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Author: deadprogrammer
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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.
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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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The Copy and Paste Culture
Lifehacker is writing (I mean copying and pasting, or “remixing”) about eating organic food on the cheap: “Raise your own meat, if you can.”
I don’t see how that’s going to help. -
The Devil in the Details
Working most of your adult life in a cubicle is like being in sensory deprivation chamber. You start noticing more details. I took this series of pictures without a tripod, just walking around town with my long lens.
Looking at the steel eagles on the Chrysler Building up close, it’s easy to imagine yourself a superhero, standing on it with a cape billowing behind you.
It’s a little harder with the eagles’ less popular neighbors – flying hubcaps.
The decorations of the beautiful Art Deco Chanin Building are so very Lovecraftian. Tentacles, pentacles, tentacles with pentacles.
More tentacles and jellyfish on the copper parts.
The fighting dragons. An allegory of retaliation or something?
Minerva on the top of the Grand Central Terminal has a very modern look favored these days by Conde Nasties and the like. Must be cold up there.
It’s pretty cool to see how cabbies order hot dogs without getting out of their Crown Victorias.
I hate graffiti, and especially train graffiti. That said, I must acknowledge that an infinitesimally small percentage of graffiti tags is actually cool. Here’s one that caught my attention. It looks like instead of the usual gobbledygook and gang symbols, this tagger painted “NYC” in a manner highly reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy. I still mind having it blocking my view, but I would not mind purchasing something like that on a scroll.
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These are my two favorite NYC photography books. “Drive by Shootings : Photographs by a New York Taxi Driver” is a collection of photographs by a taxi driver with a Yashica T4 from behind the wheel.“New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott’s New York” is a collection of photographs of New York originally taken by Bernice Abbot in the thirties, and then retaken with the same camera, lenses and at the same angles by Douglas Levere in the nineties.
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The Naked Barrista
I haven’t written about one of my very expensive but ultimately rewarding hobbies for a while, so I will try to correct this. You see, I like espresso and espresso based drinks. One of these days I’ll write a long post about everything that I ever learned about making them, but for now, here’s a short progress report.
There are hundreds of cooking shows these days. Even the British, famous for their indigestible cuisine, field two awesome shows: The Naked Chef and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. All of a sudden, London is referred to “City of Chefs.” In any case, I am sure that both Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay prepare very tasty meals in their restaurants. But I am also pretty sure that if you order an espresso or a cappuccino there, you’ll get the undrinkable crud. Jamie Oliver, for instance has a FrancisFrancis! – a beautifully designed, but highly mediocre espresso machine in his home kitchen. Would one show about coffee and coffee training for celebrity chefs and their restaurant staff be too much to ask for?
As my financial means increased, I’ve progressed through a series of espresso machines. For a year or so I’ve been a proud owner of a Reneka Techno. It’s a common choice amongst espresso enthusiasts who always wanted a La Marzocco machine, but finally gave up, as new ones cost too much (around 6K) and used ones are hard to come by and troublesome. The scarcity of used La Marzocco machines is a mystery to me – Starbucks replaced almost all machines that it used to own with superautomatics of unknown to me make, reportedly forcing the closure of the US La Marzocco factory. Where did they all go?
Anyway, strange as it is, but a French company, not an Italian one is making a machine that mostly replicates a La Marzocco for home users. So, what separates this machine from hundreds of competing espresso makers?
Well, for starters it uses a rotary pump instead of the most common vibratory one. Rotary pumps give a steady pressure, unlike vibratory ones that provide the same pressure in a series of very rapid pulses. This is similar to analogue vs. digital sound, and just slightly less controversial, as the results are easier to compare. For the record, I like analog sound better too.
The second highly desirable feature is the separate high powered steam/water boilers. Add to that a digital temperature control circuit tunable to 1F and you got yourself a great machine. With this little bit of digital trickery you get in-boiler temperature stability that the bigger machines get through great size and painstaking adjustment. The temperature stability at the group (the coffee holder) is another question altogether, but it’s not bad there too.
Of course, to get all that you have to suffer some difficulties – like having a 220V outlet installed. This is not too difficult – you just need to have access to two 120V lines on a different phase and have your electrician put in a special circuit breaker. You also need a direct water connection, as rotary pump machines don’t have water tanks and need to take in water at water line pressure. This is not too difficult as well – you need to have your plumber to lead a flexible copper water line from the sink. If you install the machine near the sink, you can also tie the coffee machine’s drain into the sink drain. I am not as lucky – my machine drains into a big vase.
Here is my Reneka Techno with the side cover removed. You can see the pump as well as the badly placed pressure gauge. Pressure is adjustable, mine is set at about Schomer-recommended 8.5 bar.
A new trend in espresso shot-pulling is the so-called naked portafilters. Techno came with an extra portafilter, which I had modified at Home-Espresso.com for only $25. The idea is that you get to see the cream formation and flow of espresso though the filter bottom, noting the evenness of extraction. Also, crema touches fewer surfaces, ending up mostly in the cup.
I’ve ordered some coffee from Victorola, this is a shot of their Streamline Espresso. The crema looks a little light, but espresso did not taste sour at all. Is that the mysterious “tiger flecking“? I don’t know. In any case, this was a trial shot, I’ll keep playing with my new toy and new coffees from Victorola.
I am sad to announce my continuing suckage at the fine craft of latte art. Look and laugh at this misshapen rosetta. Ewww. Well, practice makes perfect.
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Serious espresso making requires serious reading. David Shomer’s book is a classic that must be read by every aspiring barrista. Espresso Coffee : The Science of Quality by Rinantonio Viani, Andrea Illy (yes, that Illy) is a sophisticated scientific and scholarly work about espresso. It’s expensive at seventy something dollars. But when you spend that much on coffee machines, coffee accessories and coffee, what’s 70-80 bucks more for a good book?
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What’s Wrong With Frank the Goat?
Dear Mena, Studio Ghibli called. They want their mascot back.
Maybe I am not with the times, and this is all a part of “remixing culture.” Like Chibi Totoro being “remixed” into Toph and TophToph and Mei being remixed into “a little 10 year-old girl named Hana”.
I think Mr. Miyazaki will not be amused. Neither will be Frank.
Don’t be like Mena. If you haven’t watched “My Neighbor Totoro” you are missing so much.
There’s also a cheaper 2 disk set
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More Investment Strategery Talk With Deadprogrammer
Two years ago I wrote about my inept investments and got derisively laughed at by my longtime virtual friend Andrew. “He heh” – he went – “PALM, HAND. You should have tried FOOT and LEG”. Indeed , Foothill Independent Bank and Leggett Platt Inc performed better than Handspring and Palm Inc (they merged back together now).
After the Internet Bubble my investment strategy closely followed the baseline advice of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street“: I maxed out my 401K with a no load S&P500 equivalent index and the like. Later I scraped together the remnants from my old non-401K investment accounts, added some money and since I seem to always pick wrong body parts to invest in, asked smartass Andrew what to buy. His recommendations were AMLN and AMGN.
For the most of the next year Amylin Pharmaceuticals was not doing so hot most of the year, and I got to heckle Andrew, saying that even his stock mojo could not overcome my bad luck investment voodoo. Yesterday Amylin popped up 28% because “Phase II clinical trials for a sustained-release formulation of Byetta showed the drug, when taken at the highest dose, could help type 2 diabetics control their blood sugar levels while losing weight“.
Overall, I am up about 30-35% for the year. I never did buy that La Marzocco, settling for a very nice Reneka Techno. La Marzocco is old news anyway, these days the object of my desire is a Syneso Cyncra. If the things go this way further, maybe some day I’ll buy one.
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Don’t even think about investing without reading “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”.
“Liar’s Poker” and “Ugly Americans” won’t teach you much about investment, but will teach you a lot about traders. Both are highly entertaining and very readable, real thrillers about BSDs. And there’s nothing “free” about them.
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Deadprogrammer Does Japan: Morning Set
Let’s face it, my week and a half trip to Japan was a major highlight of my miserable cubicle existence, and a major picture taking opportunity. In fact, it wore out my old camera. Still, I wrote up maybe a tenth of what I wanted to write about. Part III of the extensive posts still sits unfinished somewhere on my laptop. Writing long articles kind of wore me out, so I’ll try my hand at small Scobel-esque little bunny poop postlets focusing on tiny aspects of my Japanese experience.
Any good Japanese guidebook will tell you that food is very expensive in Japan with one major exception: morning sets. Morning set (I think it’s pronounced “morningu setu” or something like that) is a cheap breakfast menu. The average price is about 500 – 600 yen, or about $5. Paying for breakfast with a single silvery coin is rather cool.
As we all know, Japan is all about dainty stuff. Morning sets are chock full of kawaii. Your coffee is served in a nice cup, you get a cute little salad, a small scoop of potato salad, a croissant, a cup of yogurt with floating bits of fruit. Notice the cutest little stirrer-spoon.
Although Japanese-style morning set exist, Western ones are more popular. Me and my wife had this particular breakfast in a little French-themed cafe right near our hotel. There was Mozart piped in from the speakers, but friendly service was most un-French.Here’s an American-style morning set. A tiny cute little omelet, a tiny cute little piece of bacon and the most manly toast. Morning set toast is super thick, reaching a few inches in cross section.
The interesting part is that Western-style morning sets are way more exotic and Japanese in nature than the traditional Japanese breakfast of rice, miso soup and fried fish. Beware of Western-style restaurants in Japan – they often suck, but definitely do not eat breakfast in hotel restaurants, but go for morning sets outside.
I added my photos with a Flickr tag “morningset“. Maybe the collection will grow.
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I thought about including a nice Japanese guidebook in this ad, but that’s boring. Katamari Damacy aka Katamari Damashii on the other hand is the most amazing weird Japanese video game. You control a tiny little alien who is rolling a ball called “katamari” around various settings. Objects stick to katamari, making it bigger and bigger, allowing you to pick up larger and larger objects. You’d be surprized at how addictive this is.Wikipedia explains the meaning of the name: “Katamari means “clump”, Damashii is the rendaku form of tamashii (soul or spirit). Therefore, the whole phrase approximates to “clump spirit,” or, somewhat more loosely, “clump of soul.” It might also be considered a pun — dama means ball while shii can be translated as circumference, and the two kanji that form the name look nearly alike in a kind of visual alliteration.”
The objects that stick to katamari range from pencils and erasers, to takoyaki to giant squids and fishing boats. When I had my first ever takoyaki in Japan, all I could think about was this game.
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Party Pictures
I’ve attended the Joel‘s demo party for Fog Creek Copilot, an amazing grey hair and premature baldness prevention product. Here is my photo report.
The Joel is famous for creating humane working conditions. Natural light, dual flatscreen monitors, Aeron chairs. Actually, this is very similar to the setup that I have at home, except I have a view of Brooklyn instead of Manhattan. My chair at work is a butt-hurting monster, but if I stand up in my cube and really crane my neck, I can see the same skyscrapers, but from the other side.
Joel was literally mobbed by fans.
I dragged him away and had a couple of minutes to take a picture of him.
A funky light fixture was casting a glare on the famous office partition window, but I used it for a cheesy “idea” effect.
Michael Pryor had way too much fun with a Zero Fog Blaster.
Despite a wide array of snacks, he chewed on the poor defenseless office plant.
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Colp
The long corridor that connects 1-2-3 and N-Q-R platforms (or in other words connecting Interborough Rapid Transit and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit lines) at 42nd street houses one of the stranger fruits of Art for Transit program. A series of signs that spell out a poem: “OVERSLEPT, SO TIRED. IF LATE, GET FIRED? WHY BOTHER? WHY THE PAIN? JUST GO HOME DO IT AGAIN.”
This monumental Burma Shave ad-inspired work by Norman B. Colp was supposed to be temporary, but apparently it has served a daily dose of doom and gloom to countless late commuters for a decade or so. I remember seeing it years ago, and thought – what a neat-o keen quirky piece of art. But seeing it again today I thought about those people whose commute actually involves seeing this “artwork” on a daily basis. I guess most people can just tune it out, but I bet that semi-autistic programmers must find it rather unpleasant.
Burma Shave story in Wikipedia turned out some interesting bits of trivia – the “Free – free / a trip to Mars / for 900 / empty jars / Burma-Shave” ad an the guy who took them up on the offer as a precursor to the Pepsi Harrier jet fiasco.
I did a bit of digging and found a couple more pieces by Mr. Colp: a series of four blurry pictures of what looks like a shark’s fin titled “Role Model” and series of pictured of water called “The Relative Sameness of Difference“. Yep, it looks like the subway poem signs is his stronger work, although I might say that “Role Model”, which was created for a program that put art in US diplomatic residences is deliciously ironic. It seems like Mr. Colp specializes in art that produces an immidiate response (a chuckle in this case), but is not something that you’d want hanging in one place for a long period of time.
What’s interesting, is that the abovementioned pages contain his email – ncolp [at symbol] nyc.rr.com, so if you see “SO TIRED” on a daily basis, you can let him know what you think.
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