I took a nice long walk after visiting Trump Tower today, and on my way finally got to see the ungracefully aging United Nations building. There’s this weird fence on a little terrace across from it, and the shot framed itself….
Blog
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Resolution 47 : UN Reiterates that It Deplores, Deeply Regrets and Strongly Condemns Deadprogrammer’s Smartass Photography
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At the Towers of Madness
I always dreamt of working in an office located high up in one of the Twins. So today I would like to publicly thank the Donald for giving me a slight glimmer of hope that I might still fulfill this dream. Also I would like to thank him for calling pile of shit architecture by its proper name – pile of shit architecture.
The current version looks like the worst case of design by committee – absolute shit. The angles of the cut off roofs and the horrible spire that looks like a chewed up pen stuck next to a stick of modeling clay (that’s how they probably got the idea) are Lovecraftian in nature, looking as if the architects came from a place of perverted geometry.
After work I went to take some pictures of Trump’s model over at the Trump Tower lobby. I have to give it to the Donald – his place is way photographer friendly.
Trump rebuilt the Wallman Skating Rink after fighting the egos of numerous politicians and politically connected incompetents. That was a medium sized miracle. Now we need a supersized one.
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TT : Misc
Wow, who knew. According to Wikipedia, the order of the Teutonic Knights exists today as a charitable organization (they don’t seem to have a website though). It even has a grandmaster – one Bruno Platter. And I thought that Alexander Nevsky got rid of them completely. Or at least the Soviet era cartoon that I’ve seen made think so, because my education in that period of Russian History never progressed much further than that.
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I noticed that at home I mostly use Outlook as a very slow and crappy spell checker for my blog. I only keep it around because of the spellchecker and because Gmail does not have an import feature. I tried importing with Gmail Loader, with the whole crappy export to Firebird thing, but that messes up most Russian emails and does not set the dates correctly. Why Google does now provide an import utility is beyond me – it would have completed lock-in for so many users. Also, I wonder, what’s the best software spell checker that money can buy?
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Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters presents : Microsoft’s famous (mentioned in Microserfs and the Joel’s rant ) Ship-It award throughout the ages. I wonder if I could buy one of these on eBay :)
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Do You Remember the Fear?
By force of an old habit I read Livejournal blogs through the website instead of Bloglines. I immediately regretted that because once again almost made a mistake of writing about a private post. Livejournal marks private posts with little locks, and I once very stupidly discussed some non-public information about an LJ user without realizing that it was from a locked or “friends only” post. Eeek, I cringe just remembering that. Anyway, this time I got permission to post about this (even though I will try to keep away from “locked” posts as much as possible). Upc747 was very kind to let me use this photo of an old newspaper that he took:
The Soviets are gone, but Iraq and Iran are still troublesome. And you know what? I’ll take the War on Terrorism over the Cold War. It seems like all the Generation X-ers and Boomers suddenly forgot the terrible, paralyzing fear of the global atomic war. Not the fear of North Korean or terrorist nukes or conventional attacks, but the dark gut feeling, the stomach churning certainty that the Soviet Union and the United States will annihilate the entire world in one final showdown.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at seven minutes to midnight in 2002. It seems that in the years when the clock was at 9, 10, 14 and even off-the-scale 17 minutes everyone seems to have forgotten all about the fear of World War III. Do the people that say that the world at the turn of the new century is crazier than before remember the ominous 1984, when the clock stood at three minutes to midnight? The time when few people thought that the arms race will result in the collapse of the Soviet Union, but almost everyone was certain that the end of human race in nuclear inferno was almost assured?
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Eyeballs vs Clicks
I really don’t understand why Internet advertising industry is so centered on clicks. Everywhere else advertisers pay to put ads on billboards, magazine pages, TV and movie screens, all unclickable. They will even pay crazy money for tiny little logos on very fast cars going in circles. Or on outfits of athletes and even golfers. Yet when it comes to web advertising – eyeballs do not matter, it’s all about clicks. For instance, Vonage gets a really sweet deal – I never click on their ads, but every ad is a reminder to me that Verizon is ripping me off and I should really think about an IP telephony solution. When I will finally see that they have done something about providing a 911 service that is as reliable as a regular phone company’s maybe I’ll finally succumb. Or maybe their ads will do their dirty deed, I won’t have much problems finding them – their company name is also their web address.
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The Fantom Photo Album
Being a fan of photography has its upsides and downsides. On one hand photographers notice more things. Beautiful things. Unusual things. Things that only can be seen through the lens of the camera that lives inside your brain.
On the other, if they don’t have a camera handy, or the batteries are dead, or there’s too little light, or if taking photos is prohibited or just simply not wise – photographers become agitated and miserable. Oh, the most wonderful moments that should be simply enjoyed can be poisoned by worrying about lighting, f-stops above all — the lack of camera in your hands.
The shots that did not happen – those are the worst. They linger in your head for a while, but then the moment passes, and the fata morgana of the perfectly composed and exposed picture dissolves into the bitterness of a missed shot. It’s even worse if you just did not have the guts to take out your fully charged, properly equipped camera and point it’s soul stealing eye at the situations, people, things and places that simply must be photographed.
Let’s see, off the top of my head, three shots that did not happen and still drive me nuts:
1) A young woman occupying the two-person seat of the R40 train (you know, the one next to the cab), bathed in the unearthly greenish glare of fluorescent lights, opposite a guy reading a newspaper and another one dozing. She is as pissed off as can be, the expression on her face a mask of anger, sadness and disgust. Yet she is dressed in a brilliantly colored butterfly costume, with big transparent wings. I just did not have the heart to take out my camera from my bag.
2) A bum sitting in the street, slumped in a cheap computer chair, kind of like the guy on the logo of my website. He rested his head on the handle of a shopping cart filled with ivory colored computer towers and topped with an old CRT monitor, a keyboard and even a couple of mice and modems. I think I even noticed a hub in there somewhere. The yellow plastic of old equipment and the depressed, bearded and unwashed guy would have looked ordinary in a cubicle farm, but outside in the midday New York sun they looked sad and alien. My camera was with me, but I forgot the flash card at work.
3) Japanese museum, a glassed in stand containing a samurai’s suit of armor, surprisingly small in size. The ghostly reflection of a petit Japanese girl’s face just would not line up with the dark opening in front of the horned helmet. The museum was closing, the lighting was dim, and I just did not feel like waiting for the perfect shot.
But then again, there are times when you take a picture, and then feel that you probably should not have. Those primitive people that feel that a photograph steals one’s soul might be onto something. It sure feels that way sometimes.Being a fan of photography has its upsides and downsides. On one hand photographers notice more things. Beautiful things. Unusual things. Things that only can be seen through the lens of the camera that lives inside your brain.
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Scobelology
Back when Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet, this dude named James Parry figured out an interesting promotional trick. He built a homegrown Usenet search utility and tirelessly trolled it for the mentions of his own nickname, “Kibo“. When he found some, he would join the conversation. This feat of persistence gained him thousands of fans and even a homegrown religion, Kibology. I don’t think anyone has figured out a finer way to waste time, especially considering that commercial application of search technology in the past tended to mint millionaires and billionaires.
I have a special folder in my Bloglines accounts that holds a set of very popular, but surprisingly unreadable blogs. Remembering Kibo today, I think I understood why Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble has so many readers. He’s the Kibo of bloggers! Look (and this is just one page):
Joey is 10x the guy I am
Rick Segal debates my impact
Alfredo asks what Wired’s top 40 list says to me
And this is just the first page! The quick pitter-patter of Scoble’s posts is filled with references to other people’s posts about him! Can Scoblelology be far behind? So far no hits.Still, this does not explain why people read Joi Ito’s blog. It could be more properly described as “Where in the World is Joi Ito”. It’s all “Off to Japan“, “Off to SF“, “Off to Japan“, “Off to Australia“. I get it, he’s a world traveler.
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Three Years of Poor Grammar, Bad Spelling and Procrastination
I started this blog in May of 2002. I got my first digital camera around this time as well. So, it’s time to look back at my 3 years of blogging and 3 years of digital photography.
My mostly backed up (is yours?) photo folder holds about 27 gigabytes of photos, which translates into about 16,500 files (I use Picasa to organize them and a usb drive for backup). That’s about 458 rolls of 36 exposure film. At 5-6 bucks a pop for film and then a couple of bucks for processing that’s a lot of mon-ay. Of course I print a lot less and mostly show pictures in the blog, but still this is a huge economy.
In three years of blogging I wrote 824 posts containing 117,274 words. Considering an average of half an hour per post that’s about 50 eight hour work days. That is a lot of time, people. Considering that I do not write posts at work, this is a very sizable chunk of my free time. I could have written a book in this amount of time.
According to Feedburner my current readership is puny. 47 (a special number, isn’t it?) livejournal readers, 8 from Bloglines, and a couple of others, some of which are probably bots. When I hosted my site in Livejournal it seemed like I had about 250 readers, but as it turned out most of those were just “you added me, I added you” kind of deals. Even then I was far behind Ripley the Cat (and I find it very hard to get over this fact).
So, sob story about the number of readers aside, now I am a member of the elite group of bloggers who have been doing this for 3 years. How elite, you might ask? Let’s ask Mighty Google. Here is a graph of how many results come back to “x year(s) of blogging”, where x is “one”, “two”, “three”, etc. This, of course has just a slight correlation with the number of years people have been blogging, as “hundred years of blogging” brings back three results.
My website that hit the Information Superhighway back in 1996. It helped my future wife find me and gave me some rudimentary skills for my first web job. The blog hasn’t been so useful or popular, it seems. Maybe back then there was less good content on the web, and now there are shite waterfalls of it. Or maybe I need do something to market it. Like asking my staunch 47 + 8 + x readers to link to their favorite post or two (all of the old posts are searchable from https://www.deadprogrammer.com). Right?
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Amdahl : Business in the Front, Party in the Back
A few years ago I purchased a strange piece of computing history on eBay. Some guy in Canada was selling what he described as a “model” of an Amdahl processor. He did not include a picture with his listing, and because of that I was able to snap it up for about 30 wing-wangs.
When the package arrived, it turned out to be a real 42 (!) processor board from an old Amdahl mainframe that was “presented to T. Eaton Company for its purchase of Amdahl 5995-3550M processor in June 1992” as the plaque said. T. Eaton Company no longer exists, it was swallowed by Sears. Neither does Amdahl – it is a part of Fujitsu now.
The little cooling towers made it possible to air cool the chips.
The back of the board was very strange though. All the wiring seemed to be done “point-to-point” by hand. Overall, thinking about how many work-hours went into designing and making that board made me shudder.
[update] Thanks to the Boing Boing liks this seems to have become the second popular post on my site – first one being the Revelation post which gained popularity thanks to being the only google result for “omnioum finis imminet” for a while. I’ve got some great information from former Amdahl employees:
Tom: ”
The item is an MCC (multi-chip carrier) from an Amdahl V8, V7 or V6. Many were plugged into either side of a large frame which connected the MCCs to each other and to power, the console, memory, and the IO cables.The finned gizmos are cooling towers glued to the top of the individual chips. A plastic cover directed cool air over the towers and fans exhausted it out the top of the frame
hese were used in the 470 series computers. The follow on computer, the 580 used much larger boards about the size of a pizza box. They were inserted into a plenum (which became known as the pizza oven) with ZIF connectors on the side. They had black instead of gold cooling towers with more fins.The board is circa 1980. The back wiring was done in Japan because they couldn’t find enough people in the US who could do it well. I believe the chips were laser bonded on the front with the hand wiring on the back. Note that the circut boards were multi-layer and the back wiring was only used where they couldn’t get enough paths from the circut boards and for engineering changes after production.
”NoOneAtAll : “Amdahl used to give out dead hardware and out-of-date engineering samples to their sales guys made into lots of different things. I’ve seen coasters made out of unusable processors, an Amdahl sales binder made from a set of bad carrier boards, a couple of plaques like this one made from DOA MCC modules, pen holders made out of ribbon cable, etc.
An IBM reseller I worked at spent Amdahl’s entire corporate lifetime telling them no. By the time the sales guy gave up, pretty much everyone at the company had been hit up by the guy as a possible lead, and pound for pound there was more dead Amdahl hardware repackaged as kitsch on the desks in sales than we had actually moved in Amdahl equipment. ”
[update] Two similar processors just came up on eBay. The picture quality is ghastly, but they seem like a bigger version of the one that I have, with even more complicated back wiring.
P.S. Don’t forget to take a look at the rest of my blog, or if you are interested in Amdahl, at the rest of my Amdahl-related posts.