Dead Programmer's Cafe

Author: deadprogrammer

  • Lunchtime TT

    * Somebody already executed a hack I was thinking about.

    * A snippet of conversation overheard in the streets of New York today:
    Woman 1 – … Gin and something.
    Woman 2 – Gin and Tonic?! For breakfast??!!

  • You Still Need Proof That Aliens Are Amongst Us?

    American Standard’s “America’s Ugliest Bathroom� contest winner looks like it escaped from my favorite online comic.

    I actually like some of the couches in the “World Wide Ugly Couch Contest”.
    I’d be very surprised if this thing could not travel in time:

  • Huh…

    I never thought about it, but “goodbye” (which I often misspell) is “a contraction of God be with ye “.

  • Starmagic


    There used to be a little novelty store near NYU called Starmagic. I think I bought a deck of Tarot cards there, and some slinkies over the years. Then it disappeared leaving only an empty shell of a room with weird conduit pipes hanging from the ceiling. Seeing it empty at night made me realize how tiny that store was and how crammed with silly-space-age-glow-in-the-dark-made-in-China-tchockes it was. Goodbye, Starmagic.

  • The Shutton Bop


    If you get the title of the post award yourself 50 deadprogrammer points.

  • What Up?


    Urban Dictionary is an awesome slang recourse. Thanks, , you non-blogging bastard. Before I used to go to Everything2 for all slang related research. But Urban Dictionary is so much better.

    For instance there I learned that usage of “word” as affirmation probably originates from “the word of God.”

  • Monitor 451 or Ixnay on the X-ray

    What I always thought to be just dirt on my screen or glasses, turned out to be a burned in picture of the login screen. Modern monitors are supposed to turn themselves off after a period of time, didn’t they? I thought that the login screen in NT used to jump around like a screensaver? Apparently not so.

    A friend from the Fair and Balanced Network told me over lunch that the reason network logos are usually 3-d and rotating is because people used to get rather nasty burn-in on their TVs with static logos.

    This got me thinking — what kind of statistics are out there about radiation exposure in programmers? I spend about 8 hours a day in front of an electron gun directed at my face and chest. And I’ve been having salivary gland troubles for a while. People worry about stupid cell phone microwaves. Monitors shoot X-rays. Now that is scary.

    I am thinking now of buying a couple of flat panels for home and work. As expensive as it can be, it’s probably a good idea.

  • Jonathan Livingston Cellphone

    This morning I heard a series of weird rhythmic squeaks on the elevated platform of the Q line subway.What kind of moron would pick such a nasty sound for a cellphone ring, I thought. Turned out it was a giant dirty seagull on the roof of a neighboring building. Brooklyn garbage-fed seagulls are amazing creatures.

  • Sometimes a Woodworking Tool is Just a Woodworking Tool

    My wife giggles every time Norm Abram says “dado” on New Yankee Workshop. An explanation that “woodworkers use dado blades to cut joints” doesn’t help things. On the other hand that could explain why I find New Yankee Workshop one of the most relaxing shows on TV.

    As I learned at Home Depot there’s another thing that bridges a gap woodworking and Freudian Analysis — Freud brand saws.

    They make dados too.

    By the way, notice the price of the blade. Doesn’t that prove that 47 is in fact the most common random number? Not convinced? Check out .

    Random bit of knowledge that I learned from Norm: there are saws that are for cutting with the grain that are called rip saws and those for cutting across that are called crosscut saws. Also Japanese saws cut on the pull stroke and European ones cut on the push. I am a big fan of Shark Corporation Japanese saws.

  • Something Is SKUwey Here


    I found this some time ago in a sporting goods store. I wonder why the programmer made the tag printing machine print an error message on the tag itself. Probably to preserve the order of tags which are probably batched in relation to pallets of items.

    A few days ago I was talking to a Radio Shack employee. It turns out they can print out a manual for most things they sell by just punching in it’s SKU number into a computer. I asked her if she knew what SKU (pronounced “skyoo”) stood for. She didn’t know. Can’t blame her -it took me a few months of writing an e-commerce application and hearing the word daily to inquire about it’s meaning. SKU is an abbreviation for Stock Keeping Unit.

    By the way, in Radio Shack I was looking for a cheap lcd tv that I could use to hook up to the camera that is trained at entrance of my apartment building (it is hooked up to a coax cable that runs through the building). They had a tiny one for about $200, but I’d like a slightly bigger and cheaper one. B&W is ok. Any suggestions? I also need to find an affordable lcd tv for the bathroom. Come on, it’s the future now. We’ve been promised tv monitors and cameras everywhere. I am not asking for usable video phones, flying cars and robots bigger than a vacuum cleaner.