Dead Programmer's Cafe

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  • iPhoto Retro or John Sculley’s Gift To The World of Photography

    I collect 20th century technology antiques. They are not expensive and don’t take up much space – perfect for my cubicle museum.

    My shelf at work houses a small, but growing collection of monstrous early cellphones. There are a couple of gigantic vacuum tubes (some from an early Univac), a core memory plane, a multiprocessor unit from an Amdahl mainframe, a weird hardwired logic unit from a forgotten computing machine. My latest purchase is rather interesting – the first consumer digital camera.

    A $700 piece of equipment in 1994 Apple Quicktake 100 cameras sell for just a few bucks on eBay. I first saw one mentioned in this outstanding livejournal post. This guy’s camera still had some images in it which provided a weird time tunnel into some office party in 1994. I guess the people in the photos were celebrating extravagant Mac purchases.

    I bought two cameras on eBay for just a few bucks each, and one came with a cable and a floppy with PC software. Not even hoping that it’d work I plugged in the serial cable, installed the software on my Win 2000 machine, turned on the camera and ran the program. It worked the first time.

    Here are the two Apple QuickTake 100’s that I purchased. I bought two so I could take stereo images and view them on my 100 year old stereoscope. In a couple of years I think I’ll be able to buy a couple of iPod photo thingies for a few bucks and do what this guy did.

    Times Square at night in full .3 megapixel power (compressed to 500 width).

    Times Square at night with lower resolution option turned on

    Snow storm in Brooklyn

    Considering how difficult lighting conditions were the results are respectable. Usability wise these cameras are lacking. Even though they look like those binoculars from Star Wars movies, they have a very nasty lens cover that is very hard to open without leaving a nice fingerprint on the lens. Taking portrait orientated pictures is rather hard.

    So here I am, paying tribute to one of the last Apple products of John Sculley’s era at Apple (note how Apple CEOs are arranged in a timeline at Wikipedia – just like kings). I wonder if Steve Jobs will ever consider making an Apple digital camera. So far the fate of Apple Newton shows that to Jobs anything ever touched by Sculley is taboo.

  • Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

    I am thinking about going to Japan for my next vacation. Time to tally my knowledge of Japanese. Let’s see…

    Nippon – Japan
    Sushi – Raw fish with rice
    Sashimi – Raw fish
    Sake – Alcoholic drink. Some call it Japanese vodka or rice wine, but what do they know. It’s technically a rice beer.
    Yakitori – Kebab
    Tempura – Stuff fried in batter
    Nori – Seaweed for sushi
    Wasabi – Pickled radish
    Agari – Green tea (in sushi restaurants)
    Miso – Soy paste soup
    Mochi – Ice-cream (or other stuff) in a dough shell
    Arigato – Thank you
    So Des – So it is
    Godzilla – Big radioactive lizard
    Sumo – Along with competitive eation, one of the few sports involving a lot of fat people
    Yokozuna – A champion wrestler. Tend to be overweight
    Sarariman – Office worker, formerely a Samurai. Probably.
    Samurai – A Shogun’s report
    Shogun – Samurai’s supervisor
    Bushido – Samurai’s Rules and Regulations Manual
    Geisha – A woman who entertains Yokozunas, Samurais and Shoguns. As well as Sararimen with a good sarary.
    Sensei – Teacher
    Kohai – What Wall Street types call a Rabbi. One who helps out somebody less experienced.
    Sempai – Someone who has a Kohai.
    Karate – Pronounced Kara-tey.
    Something-do – Way of something.
    Kendo – Way of the sword. Somehow really means fencing dressed skirts with bamboo sticks.
    Robot-san – Mechanical human being. Some take Samurai or Geisha form.
    Kinokuniya – Japanese bookstore chain
    Ringo – Apple
    Ringu – Ring
    Waifu – Wife
    Chambara – Japanese movies about Samurai
    Manga – What Americans call Anime
    Jedi – Another word for Chambara; also a person with high midiclorian count
    Terevision – A device for watching Chambara
    Harakiri – A suicide method very popular in Chambara
    Kamikaze – A suicide method not very popular in Chambara. Also a drink
    Kohee – 8 dollar coffee
    Yakuza – Legitimate businessmen with a lot of tattoos and missing pinkies.
    Meiwaku – Trouble, disturbance.
    Kawai – Cute
    Pokemon – A very kawai little critter
    Makdonurado – A fast food place where sometimes you get a toy Pokemon with you meal and your food tastes like it’s made out of Pokemons.
    Katana – A type of Samurai’s cutting sword. Also name of Larry Ellison’s giant boat.
    Katakana – One of sets of Japanese characters. Either the one used for foreign words, or the other one.
    Hiragana – Same as Katakana.
    Hai – Yes
    Beero – Beer.
    Ebisu – God of something good, maybe beer. Also a type of beer.
    Kappa – Demon of some kind, I think lives in water. Also a character in Mario Bros. games.
    Tanuki – A smart shape shifting demon with huge balls.
    Futon – Bed
    Tatami – Rug

    Uh… Yeah, I think I am done.

  • Web Archeology.

    While looking for some hardware in my junk pile I unearthed a stack of Zip disks with old backups. On them was a reasonably complete copy of the long lost “Dead Programmer’s Cafe” circa 1996-1997.

    I think this was the first version of the logo, back when I hosted my site at silly.com, my first Internet provider. My High School buddy helped me get an account there for which I am forever grateful. Believe it or not, but a shell account cost about 4-5 bucks a month and you could even do web browsing with Slipknot. Far out.

    The logo represents an alpinist scaling a Cray machine.

    This is a later version of the splash page when the site was hosted at akula.com . All the cool pages back then had black backgrounds and neon or chrome Photoshop effects.



    Later an espresso cup made an appearance on the coffee page and on the splash page together with an IBM card punch.

    These webpages served me well. A girl who lived in my neighborhood found my first homepage and sent me an email. We got married a few years later. Her friend learned that I knew minimal HTML and helped me get my first web job. Information Superhighway is great and the future seems to be indeed bright enough to require sunglasses. Thank you, Eugene, Julie and Senator Gore!

  • Drink At Joe’s

    Believe it or not, but finally there’s a coffee place in Manhattan that I can recommend. It is hard to believe that this lasted for so long. Read this famous NYT article by William Grimes to understand just how miserable the situation was. So when livejournal user mityanyc first told me about this new place I was a bit skeptical, but it turned out to be the real deal.

    The cafe is somewhat unimaginatively called “Joe” and looks just like any other espresso place in the Village. A small space with a few tables barnacled with PowerBooks toting hipsters and paper grading NYU professors, a shelf with pre-packed coffee beans, a large espresso machine, a couple of commercial grinders and a counter full of pastries.

    What sets this place apart is the fact that the owner, Joe Jonathan, actually spent some time researching the subject of proper espresso drink making. The machine is a La Marzocco. The coffee – from a very high quality roaster and is ground to order. The tamper (I think it was an ErgoTamper) perfectly fits the portafilter and the barrista actually knows how to use it. And guess what – every latte is served with a rosetta.

    For the purposes of this review I ordered an espresso ristretto and a small latte. The latte was perfect – “microfoam“, rosetta, sweet tasting milk. Very tasty. Espresso was passable – good amount of crema, not too bitter. The color of the crema was brown, without overextracted whitish inclusions, but also without “tiger striping” and that brown reddish glow. A very respectable result, similar to what I get at home most of the time. With a few tries and very fresh shipment of Schomer’s beans I get tiger striping/flecking and the espresso tastes better.

    I wanted to buy some beans to review, but they did not have any espresso roast left.

    While I stood outside taking a picture, two men walked by me, and one pointed to “Joe” and said to the other: “ah, so that’s the place that everyone’s talking about”. Indeed.

    Joes is located at 141 Waverly Pl., it’s just past Waverly Restaurant (see picture at the bottom of this post) that looks like the diner where Seinfeld characters hung out. The closest subway station is West 4th Street on IND. 6th Ave line.

  • Hand Chewed

    I just learned from co-worker that I missed a reading by Douglas Coupland over at B&N in Union Square. He signed books and everything! Dang. How I wish Barnes and Noble had an rss feed of all the Meet the Writers events in Manhattan stores.

    Anyway, heads up – Coupland is on his way to Atlanta, SF, Berkley, Portland, Seattle, etc.

    I am surprised Kurt Vonnegut did not think of this first: “hand chewed” book sculptures. I wonder what inspired Coupland – the Spanish Inquisition that forced heretics to eat their books?

    “Generation X”
    Paper and magnolia branch
    First edition English language version of Generation X
    hand chewed by the artist and then formed into a nest
    2004

  • Weyco And Smell The Smoke

    From The Daily Free Press:
    “… Okemos-based Weyco Inc., instituted a no-smoking policy in 2003, purportedly to save on the cost of health care benefits for its employees. The policy forbids employees from smoking both in the workplace, and at home. Weyco offered help to employees trying to quit and has said that 14 of its estimated 20 employees who smoked kicked the habit before the policy went into effect.”

    Somehow I imagine the “help” that this company provided exactly as described in Stephen King’s short story “Quitters Inc.” that later became a part of the movie “Cat’s Eye“:

    First offense – your wife gets some electric shock treatment. Second offense – you get one. Third offense – you get it together. Fourth – your kid gets beaten. And so forth.

    And after you stop smoking you get the bill for 5000.50.

    Quitters Inc is conviniently located right next to the United Nations at 237 East 46th Street, by the way. Don’t forget to ask them about their weight loss plan.

    I bet once Weyco is done with the smokers they’ll go after the fat people.

  • Overheard Inside The Stainless Steel Worm

    A slightly non-standard conductor’s announcement:
    “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a red signal against us” (instead of the usual “ahead of us”).

    Fellow passengers use slang from a certain industry:
    “West 4th is the money stop” (because so many people get off there. Budum-pum.)

  • Dances With The Dolls in Subwayland

    From Randy Kennedy’s outstanding book “Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York“:

    “Despite the laughter and applause that follow Mr.Diaz every time he draws his partner from her suitcase, he acknowledges that many subway riders have never quite known what to make of a grown man dancing with a buxom, life-size doll, even if the man dances very well. “They think that I am lonely or a sad man,” he said. “They make jokes about what I do with the doll when I am alone.””

    My illustration:

    Just now I noticed that my post about top 5 books read in 2004 post has only 4 books because I forgot to put in “Subwayland”. Thank you, attentive readers, for pointing that out. I positevely get the impression that either nobody is reading or my email and comments are broken.

  • The World Is Your Spitoon

    BoingBoing writers don’t seem to be able to shut up about betel lately. This reminded me of a 4th or 5th grade report on India (great friend of the Soviet Union, emerging economy, blah, blah) that I had to do in school back in the Soviet times.

    I remember the teacher get very interested about betel chewing and prematurely praise it as a great habit. Then I reminded her that importing such a thing would mean having to deal with bright red spit all over. It’s not like the Soviet Union did not have its own share of hygienically questionable customs.

    Back then Soviet sci-fi writers promised us Communism with goods being teleported right into our crystal palaces for free from anywhere on the globe. I guess that (and my flying car) did not work out, but today Capitalism brings us the ability to order almost anything from almost anywhere through electronic computers.

    So, if I want to try some betel all I need to do is pick between The Basement Shaman and Shaman Palace or many other fine merchants.

    Who knew that there are so many stores catering to shamans. At leats now I know where the Suburban Shaman.

    Hmm, I guess I could get one of these and try to rid my cubicle of the sick building syndrome.

  • Tring Flickr Bloggng Featurs

    What is it with the naming of websites these days? The harder to type it in – the better? http://del.icio.us and http://flickr.com are just as hard to remember as dastardly regedt32.exe

    The photo is Hotel Pierre at night from Central Park. Everybody’s favorite billionaire tyrant recently bought himself a humble apartment there.

    ruperts_house
    Originally uploaded by deadprogrammer