Dead Programmer's Cafe

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  • Rank and File

    Since a comprehensive list of Microsoft codenames already exists, I would like to move on to another taxonomy project that fascinates me. I would like to collect a list of weird titles so common in many big-name corporations. Here are some notes that I collected already.

    Also I am adding a little note about certain not very publicized rules that the company has that might help you get better service, or so to say to hack the system. You’ll see what I mean.

    Kinko’s
    Every employee carries a title of “Co-worker”. Employees use the term Kinkoid instead.

    Kinko’s hacks:
    All Kinkoids seem to live in fear of “mystery shoppers”. The corporate mothership sends special agents that pose as customers, and then evaluate the Co-workers. On at least several occasions I asked for some collating and printing jobs and quoted long wait times by Co-workers, which strangely had a change of heart and did the work right away. Your job is to make a Co-worker suspect that you are a “mystery shopper”. How? I don’t know, but apparently I managed to pull it off a couple of times.

    McDonald’s:
    Generic title: Crew Member. There are special non-management Crew Members with many years of experience called Crew Superstars. Managers carry the title of Crew Leader.

    Fast Food Hacks:
    This is a little known fact, but almost all soda fountains have a special button that will dispense seltzer. So technically the soda choice include seltzer. Sometimes when I am not in the mood for caramel coloring and phosphoric acid, I buy a medium soda and then ask them to find the button (most employees don’t know about it).

    Starbucks:
    Barristas are known as Hourly Partners. I’ve seen a title of Coffee Master on a manager’s card.

    Starbucks Hacks:
    There’s an 8oz cup called “Short” as opposed to the holy trinity of Tall-Grande-Venti. It’s never advertised, but I successfully ordered it on occasion.

    I learned a new trick, which I am not planning on using, but which surprised me. I found a tiny sticker which outlined Starbucks refill policy. It reminded me that Spongebob episode where Bubble Bass pointed out to the microscopic print on the Crusty Crab menu that outlined the refund policy. Anyway, it seems like the rule is that if you finish your drink within the hour, you can ask for a refill in the same cup at an unspecified reduced price. How will they know if you consumed your drink in an hour? There’s a label on the cup that records the time when the drink was ordered. You can also apparently bring in your own cup and have it filled at 30 cents off or so.

    You can ask for free coffee grinds at any Starbucks store to use as fertilizer for your garden or farm.

    Barnes and Noble:
    This is a surprising one. All B&N employees carry the title of “bookseller”. Even computer programmers and janitors. Thank you, anonymous tipster for this slice of corporate weirdness.

    Disney
    Most employees at Disney World are titled “Cast Members”. “Face” characters, like Cinderella and the like are “Union Actors”. Disney weirdness is too huge to discuss here, there are whole sites dedicated to the subject. “No Disney Cast member at the Disney reservation center has the same name. If there are more then two with the same then they are given a name.” Whoa.
    Thank you, Merlin!

    Pacific Theaters
    Ushers and the like carry the title of “Talent”.
    Thanks you, Greg!

    This calls for a gratuitous Spongebob quote:
    “Squidward: Repeat after me. “I have no talent”
    Spongebob: I have no talent.
    Squidward: “Mr. Tentacles has all the talent”.
    Spongebob: Mr. Tentacles has all the talent.
    Squidward: “If I’m lucky, some of Mr. Tentacles talent can rub off on me”.
    Spongebob: If I’m lucky, Mr. Talent can…rub…his tentacles on my…art… (smiles)”

    Toyota Canada
    Salesmen carry the title of “New Vehicle Advisor ”
    Thank you, Aidan R.

    WL Gore & Associates
    Every employee is – you guessed it – an “Associate”.
    Thank you, Joe Grossberg.

    NASA
    Gouvernment employees are called “Guvvies” and contractors are called “Swaliens” (because they are frequently from Swales Aerospace.

    Thank you, anonimous commenter.

    IKEA
    IKEA employees have the same designation as Kinkos – “Co-worker”. I am not sure if this is a recent development or not.

    If you have any information like this, please let me know.

  • A Bumpy Ride Down Memory Lane

    Back in the late Nineties I remember seeing many, many copies of a book called “24 Hours in Cyberspace” littering the bookshelves at the Strand. There were literally hundreds of copies of the damn thing, and nobody seemed to want to buy it even at half the price. Today they sell starting at 1 cent + shipping over at Amazon.

    For some reason I remembered it and decided to buy a copy of my own a couple of days ago. The idea was not bad at all – to have photojournalists in different countries to take a bunch of photographs about people using the Internet during a 24 hour window in February of 1996. I was hoping for a nice time capsule. After leafing through the book again I understood why paying more than a cent for it was not a good investment.

    As I said, the idea was good. But it seems like the editor picked the most “special”, extreme and unusual uses of the Internet, at the same time selecting the most posed and boring pictures. If you were to believe this book, the average Internet user in 1996 was either physically or mentally challenged, lives in an exotic locale, is a monk of some sort or is really poor. From what I remember, the typical Internet user back then was a pasty white overweight kid or young adult.

    As an example of someone running a software company they picked 11 year old Greg Miller of Tenadar Software. Greg should be 20 now, but there seems to be no mentions of him or his company beyond old articles in Wired. I guess 11 year old company founders don’t do much better than 25 year olds and older.

    There’s a sense of “fake” and “posed” permeating the book. It reminds me of the Russian word “pokazuha”, a concept probably invented in Russia and best represented by Potemkin villages. An you know what, calling Internet “cyberspace” was not cool even in 1996.

    Strangely, not one picture from inside Netscape, even though it was one of the main sponsors of the book. I fully expected to see the famous picture of the Tent of Doom, or at least the Aquarium of Doom. Apparently accordion playing, Speedo-wearing Mahir “I Kiss You” Cagri was not on the web yet. And no mention of Internet soda machines or the Trojan Room coffeemaker.

    But then some nostalgic hardware and familiar faces made it into this book.

    “Joi Ito, Japan’s “Mr. Internet” and teen Idol Reiko Chiba stroll Harajuku, the trendy Tokyo neighborhood that Ito hopes to wire”. The pompous caption would probably make Mr. Ito, 9 years older, blush today, but the picture is one of the few that look somewhat non-posed. Teen Idol Reiko Chiba looks genuinely bored, although I am not entirely sure that Japan’s “Mr. Internet” is not faking a phone call. That’s a nice chunky phone, I might have one like that in my cubicle technology museum. I wonder, was Japan’s “Mr. Internet’s” writing less boring back then?

    [ Image removed due to a complaint by Mr. Boyd. in the image: Joi Ito talking into an early-model cell phone, Reiko Chiba looking bored. ]

    (photo credit : Torin Boyd)

    And here’s the wife of Internet-creation-initiative-taker-in taking a picture with what the book says is a digital camera, but does not look like Apple QuickTake 100, 150 , 200, Kodak DC40 or Casio QV-11.

    (photo credit : AP)

  • NYPD You

    I tend to pay attention to badges of NYPD officers. Some time ago I noticed some very strange star shaped badges on fully uniformed officers. I thought that they were simply from out of town cops, but that wasn’t it. A little research showed that those were NYPD Auxiliary Police officers.

    As far as I can tell, it’s a volunteer force of over 4000 ordinary citizens. The requirements are reasonable, but not super difficult. They get 54 hours of training over a 16 week period (which I hear included some pretty advanced things like baton training and such). And then they get to take part in various parade details, traffic direction and overall helping out the NYPD. They get uniforms, radios and if I am not misled – batons and handcuffs. Some get to ride along in radio cars, some – get to go on foot patrol.

    In short, this deceptively looks like a perfect way to live out all your NYPD Blue and Cops fantasies (seing how saying “who’s the skell who wrote this piece of code” gets tired fast). Of course that isn’t it. They way I understand it, auxiliary officers are supposed not to get involved in confrontations, but to call the regular officers on the radio when bad stuff is happening. Still, a very, very cool program.

    Also the auxiliary force is not without controversy. Police unions are not ecstatic about an non-paid force of relatively untrained volunteers.

  • Midnight Linkage

    * Oh, such an awesome shot from inside the motorman’s cab. Click on “comments” to read about how it was taken.

    * Wow. Decopix.com, one of the best sites about Art Deco that I’ve ever seen, presents mind-boggling Art Deco fridge.

    * Similar to the celebrity path pavers in Brooklyn Botanical Gardenthat carry the names of famous Brooklynites like Isaac Asimov and Mae West, you can have your own paver in Tompkins Square Park through Make Your Mark in the Park program. And it’s just 250 bucks per paver! 70 characters – enough for a url. I am actually thinking about this…

  • One Hundred Views of the Empire State Building #20 and 21

    Giant’s toothpick

    Twins

    The rest of the series is here.

  • Time to Get on the Top of the Rock
    or
    Can You Smell What’s Cooking at the Top of the Rock?

    There’s one thing that I hate about Chrysler Building. It does not have a public observation deck. I feel that any major skyscraper needs to have two things at the top: a restaurant and an observation deck.

    To the owners the public areas at the top are usually a pain in the ass and rarely pay for themselves. Having a lot of people from the street come up to the very top of the building, adding to the overall traffic is not fun for building management from the security standpoint. I remember reading about the co-op board of a posh building at 30 Central Park South trying to evict Nirvana, a top floor Indian restaurant with amazing views of Central Park. They complained about the traffic and the cooking smells.

    Because of this most buildings that used to have observation decks and restaurants closed them. Over a the Tishman Building Top of the Sixes turned into an exclusive cigar club. At the City Services Building the public observation deck, which was actually planned as the owner’s penthouse, was turned into a closed lounge for AIG brass. An at the Chrysler Building, the observation deck became Schrafft’s Restaurant, then it morphed into posh and private Cloud Club, and then closed altogether.

    When I was younger, I was not particularly attracted to the views from high vantage points. But for some reason at the turn of the Millennium found me deeply fascinated with skyscrapers and views from them. To this day I can’t forgive myself not visiting the observation deck at WTC. I probably did not have enough money to eat at the perished Windows on the World, but not visiting Top of the World still fills me with remorse.

    Because of this upsetting tendency of restriction and destruction public spaces high in the skies, I find this very joyous news: the rocket-like 30 Rockefeller Plaza will be opening an observation deck to the public. It’s going to be called “Top of the Rock.”

    Rockefeller Center has an interesting distinction of being one of the very few Rockefeller family projects that carry their name (the other big one being Rockefeller University). Most people also think that it’s built and named after John D. Senior, the Mr. Burns prototype and semi-crazy hander outer of nickels, when in fact, it was the mellow John D. Junior who built it.

    Since the Rockefeller name is not that popular, it’s common to see “Rockefeller Center” to be shortened to sexier “Rock Center”, as for example the menu of Yummy Sushi contains several sushi combos named Rock X, where X is a number of the combo.

    As much as I tried, I could not find out a more definite date than “sometime this fall”, but one of the free booklets that you can get in the lobby of the GE (former RCA) building has a little blurb and the logo. I like the logo. It’s all Art Deco-ey.

  • NYC Buildings You’ve Never Noticed : The Graybar Building

    Graybar building is one of the bigger, yet lesser known New York City skyscrapers. Located at 420 Lexington Avenue, it leans against and over Grand Central Terminal. In fact, I walked by it many times thinking that it was a part of Grand Central.

    The understated Art Deco design helps to hide the huge bulk of the building. Some of the sparse embellishments are striking and very unusual.

    The cables that hold the rain canopy in place are in the shape of ship’s mooring ropes, complete with rats and anti-rat devices. I did not notice this at first, but the rosettes from which the ropes emanate are decorated with rat heads. Freaky, huh?

    Bas relieves to the side of the entrances are rather conventional allegorical representations of communication – a dude holding an old-timey (but maybe slightly out of date in In 1927) phone with lightning bolts around his head and stuff and transportation – similar looking dude holding a truck. The other two relieves are of Deco-Assyrian looking Prometheus with fire.

    There’s an antenna at the top of the building. I could not find any information about it.

  • The Invisible Bum

    You just have to appreciate this beautifully engineered and architected street dwelling.

  • I Don’t Know if this Qualifies as a Mitzvah

    I am a big fan of a NBC’s failed TV show “The Restaurant“. If you remember, in the promotional clip Rocco says that 90% of restaurants fail in the first year. The author of this article claims that “the ridiculous myth about excessive restaurant failure rates is once again perpetuated and moves from industry scuttlebutt to everyday knowledge.” I don’t know the numbers seem about right to me – Rocco’s is out of business, right? I am just glad that I actually managed to go there once, eat lukewarm Italian food and have my picture taken with Rocco’s Mama.

    So, what happens with all the cups, plates and flatware from all the failed restaurants? Well, partially it’s bought by resellers, such as a wonderful little store located right at the beginning of Silicon Alley in Manhattan. It’s called Fishs Eddy and it sells a wide array of used commercial plates and flatware. For instance, have you ever wanted to steal a nice fork from an airplane? Well, Fishs Eddy sells airline flatware.

    They also sell some one of a kind items that seem to be specifically manufactured as novelties. Take these “Heroes of the Torah” tumblers:

    They seem to be made as a follow-up to a movie called Keeping the Faith, a story about a priest and a rabbi who traded “Heroes of the Torah” trading cards when they were children.

    There are of course no “Hero of the Torah” trading cards. That’s right, in real world they are called “Torah Personalities” cards. These were made in the late eighties-early nineties, and might still be manufactured. I dug up an image on eBay:

    There’s also a version called “Torah Link” that is available from torahtots.com.

  • Down The Gopher Hole

    Today, for some reason I remembered about gopher:// protocol. And was I surprised to find out that there are still gopher sites operating: gopher://erwin.complete.org/1/Software/Gopher/servers.

    Gopher is a pre http:// protocol that was created at University of Minnesota an named after its mascot, Goldy Gopher.

    Goldy is apparently not really a gopher:
    ““He’s actually a chipmunk,” said Sarah Compton, a student worker at the University’s Bell Museum of Natural History.
    …
    The museum has created a mock criminal lineup comparing five stuffed rodents alongside a stuffed Goldy Gopher.
    …
    Although this comparison makes Goldy’s mistaken identity seem obvious, other rodents have been mislabeled as gophers since before Minnesota became a state.”

    Well, it could have been worse. If MIT or Caltech geeks created it, we would have had beaver:// protocol on our hands.

    Browsing about a little I found this gem:

    “Happily, most web browsers will still understand Gopher, but they are at best suboptimal. No major web browser understands Gopher+, for one thing.
    …
    Because of security bulletin MS02-047, Gopher support is NOW DISABLED IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6 and higher. Rather than fix the buffer overrun in the Gopher protocol handler, Microsoft, in typical fashion, simply decided to disable it entirely. Instead of spending another paragraph or two on a droll rant about how high up their rear ends the heads of Microsoft technical designers are, we’ll just talk dispassionately about the impact of this security flaw: while the risk of an exploit is low in our very friendly community, it is not impossible, and the flaw is apparently damaging enough to be graded Critical. Nevertheless, if you want to reenable it, download the registry file from the clients directory here at Floodgap, or go into RegEdit, drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings, and enter a key named EnableGopher
    with type DWord and value 00000001. The reg file is available from gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/9/gopher/clients/ie6/iegopher.zip“

    Rooting around I found some protocols that I haven’t even heard of, like “Hyper-G“. Man, why do I like to dig up this obscure stuff?