Author: deadprogrammer

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We’ll Take Your Money

No, I am not talking about NYU here, even though “We’ll Take Your Money” is its unofficial motto. The official one is “Perstare et Praestare” – “To Persevere and Excel”. Yep, not PowerPoint. Excel.

Hmm, I wonder what other interesting unofficial mottos other colleges have. Brooklyn College’s official motto is “Nil Sine Magno Labore” – “Nothing Without Great Effort”. I know that firsthand. This is especially true about registering for classes. There is no popular unofficial motto, but if there was one, it would probably be pretty profane.

Cornell’s “Deus Et Humanitas” – “God and Humanity” is sometimes mistranslated as “God Went To Cornell”. And MIT’s “Mens et Manus” doesn’t mean “A man and his hand”. Well, what can expect from them, their mascot is a beaver.

Whoops, I got sidetracked. I wanted to write about charities. You see, I use Yahoo!Shopping a lot. As you spend money, they give you points. You can get some crappy merchandise for those points or you can also donate the points to a charity from http://www.guidestar.org. There are 850,000 charities in their database. Pretty interesting. If you search, let’s say, for “goat”, you can find “American Dairy Goat Association”. Search for “butt” brings forth hilarious results, like
“Friends of the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library”
“Charles C. Butt Foundation”
“HE Butt Foundation”
“Hurl Butt Street School House, Inc.”
and absolutely bizzare
“AMERICAN LEGION SN345 COLE-OGLE-BUTT”

And they all can take your money.

Me? I am going to donate those points to my usual charity – The International Dark-Sky Association.

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Live, From New York (actually Brooklyn) It’s

Weekend Update With Michael!

I spent most of Friday night upgrading my Tivo with a new 120 meg drive, which should give me 30 hours of recording capacity at best quality. I copied the data from my old dual drives onto one big one and tested the drive in Tivo. Everything’s ok, but I still need to install TivoWeb.

On Saturday I was finishing up what I call my Great Fight With The Wall Warts and Holy Insurgency Against Wire Mayhem. I’ll write about that later, it might be useful to you.

I also went shopping for fishing gear and spent a buttload of money.
Among the things I bought:
Seeker BA 30 7′ rod
Newell S 338 – 3.6 reel
Guy Cotten SuperKodiak Pullover
Buncha other fishing paraphenelia.

The pullover is really, really nice. It’s the kind professional fishermen wear. It has neoprene cuffs, very warm fleece on the top and fleece covered by PVC on the bottom and sleeves. Just what the doctor ordered for winter fishing.

Interesting thing is, the size of it is pretty much inflated. I am an XL, but in no way am I an XXL. The sizes were probably selected just to stroke the ego of commercial fishermen.

Ok, gotta go sleep, the boat is leaving at 7, and it’s already 2, no, wait, 1:15. Cool, daylight savings dealy is working it’s magic!

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Gender Bending Frame

I want a good digital photo frame. Not the stupid Ceiva, which requires you to buy into their crappy service and works through an analog modem (ie, even if I wanted to, I could not use it at work because we have VoIP phone system or something like that).

From reviews at Amazon:

“I knew this frame was cool when my teenage daughter was admiring a picture of herself and it suddenly changed to one of her brother. She let out a scream, and uttered a few unauthorized words.”

Now I know too. I hope she did not wet herself from excitement.

Well, I’ll probably end up making a frame out of an old iOpener or something. I also want a that 3COM net appliance for my bathroom, but that’s a different story.

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Are You Proud of Your Workplace?

I like decorated workplaces. And I don’t mean a cube with a swimsuit calendar and “motivational” posters from http://www.motivational-posters-animal-posters-sunset-beach-photos.com/ (that’s a real address too). I don’t like Despair, Inc Demotivators TM, although I wish I came up with that idea myself. It’s a big business, as illustrated by this spooky picture of their warehouse:

What I do like, is when an office has some artifact or artifacts that everybody is extremely proud of. For instance in Boston office of defunct company iXL they had an Aibo dog (the expensive first version), which they’ve got for creating http://www.aibo.com. I worked in New York office of iXl.

A company that I worship, iDEO, has an office which has the ultimate office decoration. Some engineers went to the airplane scrap yard and brought back a huge WWII bomber wing, which they polished and hung above a meeting room.

Art. Lebedev Studio, a company, which I think will become Russia’s iDEO, and which I also worship, has the coolest collection of old technology

Fog Creek Software (yeah, I worship a lot of companies) strives to provide the best working enviroment possible. From their website: ” … That means the nicest work environment we can get. For now, that means an historic brownstone in an exciting Manhattan neighborhood full of cafés, bookstores, ethnic restaurants, movie theatres, and a rather disproportionate number of Persian rug shops. We have a real garden out back, a full kitchen, a pinball machine, and natural light… ” And that is even more amazing than an airplane wing.

Me? Well, I have a small collection of old vacuum tubes (or valves as Brits call them) in my cube. But I think a nice jet fighter’s helmet and a nice jet instrument panel from eBay’s fine selection would be much cooler.

Ok, I am off to install a 120 gig drive (a bargain at $130) in my Tivo. Wish me luck.

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Stroking the Genius

Right now am pretty much obsessed with books about rise and fall of tech companies.

These are the most memorable books I’ve read this past year:
“Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”
“Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything”
“Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age”
“Show-Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows Nt and the Next Generation at Microsoft”
“The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison”
“High Stakes, No Prisoners : A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars”
“The Soul of a New Machine”
“The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer”

Awesome, awesome stuff. I should find time to write some reviews.

I purchased all of these books used (except “Soul of a New Machine” which I just _had_ to have at the time). Some were cheap, others surprisingly expensive. For instance my copy of “Hackers” set me back $30 or $40 because it was out of print at the time. A new edition came out very soon thereafter. Interestingly enough the same thing happened with “Alan Turing: The Enigma“. “The Supermen” was the most expensive at $50. I am still hunting for acceptably priced “The Legend of Amdahl“.

I just finished reading “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton“. It was very good.

Right now I am reading “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed“, which is orgasmically [spellchecker suggested “orgasmic ally” heh heh] good.

I really want to buy one of those highlighter scanners made by C-Pen so that I can keep notes for my livejournal as I read.

C-Pen’s slogan is “Stroke of Genius”. Beavis and Butthead would have a field day with them :)

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Defective Detective Shops for a Pepper Mill

I am shopping for a really good pepper mill, and dammit, I can’t decide.

Right now I narrowed it down to two choices:

a) A pepper mill made by Peugeot. Supposedly Peugeot was making pepper mills even before cars. [Insert your own joke about wimpy French cars and their origins]
and
b) Turkish coffee grinder that was popularized as a pepper grinder by the Frugal Gourmet dude.

Ok, so let’s see what Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance taught me. Thinking romantically, it’s really cool that the grinder is made by an automobile company. It’s a great conversation starter (not that I need any of those). But thinking classically, a mechanism made for grinding Turkish coffee must be by it’s nature more robust, and have a much greater level of adjustment.

Like obsessive-compulsive detective Monk, I can’t decide.

Oooh, isn’t the salt pig adorable? Nah, I’m happy with the salt cellar that I have. Besides, it looks like a perfect place for roaches to camp out.