Here’s a keyboard that’s truer than the One True Keyboard:
Fun With Google Maps Part I : The Magical Lake in the Land of the Blibbet
What’s that between buildings that look like shuriken from above? Of course it is Lake Bill. It’s not marked on the map kindly made available by Jeff Barr, but there it is in an awesome 360 degree panorama and here are some pictures of ducks and koi that live there. There’s another picture in the blog post by Adam Barr (I’ve read his book) about 10 favorite spots on MS campus. I am told that it is a prime beer drinking spot – no wonder seeing how many Barrs there are at Microsoft budum-pum.
The origin of the naming of the lake is shrouded in mystery. I also heard that long before Bad Boy Ballmer was charging up developers by jumping on stage he was doing that by swimming across Lake Bill.
By the way, does anyone have a video of Gates’ famous table jumping skills? Does he do that any more? Oh, and if somebody pointed me to those funny Microsoft Tech Ed videos, that would be very cool.
Caffeinated Bubble Trouble
It’s a proven fact : bubbles make caffeinated beverages better. Take a crappy tonic drink from Thailand, add carbonation, introduce it in Europe and the US and bam – you are a billionaire. Introduce espresso (simplistically speaking a very concentrated coffee with a foam of sugars, proteins and oils on top) and cappuccinos (add foamed milk to an espresso) in America on industrial basis – and bam – you almost a billionaire.
Seems like the next logical step is tea. You see, Japanese have this tea ceremony thing. Never being a big fan of tea, but being a Japanophile at heart, I always wanted to try that. Unfortunately to this day I haven’t, but I definitely tried some tea that is used in the ceremony. They were selling it in a booth in Kyoto alongside with ice cream.
Japanese tea ceremony involves two kinds of tea, “thick” and “thin”. From what I understand the difference mainly in the dilution and the quality of tea. I like stronger flavors, like espresso and scotch, so I prefer to make thick tea. Making is very simple. You take some high quality powdered tea called Matcha and put it into a bowl. You pour some hot water on top (I use the water from my espresso machine’s hot water spigot). Then you take a special whisk called chasen that is made by splitting a single piece of bamboo and whip your beverage up, kind of like making shaving lather with those old fashined shaving whisks.
You get a radioactive green liquid that is absolutely loaded with green tea flavor, caffeine and and antioxidants. I already went through a package of medium cheaper Matcha, I think I’ll order some of the higher quality stuff as well.
Here’s how Matcha is served in Japan, with regular tea and sweets. The one on the right is wrapped in a pickled leaf of sakura.
Here’s what I just made for myself:
“We Also Build Poor-Quality Cars and Inferior-Style Electronics”.
Oh. My. God. My blog is actually useful. See, livejournal user n0w emailed me about this show called MXC, telling me that it’s a new version of “Takeshi’s Castle“. This is some useful information.
Here’s what TVHome.com has to say about it : “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (or “MXC”) is the ultimate in reality sports, where contestants comprised of two teams are physically and mentally challenged and eliminated through crazy and challenging games.”
This was not encouraging description. I recorded one episode, expecting a new American Gladiators type show. But oh no no no no no! It’s nothing but. This is a creation of a few of mentally challenged Spike TV producers who somehow got their hands on vintage Takeshi’s Castle footage and proceeded to anally rape it.
Here’s what these brilliant minds did to the poor thing:
* They renamed the main characters. General Tani became Captain Tenneal, Count Count Beat Takeshi became Vic Romano. Count Takesh’s advisor whose name I don’t know became Kenny Blankenship.
* They edited the footage to somehow give the impression that the original one hundred something contestants are broken up into two teams.
* They completely replaced the dialogue Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, but with a lot of crude, frequently homophobic and sometimes even racist comments.
* They removed the actual storming of Takeshi’s castle, although you sometimes can see the castle in the background. Instead they show replays of the more painful falls and scrapes that the contestants suffer.
Of course, it is possible that the owners of Takeshi’s Castle footage sold it under the condition that it should be disfigured like this. Or Spike TV did not have enough money for a Japanese translator. Or some bigwig came up with these brilliant enhancements and the poor producers had no chance but to go along. Then I apologize for calling this mutilation one of the dumbest things on TV.
The original Japanese show had so many things going for it, no wonder I remembered it for 12-15 years after seeing a couple of episodes. It has hundreds of regular people facing almost impossible tasks. Most of them failed at these tasks, facing painful and humiliating falls. Yet they showed fighting spirit, hanging on as long as possible, getting up drenched in dirt and mocked by Takeshi’s henchmen, yet not loosing face. Instead of concentrating so much on humiliating falls, in the original show they replayed attempts that showed the most determination, to this day I remember the guy who tilted at about 20 degrees to the ground on the stepping stones challenge, yet made one more jump. The actual storming of the castle was a great thing to look forward to at the end of the show, even though the contestants succeeded only a couple of times through the whole run of the series.
Well, I guess this mutant of a show is still watchable if you mute the moronic braying of the idiotic remixers. “Now, our game shows are a little different from yours. Your shows reward knowledge; we punish ignorance“. Well, our shows do not rewards knowledge. They punish the viewers. I so wish I could enact that Tivo commercial, where a couple of guys throw a network boss out the window, with MXC creators.
General Hayati Tani renamed for us, “average American Joe Salaryman waiters”.
Morning Deadwood
People were filthy and smelly in the olden days. And HBO capitalizes on amazingly good historical dramas teeming with filthy, period authentic characters. First there’s Carnivale, a mystical drama set at the turns of the Century. It has everything : carnies, okies, tarot cards, old cars, Art Deco and Craftsman interiors, mysteries, psychics, telekinesis, Knights Templar, evil preacher played by brilliant Clancy Brown aka Mr. Eugene Krabs from Spongebob and a lot of filthy people. And absolute tivo-worthy show.
Then there’s Deadwood, set during the gold rush. A high quality historical show, Deadwood writers try to stay as authentic as possible, hygiene and all. Famous hacker JWZ is not a fan: “It’s like watching paint dry. Dirty, foul-mouthed paint, but paint nonetheless.” I guess he is just not used to “Milch-speak“, a very peculiar style of dialogue that the show’s creator and writer, David Milch uses for his characters.
Familiar to fans of NYPD Blue, Milch-speak is a rather weird . I real life I encountered Milch-speak being used by often smart people with difficult and important jobs, who although lacking formal education, try to sound educated. It’s rather hard to explain, but I’ll try. First of all, milch-speakers use a lot of long words, meanining of which they more often know than not. They often mispronounce them though. The sentence structure is strange and tortured. It’s almost overly formal, Victorian in nature, and at the same time involves elements of Brooklyn Yiddish. It’s like as if listening to a very profane Victorian Yoda from Brooklyn. The sentence structure often resembles programmer-speak, so many logical twists and turns it has. There’s also lot’s of irony and slang.
Here’s a quote from recent episode: “Bad news or tries against our interests is our sole communications from strangers, so let’s by all means plant poles across the land and festoon the c*cksuckers with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive.”
The character who spoke that line, appropriately named saloon owner and master criminal Al Swearengen, according to Entrepreneur magazineinspired David Tufte, a professor at Southern Utah University’s business school to use Deadwood as a source for his students.
Here’s Al staring at me from an ad inside special Deadwood themed subway train:
Subway seats wrapped in special plastic to resemble old-timey leather chairs. Add a lot of filthy passengers and you’ll get a full Deadwood experience.
Captain Deadprogrammer and the World of Today
This is one of the many photos in the series that will need to be reshot. I was looking for this picture to happen for a long time, but when the opportunity finally occurred, my main camera was broken, the new one is not ordered yet and my old standby camera had enough juice only for one or two pictures.
On Friday the Goodyear Blimp was loitering around the Empire State building for some reason. Of course the photo is of poor quality, Goodyear Blimp is no Hindenberg and is positioned incorrectly to use the mooring mast, but I guess this is as close as it gets for me to take a picture that I imagined so many times when looking at the Empire State Building. Seeing that scene in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” made it worth my while to go to that otherwise not very interesting movie.
Gyro Captain or Helicopter Liberals
Looks like I am in a snarky mood today. Look, pilot extraordinare Philip Greenspun, after salivating over his recreational helicopter flying, puts down SUV owners:
“Pacific Coast Helicopters will take non-pilots on the same itinerary as a sightseeing tour. It is certainly fun for getting some perspective on LA freeway traffic. Lots of monster SUVs going nowhere burning premium gas that is now up to $3.10 per gallon in Malibu”
By my super rough calculations a Robinson R22 helicopter should do about 10 miles per gallon, and an suv about 20 miles per gallon. I think I know which Mad Max 2 character Philip Greenspun would be. “Looks like I got me some gasoline, eh, eh?”
[Update] : Also see Small airplanes and the environment: A moral dilemma by Matthias Wandel.
About Air Hostesses, Citizen Journalists and Greasemonkey Scripts
Gothamist is a popular blog that uses New York newspapers the same way BoingBoing uses the Internet: they pluck quotes and pictures from interesting new stories mostly from the Post and New York Times, but also don’t consider it below them to pilfer content from other blogs. Unlike BoingBoing they have a few original posts, including interviews with various New York types. Usually these are no talent filmmakers, D-grade actors, performance artists and other artsie-fartsties. Many times I was tempted to write something similar to this Greasemonkey script, but just like with Xeni’s posts, Gothamist’s interviews have an interesting tidbit in them once in a while:
From an interview with a flight attendant:
“Do you live in a crash pad?
Oh god, there’s like 25 people there. All flight attendants and pilots. It’s crazy. if you want to see a good reality show, they should put cameras in there.”
This is an idea so good that I am truly surprised that Mark Burnett did not think of this yet. A reality show about airline workers would be so awesome it’s not even funny. Those crash pads must be overflowing with sexuality and drama. The only problem will be coming up with a name : “CRASHPADS� and CRASHPAD� are Registered Trademarks of Flight Crew Services”.
I could not pass on the temptation to slap together a Greasemonkey Dumbgothamist script (download it here) that crudely attempts to remove annoying “editorial we” from Gothamist. I spent about 20 minutes modifying Dumbquotes.
Monzy is Baaaaaaack!
The one, the only, the magnificent Dan Maynes-Aminzade started posting again. It looks like he does not believe in (or simply does not have time to set up) those newfangled xml feeds or html anchors, but he’s back and posting again. Scroll down to Monday, March 28, 2005 entry on monzy.com and be dazzled with his frat party science and engineering skills. Ice luge technology is not as simple as it seems.
Coming soon to deadprogrammer.com : “Deadprogrammer Visits Japan Part III : Day of the Tentacle”; “Dumpster Diving at the Flatiron”; “Ancient pre-Joel on Software Text Found at the Strand”; “Deadwood Train” and much, much more. Do not miss!
Deadprogrammer Visits Japan or Sakura in Partial Bloom Part II
Part II : Chuck Garabedian sez : “Ya gotta squeeze every penny”
My wife booked our tickets though go-today.com, thriftily opting for the cheapest tickets that do not specify the airline prior to purchase. I was expecting the horrors of Aeroflot, or even worse, flying under the 5-headed eagle flag of Turkmenistan Airlines. On a crop duster or something. But we were pleasantly surprised to become proud holders of All Nippon Airways tickets. And that meant flying on a 747-400 without one of those Pokemon or Hello Kitty paint jobs, but with 4 classes of seats, on demand video monitors in all of them, nice meals and snacks, ultra clean bathrooms, and 20% more bowing.
A flight from JFK to Narita Airport takes about 14 hours non-stop. I found it to be no worse than an extra long day in a cubicle. Except instead of working I read, watched free movies (they had The Incredibles!) ate tasty meals and wondered if one could learn to smile professionally like the Japanese stewardesses. Oh, and I took a nice picture of a circular rainbow. Unfortunately I missed seeing the fish-like Sakhalin Island where my father spent a part of his childhood and my mother earned her college degree. I hope one day I’ll visit it.
Now for some photos (there will be more interesting ones in the next post). Make your own Google maps with Keyhole technology. The whole thing looks like a motherboard, doesn’t it? For some reason Japanese like to paint their towers in red and white.
In stark contrast to the heavily industrial area above, Japan is full of agricultural areas filled with rice paddies that glisten in the sun. I was gonna say like the steel of a samurai’s sword, but did not.
In Narita I came into my first contact with the wonders of Japanese wending machines. My first purchases on the Japanese soil were a $30 Hello Kitty phone card (that was way too much, a $10 one would do, besides they sell them everywhere) and a bottle of a sports drink called “Pocari Sweat”. As it turns out many Japanese products and businesses have strange, but somewhat relevant Engrish names. Overall the vending machines in Japan are way nicer that the ones in the States. I’ll write about them later, but for now I present you with the picture of a small battery of rectangular (or should I say parallelepipedal) sports drink bottles that accumulated on the windowsill of our hotel room.
Go-today.com deal hooked us up with 5 nights in Shinagawa Prince Hotel. It’s a huge complex of a hotel located just next to a major Japan Rail station. Narita express as well as shinkansen trains stop there too. Just like ANA’s jumbo jet, the hotel seems to tailored to serve a number of different classes of customers. There’s the Executive Tower, Main Tower, New Tower and Annex Tower. We got a room in the Annex Tower which is probably like the Fiesta Deck. Still in the good old tradition of the 3rd class on a pre-war cruise ship, the room was tiny, but well designed, clean, and had very nice extras not usually found in American hotels such as yucatas, toothbrushes and razors in the “little shampoo and crap” kit and a washlet in the bathroom.
Japan is one of the last true bastions of smoking, so we could not get a non-smoking room. There was a smell of cigarettes in the air, but fortunately the windows were openable (and with a great view, including a skyscraper with a huge Canon logo) and after a short airing the room was livable. There was no hardwired Ethernet and during my stay I only figured out how to get the key to the wireless network only at the very end (you need to go to the Yahoo! cafe, fill out some paperwork, buy a drink there and ask for the access point password).
Overall it seems that Japanese businesses often treat coach class customers better than American businesses treat their business class and often first class.