0% Content, 100% Lazyweb

I take pride in keeping my blog mostly lazyweb free, unlike some formerly awesome bloggers that I know. But mostly is mostly, I am not immune to the lure of letting my readers doing my research for me.

It looks to me like I can get a better deal than the one that my current hosting provider, Zipa.com is giving me. My monthly fee is only $10, but I get charged $1/gig for traffic over 10 gigs, $5 a month for shell access (that’s ridiculous) and $2 per month for an extra MySQL database. “Sweet Dreams” deal from Dreamhost looks like a pretty good alternative. Moving all my stuff is a bit of a hassle, so, before I move, any opinions?

Oh, also, my bank, Chase, is totally ripping me off percentage-wise. What do y’all think about ING Direct?

Um, also is anyone aware of a good deal on a Treo 650 with Verizon service (I already have a Verizon account, I hate them, but Verizon reception in NYC is better than any other carrier’s ).

[Update]
Thank you for all your responses. I decided to go with Dreamhost and ING Direct. If anyone knows about a good Verizon Treo deal, please let me know.

Dating Found Pictures

Last weekend me and my wife were walking by Central Park when she spotted a small dirty paper rectangle on the ground. It was a picture of an infant with a dog. The picture could have been very old, circa late 19th century, but could have been as early as 60s or 70s.

We found another 6 photos, and they helped me date them a little bit. Here we have a Victorian grandma. I have a book called “Dating Old Photographs“, and in it there are a few pictures of women wearing almost exactly the same dress around 1890-1900. Seeing how this is a paper photograph, and grandmas usually don’t follow latest fashion, this is probably 1910s or 20s.

I like the composition and dynamics of this photo, which is rather rare in this genre of “grandma holding a baby in front of a house” pictures. Other pictures also hinted at the fact that the house in front of which the pictures were taken is a moderately sized Queen Anne style mansion.

The next picture also tells me that this is not the seventies.

I wonder how these pictures came about to be discarded on the New York City pavement. My guess is that the pictures fell out of the window of one of the highrises that line Central Park.


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Technology To Die For

I learned from a very interesting book called “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton” that during the development of Apple Newton one engineer committed suicide. Being ahead of its time, Newton did not become popular, although it was engineered so well, that to this day many enthusiasts still use it, write software, and even make new hardware for it. I am actually thinking of buying one on eBay still.

I don’t know if anyone got hurt during the development of iPod, but it was involved in several fatalities for sure.

First, a woman beat her boyfriend to death with the device. This is reminiscent of Russian Emperor Paul I being killed with a snuff box. I was recently watching Leonid Parfenov’s awesome “Russian Empire” series, where he showed the infamous snuff box. I always thought that it was rather large, but it turns out to be about the size on an iPod.
[update] Apparently this was a hoax.

Also, a kid in Brooklyn died from a knife wound when he was being robbed of his iPod. NYPD and MTA reacted by this wonderfully cryptic ad. Without actually mentioning Apple or iPod they are urging hipsters to swap out the distinctive white iPod headphones for ugly Radioshack ones. Maybe they should also suggest buying Creative’s (or Microsoft’s when they come out) players – nobody will probably want to kill for one.


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It Sucked Back Then Too.

I see that a lot of people add “programming” tag to my blog in del.icio.us. And as they might have noticed, there are very few posts about computers and programming in this blog. So far, my favorite note in del.icio.us is “a NY programmer, I guess, doing you know, stuff”. Anyway, here is an exclusion from the rule, a post about computer technology.

There’s a computer book that I was looking for for a long time. I remember having it in my dad’s library, but it probably was left behind. I finally found a source of used books in Russia, alib.ru, so I finally replaced it.

“Personal Electronic Calculating Machines in Engineering Practice” by Krenkel, Kogan and Taratorin, Moscow 1989, Radio and Communications. I mostly bough it for a certain infamous passage attributed to Dr. Taratorin, a fellow immigrant and Livejournal deserter. If you can read Russian, here is a collection of his prose(he is extremely talented) and here is his blog.

So, let’s see, it’s 1989. Dr. Taratorin is writing these immortal words (my translation follows):

“One example of unwieldy, and in authors’ opinion useless add-ons is integrated WINDOWS system by Microsoft. The system takes up almost 1 Megabyte of disk space and was designed primarily to be used with devices of “mouse” type . It unites in itself functions of a file catalog browser, text editor, calculator, calendar, graphics editor and allows to load different other applications . Because this system integrates different subsystems and allows data passing amongst them it’s often called operating system wrapper (see paragraph 2.9). It seems that the usefulness of such wrapper in the ability of the user to load a few different programs and organize data sharing amongst them. For instance, after editing a text, you can pass it to an electronic table editing program (translator’s note: I think the word “spreadsheet” did not enter Russian vocabulary back then), database, etc.

Work with WINDOWS, of course, is rather impressive: during waiting (subsystem loading, file writing) a symbol of waiting, hourglass, appears on the screen, during file erasing a picture of a trashcan appears, backgrounds and font colors change, helper windows overlap, etc. In our opinion, the symbol of extreme esthetism and unwieldiness is the time-telling subsystem. When invoked, this system shows a pretty clock with familiar clock face and moving hands… But you always have to pay for prettiness. In WINDOWS system the price is long wait times for switching between applications, bloatedness of switching constructs (translator’s note: no idea) and large amount of memory needed from the Electronic Calculating Machine.”

Ahh, nice vintage Windows bashing. Warms my heart.


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