passengers” in Randy Kennedy’s awesome Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York. One of the interesting observations there is that the highest percentage of “sick passenger” incidents happens on Modays. Amen to that.
The train that I was on was rerouted to Penn Station. I got out right next to the theater that plays “Monty Python’s Spamalot”. The street was full of actors dressed up as knights and there was a SPAM truck involved in distribution of free Spamwitches. As I was already pretty late I did not even have time to indulge in taking a picture with the knights or in free luncheon meat.
Later in the week I finally had a big ol’ titanium screw screwed in where I used to have a tooth before. Now I have a titanium wedding ring, titanium watch, titanium glasses, titanium coffee tamper and a titanium implant.
Next day I was standing in front of a drugstore counter waiting for my antibiotic and painkiller prescription to be filled out. The drugstore had a really cool ScriptPro Robotic Prescription Dispensing System. It works kind of like one of those mainframe tape retrieval systems – a robotic arm moves around in a glassed in cabinet, scans compartment barcodes and dispenses pills into bottles. To think of it, I think I’ve seen modern backup handling systems like that too. I always wanted one of those for my bookshelves.
Two oldtimers seated in the corner were obsessively discussing their prescription plans. What drew my attention was an interesting choice of words they used to describe their relaionship to the plans – it was always “belong to”. Not once did they say “what plan did you have” – it was always “what plan did you belong to”.
Dirty Money
Livejournal’s outstanding found_objects community has this gem that is a mix of CSI and Capital 1’s “What’s In Yer Wallet?” commercial.
Don’t know about you, but I just had to check all the bills in my wallet.
FUD You
A common IT worker in computer related conversation spews more acronyms than a Soviet Commissar, but chances are he or she won’t be able to decipher half of them. Managers often don’t even know the meaning of the concepts that the acronyms represent.
Some acronyms are meaningless by design and recursive to boot. GNU? GNU’s Not Unix!
Others seem like acronyms, but aren’t. I always thought that TWAIN stood for “Technology Without An Interesting Name”, but it turns out it originates from “The Ballad of East and West” – “and never the twain shall meet”. Sometimes when I try to reinstall my scanner for the hundred’s time it seems to be very appropriate.
Some apparently stood for something at some point in time, but then lost their meaning. People understood COM to stand for “Common Object Model”, then “Component Object Model” and now it stands for that old difficult technology that only Don Box used to completely understand. You need to use .NET instead, which is an acronym looking non-acronym which stands for whatever Microsoft wants it to stand for. Now Expect Trouble. Never Edit Text. Next Exciting Technology. What is the dot for? Come on, every developer knows that dots make your code more powerful.
An acronym that is often used in conversations about Microsoft is “FUD”. It always made me think of Elmer Fudd (because people using it often sounded like him), but it’s actually a term coined by a computing pioneer, Dr. Gene Amdahl.
It stands for “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” – tactics that IBM salesmen used against Dr. Amdahl’s company. Amdahl made mainframes that were fully compatible with IBM’s, but cheaper and faster. It’s easy to use FUD on managers that were in charge of purchasing those multimillion dollar big irons. “Nobody was ever fired for going with IBM”, right?
The sheer existence of Amdahl was a huge boon to mainframe purchasing customers. The rumor was that if you placed an Amdahl mug on your table, IBM salespeople were gonna give you million dollar discounts.
Let me present an artifact from my collection: the famous “Million Dollar Mug”:
White Paper, The Non-boring Kind
As a deeply materialistic person I have a lot of various collectible kipple in my cubicle and at home. I like to brag about artifacts that I own, but often don’t because I am often ashamed of photos of them that I take.
Well, no more. I thought about it for a while and realized that the best way to photograph my knick-knacks would be in sort of white background product catalog way. B&H has many fine lighting kits with domes, lights, boxes and backgrounds. I guess I’ll go there some day to pick one up after conferring with surly yarmulke wearing salespeople.
Meanwhile I headed over to my nearest drugstore and purchased a large sheet of white construction paper. I propped it up against some books on my table, placed the first object to be photographed on it and pointed my daylight reading lamp on it. The trick to avoid reflections is to shoot from some distance with a zoom lens.
Behold: an 1989 vintage (you can kind of see the date on the label) bottle of imported Soviet Pepsi in all its glory! Still full, and even seems to have some carbonation remaining. I bet for many of you this will bring back some memories as it does for me.
Also see my posts about Soviet soda and soda machines if you missed them.