Dead Programmer's Cafe

Author: deadprogrammer

  • Cheaper! Faster! Kitschier!

    NASA kitsch from the Space Coast of Florida where I spent my vacation:

    A ticket booth in Kennedy Space Center. It’s a great symbol of all government space programs.

    This obscene looking 3d mural greeted me in the airport. This is a great illustration for this proposed technology.

    A phone booth in a shape of a Mercury landing module. Classy.

    It’s awesome that I didn’t meet the mascot that I’ve seen on the KSC brochure.

    I would have kicked him in the nuts.

    Oh, did I mention that they piped horrible Christmas MuzakTM everywhere?

    Well, on the other hand I’ve seen some cool things there. But that’s for another post.

  • Happy Winter Solstice

    You know, it’s winter solstice and stuff. So on our lunch “hour” me and my wife went to see the Sun Triangle sculpture in front of McGraw Hill building do it’s thing.

    Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

    “In winter the Sun’s path across the sky stays low. Its rays align exactly with the lower side of the triangle at noon on the winter solstice (December 21), when the Sun ascends no higher than 23° in the sky. At noon on the spring and autumn equinoxes (March 21 and September 21), the Sun’s elevation is intermediate, aligning exactly with the third (upper) leg of the triangle. No side of the triangle is vertical—for good reason. At no time of day and on no day of the year is the Sun directly overhead in New York City.”

    Major disappointment. First of all it was cloudy. Second of all the lower edge of the triangle points directly at an ugly wedding cake skyscraper which name I don’t know.

    Besides maybe I got the date wrong. According to most tables I’ve seen solar noon occurs on December 22nd in 2003, but I see a lot of references to it occurring on December 21st.

  • Dream Blog : Destroyer Of Worlds Or Darn Usability

    Here’s a dream I had recently:

    A girl that was partially my wife and partially somebody else got a hold of an incantation that could destroy the world. She pronounced it and world destruction began. My former English teacher uploaded an “antidote” function into my Powershot G3. I tried to execute the function. I kept pressing buttons and scrolling through menus, but could not find it. A popup window (which happened in the air, not on camera’s screen) gave me an ominous warning “World destruction in progress. Now only elementary math functions and the contents of this room remain”. The lens and the electronics of my camera were gone, leaving only a shell with buttons. Even though a bit of time remained, I could no longer access the menus. And that’s when I woke up.

    Interesting, this is at least a second dream with a camera that refuses to work.

  • Two Cars in Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish

    Awesome! FDA decided not to mess with them, so genetically engineered zebra fish is going to become available beginning January 5, 2004 (well, at least according to their website). I am going to ask clerks at my local pet store if they could special order some for me.

    Some interesting snippets from the website:

    “GloFishâ„¢ fluorescent fish are beautiful and unique fish that were originally bred to help detect environmental pollutants. It was only recently that scientists realized the public’s interest in sharing the benefits of this research.”

    “What if a fluorescent zebra fish is eaten?

    Eating a fluorescent zebra fish is the same as eating any other zebra fish. Their fluorescence is derived from a naturally occurring gene and is completely safe for the environment. Just as eating a blue fish would not turn a predator blue, eating a fluorescent fish would not make a predator fluoresce.”

  • Ach! Bonjurrrrrrrrr! Ya Call That Onion Soup Ya Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys?

    My wife’s parents’ friends visited France. One of their huge disappointments was the French Onion Soup. They went into an expensive restaurant and ordered the soup. After the first taste they called a waiter (who apparently spoke English) and asked if he was sure that it was the famous French Onion Soup. After being assured that it was the classic, traditional onion soup prepared by a chef with many years of experience they were very disappointed. They told the waiter about an Irish tavern in Brooklyn that serves French Onion Soup that tastes ten times better than what they were brought. Like dish water the French version tasted, they said.

    I’ve had the onion soup at Buckley’s, and I’ve got to tell you that it’s very, very tasty.

  • TT : Thought Tally : Dude, Where’s My Biochemistry Degree? or Kinky Crew Superstar

    is going to like this. As I learned from TV Guide Magazine, Ashton Kutcher majored in Biochemistry.

    —

    According to one of the most annoying things a customer can do at the checkout line is to say “He heh. I guess it must be free” when the scanner beeps and refuses to scan the code. See, I could never come up with that stupid and apparently common joke. A Null is not a zero.

    —

    This kind of reminded me about a dude who was playing an electronic one arm bandit in Moscow when the machine crashed with 999999 rubles in the payout window. He stayed at the gaming parlor for days guarding the machine, but in the end the machine was rebooted and he wasn’t given any money. Or so I heard.

    —

    Coca cola definitely tastes better when it’s sold in those glass bottles. You know the ones that are probably based on the shape of the cacao pod (which was mistaken for the kola nut by the designer or something). They still make those in Mexico and sometimes they are sold in a few bodegas in NYC. I always thought it tasted better because of the glass, but finally found out the true reason:

    “She told me that they were bottled in Mexico and I nodded since I already knew that and said, “I think it is because they use real sugar.”
    She shook her head, “No, no, not the sugar. It’s the water.”
    She leaned in like she was telling me a secret, “Mexican water is the BEST water in the entire world.”
    Just then a smaller woman leaned in beside her grinning with a single eyebrow raised and whispered.
    “It’s MAGIC water!”

    Apparently it is not Montezuma’s revenge that assails unsuspecting tourists, but the magic waters that sour in the bellies of the unimaginative, somewhere South of the border.”

    —

    Many big corporations in order to retain employees use powerful “cult team building” techniques. One thing that I noticed is that worker ants usually have very peculiar job titles. For instance at Kinko’s the official title is “Co-worker”. At McDonald’s – “Crew Member”. From Gig I learned that Kinko employees unofficially use “Kinkoid” instead of “Co-worker”. And from an lj user in I learned that a McDonalds crew member who has formidable years of experience, but isn’t a manager is called “Crew Superstar”. I guess it’s kind of like “Research Fellow” at Microsoft :)

  • But Is It Kosher for Passover? or Only In Brooklyn

  • One Stop Shopping in Brooklyn


    There’s time to collect stones, and then there’s sandwich time.

  • Door To Nowhere

  • Wanke Wanker, Nike Style Developers and The Big Secret

    An interesting article about Windows developers:

    “This late in the development process, bugs are often passed along, or “punted,” to the next Windows release–Longhorn–if they’re not sufficiently problematic.
    ….
    On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, “F#$% ’em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It’s in Longhorn. Next bug. “

    I bet that when Dave Cutler was around, nobody missed meetings like that. Probably because Cutler would have punted them.

    And this is just a good proof of what Joel keeps saying about superstar developers :
    “I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, ‘just go and fix it.’ One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows] .NET Server. Let’s just say that there are people I trust, and people I don’t trust. I told these guys, ‘don’t tell me what you’re doing. Just do it.”

    From the first part of the article
    “Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn’t have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That’s why we called it NT, because it worked on the ‘N-Ten.’ “

    Huh. Now they tell us.