The Importance of a Good Chair
When the name Jason Calacanis comes up in conversation and he’s not within earshot, something unflattering is always said about him. Ah, that Calacanis. He’s blah and blah and blah. Not one thing he does is without controversy.
The reason his name comes up so frequently in conversations is because he’s absolutely brilliant. Take the post about how to save money running a startup for which he caught a metric ton of shit from the rest of the bloggerati. It is one of the best articles on the subject.
One piece of advice, “buy cheap tables and expensive chairs” ring especially true. Most IT professionals spend an average of 10 hours a day sitting down in a chair. Meanwhile, spending money on Aeron chairs is considered decadent. Decadent my ass.
At one of my previous employers good chairs were very hard to come by. The usual new-looking $100 chairs were extremely painful to sit on. I developed all kinds of weird leg and back pains for which forced me to see a doctor several times.
This is the most comfortable chair that I could find (and also the worst looking one). My boss had an Aeron for himself.
Bobby Fisher refused to play chess without a Herman Miller Time Life chair. By the way, the Time Life building for which lobby the chairs were supposedly designed does not have a single one in it, just a 100 dollar ass-wreckers for the security personnel and a Barcelona chairs in waiting lounges.
Not buying good chairs for programmers is pretty stupid. The place where I work now has outstanding chairs, and I am very grateful for that.
MOAL
One day I was in a hurry, but took a second to take a picture of an interesting camera displayed in a windows of a photo store. The store is somewhere in the vicinity of 14th street, but I haven’t passed by it again.
I really wonder what this is – clearly an early example of a very long lens paired with an early camera. This is probably an old school version of MOAL aka Canon 1200/5.6L USM
Photoshop Disasters
Seetharaman Narayanan did more to alter reality than 99.99999999 percent of people in this world. It’s ridiculous how much the look of everything changed after Photoshop. All the ads, illustrations, all the graphics in the world look different than they did in the 70s and 80s.
If you wish, Adobe website will give you a number of useful lessons on how to use Adobe trademarks, such as:
“CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.”
and
“CORRECT: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
INCORRECT: The image was Photoshopped.
INCORRECT: The image was Adobe® Photoshopped. ”
Meanwhile everything I see around me in printed form has been photoshopped to death. These days when a professional digital camera is cheaper than a copy of Adobe® Photoshop® software and the streets of major cities are full of starving young models, the photoshopers out there would rather spend hours doing unnatural things with expensive stock photos.
I could understand this if the companies who would be doing this were short on money. But you know, when the same crappy stock photo is used in an ad for Vagisil and an O’Reilly book cover? That’s ridiculous.
There’s this blog that I’ve been reading lately called “Office Snapshots”. Recently they showed pictures of the offices of Vertrue. The seem to have spent more on a single chair than on the design of their “about us” page. Take a look: the title of the graphic boldly states “WHO WE ARE”. Judging by the graphic the answer is: “We are some smiling office drones from a crummy stock photo.”
Another fun blog that I’ve been reading is Photoshop Disasters. They mock crummy designers. After reading it I started paying a bit more attention to the small details of various ads. It’s crazy how many disturbing details there are. For instance, just now, I picked up a copy of some magazine that my wife was reading. Literally the first ad that I saw had a 6-fingered model:
Alteration of reality in photographs is not a new phenomenon, of course. There’s a great book called “The Commissar Vanishes” about the way photographs were altered in the Soviet times, especially to disappear repressed individuals. Besides sequences of photos of Stalin together with “disappearing” commissars, there’s a portrait of Stalin done by a pretty incompetent painter. Stalin, upon seeing the picture, crossed out the ear and wrote the following:
“This ear says that the artist is not well schooled in anatomy. J.Stalin.”
“The ear screams and shouts against anatomy. J.S.”
I don’t have a scan of that page, but believe you me, that ear was almost as disturbing much of the photoshopped models in today’s ads.
Military Clip
A programmer’s job is full of stress. The worst part of this stress is that you can’t stop thinking about your problems, and continue working on them 24/7. Literally.
I read a blog of a developer who quit and took a job as a waiter in a Mexican restaurant. Being a server is one of the most stressful professions in the world, but that stress stops at the end of the work day. Problems that programmers face never end at the end of the day, they continue into the night, the next day, week, and year. Unless you fix them, that is. Then you get to solve a whole different set of problems.
Working as a developer is like solving SAT problems for 24 hours a day with long procrastination breaks. No wonder it’s a ghetto job.
I’ve recently had a series of recurring dreams about fishing. I come out to the beach, cast, and immediately the beach is filled with other fishermen. They all cast as well, the lines tangle, it’s impossible to fish. This is exactly like locking MySQL queries that I’ve been battling as of late.
I am a proponent of the Danny Sorenson method of stress reduction. This basically means that I go out and buy pens.
The cool thing about my new job is that I work right near a fountain pen store and a cigar store (which also helps in stress reduction). My latest stress-reducing fountain pen purchase is kind of interesting.
It’s a fountain pen with a “military clip“. You see, U. S. Army Regulation AR670-1, paragraph 1-9a(1) had the following passage:
“Soldiers will ensure that articles carried in pockets do not protrude from the pocket or present a bulky appearance.”
A clip on most pens would create a bulge on a uniform pocket. Pen manufacturers were forced to create special pens with a clip that would not cause this problem, like the one that I purchased.
While treating me and my team to dinner, my boss’ boss, watching as I stuffed a bulky Treo 650 smartphone into the front pocket of my shirt, quipped — “As soon as you put anything into your front pocket you automatically become a nerd”. I guess U.S. Army regulations have a point…
New York City Fusion
New York City has some of the most interesting cuisine mixes. Spanish – American – Pakistani – Indian – there’s fusion for you.
Japanese Books
Every time I am at a Kinokuniya bookstore, I deeply regret not being able to read Japanese.
Why does this book have two covers – with Hippie Bill and with Presidential Bill?
This book is amazing. I still regret not being able to part with $30 to get it, not only for the cover with the Twin Towers, but for the hand-drawn illustrations inside.
Blip On a Screen
Dot TV Web 2.0 video startups seem to have opened a new frontier in advertising: beer bar bathrooms.
I Blame the Politicians
Subway is my favorite mode of transportation. Over the years I’ve seen many, many things: from a homeless, running around batman-like, dressed an a garbage bag superhero costume to a girl riding home with a pot containing a huge pot plant.
This morning I looked I was finishing the last Dortmunder book remaining on my bookshelves. Sitting next to me was an older man, who could be best described as having the “hangdog look” ala master thief John Archibald Dortmunder. All of a sudden he started taking off his shirt. He took out a fresher blue shirt out of his bag and started to put it on. A black lady sitting across from him gave him the dirtiest look she could muster.
When the old dude went for his belt buckle, the same lady stomped her feet a couple of times and in a profanity-laced monologue informed him of inappropriateness of his actions. It was a good call – it’s very possible that he was planning on changing his underwear.
The unapologetic old codger replied with a tirade (also profanity-laced), in which he blamed the politicians for making a 50 year old man work (retirement age in the USA is 65). His opponent noted that it’s possible that his habit of using MTA trains as a dressing room hinted at the root of his problems in life, i.e. lack of common sense.
You can see my older subway-related articles here.
Plumbing Chops
In my line of work I am often reminded of this brilliant passage from Ellen Ullman’s “The Bug” (which I reviewed earlier):
“Programming starts out like it’s going to be architecture–all black
lines on white paper, theoretical and abstract and spatial and
up-in-the-head. Then, right around the time you have to get something
fucking working, it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing.
…
It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house
full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who
were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching
your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?”
To take the metaphor a little bit further, let me bring up one actual plumbing nightmare that I faced when I was renovating my apartment. One of the contractors clumsily knocked off a valve on a piece of water piping that did not have a local shutoff. The only shutoff was in the basement, and required turning off the water for the entire line. And the super, who could do the shutoff was not in for a couple of days.
Another contractor knew exactly what to do in that case. He created something that he called a “chop” (I found out later that the term is Ukrainian). It’s a conical piece of wood, shaped like a fat pencil that is hammered into the hole in the pipe. In a couple of minutes the wood swells up and completely plugs the leak. Add some duct tape around it, and you got a very good temporary plug that is almost as strong as the unbroken pipe. It makes the worst permanent solution (wood rots), but the best temporary one (it can be applied without taking the whole system down and is reasonably strong).
Chops, or as they are called in English – thru-hull plugs, are a maritime invention: they are used for emergency repairs on boats. These days you can even buy a ready made set.
People think of software as of something static. Well, dynamic websites are more like a ships out at sea. Sometimes you have to patch them up in a storm. And then a good, strong “chop” is the best you can hope for until you can repair the leak permanently. And you are going to sink unless there’s somebody around who knows how to make a “chop”.