Dead Programmer's Cafe

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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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  • Blimp Blamp

    Fujifilm blimp moored over at Floyd Bennett Field.

    A few notes:
    * As it turns out the word “blimp” comes from the sound that occurs when one flicks the skin of a balloon.
    * Poor Fujifilm branders. To most people “Fujifilm” means “film”, not “digital.” It’s kind of like branding with the slogan “Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH means safe transatlantic flights.” That’s not what people remember, is it?
    * Actually, Fujifilm makes absolutely awesome laser exposure printers for digital photos. They basically use lasers to expose regular photo paper, resulting in a digital print that has all the characteristics of a regular print. Unfortunately most digital photo printing services don’t let you know what kind of printing equipment they use or at what resolution they print.

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  • 0% Content, 100% Lazyweb

    I take pride in keeping my blog mostly lazyweb free, unlike some formerly awesome bloggers that I know. But mostly is mostly, I am not immune to the lure of letting my readers doing my research for me.

    It looks to me like I can get a better deal than the one that my current hosting provider, Zipa.com is giving me. My monthly fee is only $10, but I get charged $1/gig for traffic over 10 gigs, $5 a month for shell access (that’s ridiculous) and $2 per month for an extra MySQL database. “Sweet Dreams” deal from Dreamhost looks like a pretty good alternative. Moving all my stuff is a bit of a hassle, so, before I move, any opinions?

    Oh, also, my bank, Chase, is totally ripping me off percentage-wise. What do y’all think about ING Direct?

    Um, also is anyone aware of a good deal on a Treo 650 with Verizon service (I already have a Verizon account, I hate them, but Verizon reception in NYC is better than any other carrier’s ).

    [Update]
    Thank you for all your responses. I decided to go with Dreamhost and ING Direct. If anyone knows about a good Verizon Treo deal, please let me know.

  • Having a Field Day

    Floyd Bennett Field then and now:

    (a postcard printed by Interborough News Co., New York, New York, from a photo by Rudy Arnold and apparently colorized by something called C.T. Art-Colortone)

    My version

    Another photo by Rudy Arnold

    My version

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  • Dating Found Pictures

    Last weekend me and my wife were walking by Central Park when she spotted a small dirty paper rectangle on the ground. It was a picture of an infant with a dog. The picture could have been very old, circa late 19th century, but could have been as early as 60s or 70s.

    We found another 6 photos, and they helped me date them a little bit. Here we have a Victorian grandma. I have a book called “Dating Old Photographs“, and in it there are a few pictures of women wearing almost exactly the same dress around 1890-1900. Seeing how this is a paper photograph, and grandmas usually don’t follow latest fashion, this is probably 1910s or 20s.

    I like the composition and dynamics of this photo, which is rather rare in this genre of “grandma holding a baby in front of a house” pictures. Other pictures also hinted at the fact that the house in front of which the pictures were taken is a moderately sized Queen Anne style mansion.

    The next picture also tells me that this is not the seventies.

    I wonder how these pictures came about to be discarded on the New York City pavement. My guess is that the pictures fell out of the window of one of the highrises that line Central Park.

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  • Technology To Die For

    I learned from a very interesting book called “Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton” that during the development of Apple Newton one engineer committed suicide. Being ahead of its time, Newton did not become popular, although it was engineered so well, that to this day many enthusiasts still use it, write software, and even make new hardware for it. I am actually thinking of buying one on eBay still.

    I don’t know if anyone got hurt during the development of iPod, but it was involved in several fatalities for sure.

    First, a woman beat her boyfriend to death with the device. This is reminiscent of Russian Emperor Paul I being killed with a snuff box. I was recently watching Leonid Parfenov’s awesome “Russian Empire” series, where he showed the infamous snuff box. I always thought that it was rather large, but it turns out to be about the size on an iPod.
    [update] Apparently this was a hoax.

    Also, a kid in Brooklyn died from a knife wound when he was being robbed of his iPod. NYPD and MTA reacted by this wonderfully cryptic ad. Without actually mentioning Apple or iPod they are urging hipsters to swap out the distinctive white iPod headphones for ugly Radioshack ones. Maybe they should also suggest buying Creative’s (or Microsoft’s when they come out) players – nobody will probably want to kill for one.

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  • Smack Dab In The Middle of The City

    Where do you think this is?

    Yep, right over here.

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  • It Sucked Back Then Too.

    I see that a lot of people add “programming” tag to my blog in del.icio.us. And as they might have noticed, there are very few posts about computers and programming in this blog. So far, my favorite note in del.icio.us is “a NY programmer, I guess, doing you know, stuff”. Anyway, here is an exclusion from the rule, a post about computer technology.

    There’s a computer book that I was looking for for a long time. I remember having it in my dad’s library, but it probably was left behind. I finally found a source of used books in Russia, alib.ru, so I finally replaced it.

    “Personal Electronic Calculating Machines in Engineering Practice” by Krenkel, Kogan and Taratorin, Moscow 1989, Radio and Communications. I mostly bough it for a certain infamous passage attributed to Dr. Taratorin, a fellow immigrant and Livejournal deserter. If you can read Russian, here is a collection of his prose(he is extremely talented) and here is his blog.

    So, let’s see, it’s 1989. Dr. Taratorin is writing these immortal words (my translation follows):

    “One example of unwieldy, and in authors’ opinion useless add-ons is integrated WINDOWS system by Microsoft. The system takes up almost 1 Megabyte of disk space and was designed primarily to be used with devices of “mouse” type . It unites in itself functions of a file catalog browser, text editor, calculator, calendar, graphics editor and allows to load different other applications . Because this system integrates different subsystems and allows data passing amongst them it’s often called operating system wrapper (see paragraph 2.9). It seems that the usefulness of such wrapper in the ability of the user to load a few different programs and organize data sharing amongst them. For instance, after editing a text, you can pass it to an electronic table editing program (translator’s note: I think the word “spreadsheet” did not enter Russian vocabulary back then), database, etc.
    …
    Work with WINDOWS, of course, is rather impressive: during waiting (subsystem loading, file writing) a symbol of waiting, hourglass, appears on the screen, during file erasing a picture of a trashcan appears, backgrounds and font colors change, helper windows overlap, etc. In our opinion, the symbol of extreme esthetism and unwieldiness is the time-telling subsystem. When invoked, this system shows a pretty clock with familiar clock face and moving hands… But you always have to pay for prettiness. In WINDOWS system the price is long wait times for switching between applications, bloatedness of switching constructs (translator’s note: no idea) and large amount of memory needed from the Electronic Calculating Machine.”

    Ahh, nice vintage Windows bashing. Warms my heart.

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  • Soon To Be Renamed “The Ultimate Answer St.”

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  • Space Bling

    If you are a constant reader of this journal, you might have noticed that I am highly interested in unobtanium — various exotic materials. This post will depart from my usual blabbering about titanium.

    Many years ago I got my first glimpse of aventurine – a form of quartz with suspended flecks of other minerals. The name itself sounded absolutely exotic and appropriate for a mineral that looks like a piece of solidified star field. It comes from Italian “a ventura” – meaning “by chance”. It refers to the fact that Italian glass makers learned to make glass that looks like aventurine by chance through mixing in flecks of copper. But in Russian “avantura” is a word that does not carry the same meaning. It can be best translated as “a risky and/or shady venture”.

    Aventurine is usually green or orange, and I am not sure if the black version that I like so much is really aventurine at all. Recently I came by an ad in Russian Forbes magazine for a very expensive watch made by Bernhard Lederer Universe called blu-Planet. It has an internal dial made of aventurine which the ad claimed was of meteoritic origin.

    My research shows that aventurine has a terrestrial origin, but while looking at meteorites I found a most interesting fact. It turns out that many metallic meteorites when polished and dipped in a dilute acid bath, show the most amazing patterns reminiscent of microchip’s silicone surface. These are called “Widmanstatten patterns” (after the name of a scientist who discovered them) and are a result of nickel and iron cores of asteroids slowly crystallizing for millions of years in the void of space.

    Pieces of space rock are desirable. Apollo space program brought back a limited amount of Moon specimens and it was waaay expensive. Then it turned out that some meteorites found on Earth have the same chemical composition. So basically, you can get pieces of asteroids, the Moon, Mars and hell knows what else without leaving the planet. In fact you don’t need to leave your chair — eBay has loads and loads of meteorites for sale.

    Space stones do not come cheap — they sell for about a dollar per gram, which is significantly more than the price of silver, and might go for much more than the price of gold. No wonder that a former truck driver from whose website I took these amazing photos of meteorites has been able to support his family through meteorite hunting. Overall, it looks to me like the cost effectiveness of a truck driver with an ATV and a metal detector is pretty good compared to the cost of our space program.

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