Dead Programmer's Cafe

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  • Untitled

    Guess which birds live in this ugly nest at Brooklyn College stadium?

    Fricking Monk parrots.
    organaut‘s parents have one as a pet. The little green bastard talks a little, but has a very nasty attitude.

  • Brooklyn College Library

    Visited Brooklyn College yesterday to take a look at the newly reopened library.

    Well, they’ve spent countless millions, and now the insides look like a typical yuppie apartment. Various designer chairs (mostly Aerons and some other expensive looking wooden ones) , desks. The circulation desk looks like a reception desk in a Fortune 100 company. Tons of tables with ethernet hookups. Some crappy Dells with 15 inch flat panel monitors running Win XP are available in “labs”. Lots of air conditioning ducts and eyes-in-the-sky.

    Could not find any of the books that I wanted in the horrible mainframe search app (you telnet into it from the workstations). I was looking for some Lee Friedlander photography books , “The Legend of Amdahl”, some real estate books, some books about NYPD. Nada. Oh well, there is abebooks.com and amazon.com. And I have Aerons and fast network connection at home.

    I thing that royally pisses me of is that they are using crappy bright fluorescent lamps. I hate those. At work I unhooked one that is right above my cube because it was driving me nuts. Yeah, spend millions on chairs and desks and install lamps that give everyone headaches.

    The La Guardia reading room is gorgeous. There were some very nice black and white photos on the walls, a mildly interesting exposition of historical documents and photographs.

    If I actually found any good books and did not get a headache from the lamps it would have been a great experience.

  • Kiddy ride on Ave. U

  • Meanwhile in the Dreamspace…

    I’ve had a dream tonight. On my way to work I typed it up on my Blackberry.

    I learn that my grandfather, for his work on the Manhattan project, was given a castle in England. I go there to take a look.

    From the outside the castle looks like a bigger version of some of those cute Tudor style houses in Brooklyn. When I go inside, I meet a housekeeper, who tells me that she is very happy, because she was able to rent an apartment in a castle across the street.

    Thinking about why she would want to rent an apartment in another castle, I proceed. Now I see why she wanted another apartment: even though it seemed to be made of brick on the outside, on the inside my grandfather’s castle is made of wooden boards. I’ve seen boards like that on the New Yankee Workshop: they are huge, very old and not produced anymore. Furniture makers pay a fortune for them.

    I start going up to the second floor when I notice a weird thing: even though every floor is solid, there are no ceilings.

    I reach the last floor (third) and enter a room. Surprisingly it has a ceiling. I meet my dad there. I tell him about my doubts about the structural integrity of the castle.

    In order to demonstrate me how strong the castle is, he shakes the entire structure. It feels kind of how the Manhattan Bridge sways when huge trucks cross over it, but stronger. Meanwhile, I turn out to be standing over a void in the boards of the floor and almost fall down.

    After this demonstration dad tells me that there are ropes connected to the walls of the castle that are tied to a ring in the middle of the house. That ring nexus is what reinforces the building.

    Then I had a secondary dream about typing this up in my LiveJournal.

  • Die Kunst der Rant : Contrapunctus 2

    “How may I help you?” is probably the stupidest question that salespeople ask. There are hundreds of things that salespeople mean by it. It can mean “Do you even know what you want?”, or “Are you here to buy something?”, or “Buy something, dammit, or get out”, or “Dude, you are wasting my idle time” or “My manager is making me say this, but all I want is see you leave”.

    “How may I help you” implies that you need help. It suggests, that you can’t make a decision on your own. A shopper that answers “yes” is obliged to come up with an explanation about how the salesperson can assist, and it’s not an easy thing to do. Many people don’t even know what they want yet. On the other hand, people that actually know what they want and have questions will seek out a salesperson and ask those questions. That’s of course when the salesperson will be nowhere to be found.

    But guess what, turns out, there is an alternative! I’ve been reading this book about buying used boats. The author mentioned that real professional boat salesmen don’t use the phrase “How may I help you”. What the say is “What can I show you?” You see, this question is very hard to answer negatively. To make a sale, the salesperson needs to know what the customer is interested in, show off the product and make a pitch. “What can I show you?” is a question that is easy to answer and hard to walk away from. It’s a polite way to ask a permission to launch a sales pitch.

    Strangely enough, I don’t think that I ever heard “What can I show you?” asked in a store.

  • Die Kunst der Rant : Contrapunctus 1

    Like everybody else, I am frequently annoyed by waiters, clerks and salespeople. Like all geeks I am a little deficient in the communication department, which makes it harder.

    After getting somewhat bad service from a waitress in Blue Note I even suggested to a friend of mine the following idea: a world where waiters are replaced by a computer interface. You study an interactive menu and your orders are transmitted directly to the chef.

    Her argument against that was that some waiters are real characters and are really entertaining. And that’s entirely true! Howard Johnson’s in Times Square has a really unique staff of old timers, probably the most polite waiters I met. Waiters at Peter Luger’s are gruff steak experts. Without them the atmosphere would not be the same. On Dave Attel’s Insomniac I’ve seen a late night cheese steak joint where you are expected to curse out the servers and they are expected to answer in kind. It’s not a family restaurant, of course.

    But on the other hand, I find ordering in fast food places somewhat tough. The dude in Coffee Connection (Dunkin’ Donuts rip-off) habitually adds milk to my coffee when I ask for cream. More than that, he lies when asked if that’s milk in the coffee. I carry special glucose detector sticks to check if the soda I get brought is really diet (because I am on a low carb diet). Sometimes it isn’t. Many ordering experiences go pretty much as described by J.S. Bach of the Rant, his coolness JWZ. (don’t be lazy, open the link. It’s short and hilarious).

    Now, that I can understand. I worked at glorious Nathatns Famous at Coney Island, and I have a really bad short term memory. When you do mind numbing tasks all day remembering even the simplest instructions is very hard. Well, of course the menu was a bit more complex than popcorn and soda and I had to keep track of many more different things, but still…

    All you need is a PDA. You get a menu beamed to it before you enter. You select your order. You beam the order to the waiter. When done, you beam the payment. Not a single word needs to be spoken. Ahh, future.

  • The Mystery of Obidos

    Whoa, caught amazon.com while it was down.
    They are showing a page with Rufus, the Amazon dog.

    By the way, I was meaning to write about that for some time now. Did you ever notice enigmatic word “obidos” in Amazon url?

    Some theories from usenet:

  • Castle near Lisbon
  • OBI (Wan Kenobi) + DOS (Disk Operating System)
  • ‘OBI’ = Object Broker Interface

    This seems to be the correct answer though: Obidos is is a major port on the Amazon river.

    [update]
    Livejournal user hallerlake had this to add:

    “I worked at Amazon for a couple of years, and can mostly answer that.

    Obidos is the area where the Amazon is “concentrated” – it narrows to a point about a mile wide and a couple hundred feet deep. It’s the chokepoint of the Amazon. A wry sense of humor turned that to the naming scheme.

    The Amazon Marketplace (auctions+zshops+third party) code was called Varzea for similar reasons – it’s the delta point of the amazon river, where the river fans out.

    Amazon wrote their own web serving environment because the selection of scripting/webcontrol languages when they got started was so lousy. They had to call it something, so obidos it was. :) ”

    ”
    Obidos is huge, it might be over a gig by now. I don’t think it’s that bad, though. I haven’t been at Amazon for a few years. For a long time Amazon ran on the Netscape web server environment, then eventually moved to a specially tuned Apache. But yeah, the webservers had a lot of RAM in them so that we could fork a bunch of different processes… and a garbage collector got added to take care of some of the memory leaks. Even still we had a service that killed and restarted processes every hundred accesses or so. It wasn’t pretty.

    I don’t know who came up with the name… I’d bet on Shel Kaphan or possibly Joel Spiegel. Shel set the direction for the company’s software development and architecture, including standardization on C (instead of C++) due to easier debugging. Certainly for the first few years he was The Guy for software architecture; these days I would imagine Al Vermeulen has that task.
    ”

  • Prison For Dummies

    dmierkin posted a link to a dictionary of US prison slang. Well, I thought. There must be some books geared toward people who are going to prison, right? And surely there are. There is a somewhat outdated You Are Going to Prison
    the ever popular DownTime : A Guide to Federal Incarceration, and informative Behind Bars: Surviving Prison.

    What’s the audience for these books? Corrections officers, criminology students, and even some convicted felons. And me, I guess.

    From an excerpt from a review:

    I am on the way to FEDERAL prison and thought that this book would be helpful. Instead I found the book to concentrate on MAXIMUM security prisons. More akin to the Shawshank Redemption than information about what white-collar types will experience. […] White collar types will find that book much more helpful. […]

    I half expected a “For Dummies®” title to be available, but alas. Either they won’t touch such a topic, or they just did not think of it yet.

    If I had more room for books, I’d probably collect the entire “For Dummies®” series. They have fine titles like “Judaism For Dummies®”, AOLTVâ„¢ For Dummies® and Sex For Dummies®, 2nd Edition. Some books are pretty interesting, some are funny and some will become rarities. Gotta research them some more. There must be a lot of interesting trivia about “Dummies®”, like what was their first book, how they became so successful, etc.

    Hmm, they started in 1991, and “Dos for Dummies®” was the first book. Interesting.

  • After lunch

    And now I am going to have a coffee boilermaker: a shot of espresso in a cup of coffee. Niiice. Now back to work.

  • Untitled

    More cheesy jazz song titles from Sirius Radio : Joe Mooney “Do You Long for Oolong?”

    Or how about depth of meaning in “I am happy as a little boy / Who just got a choo-choo toy”?