Once again most of Inc and FastCompany staffers spent hours gawking at the spectacle of our president visiting WTC site.
We could see the snipers on the WTC memorial
And on the top of Century 21 (as well as a few other buildings)
Our senator has arrived
The firemen lined up
Tourists were sardined a few blocks away
The presidential cortege was significant. It went on (notice the suv with a popped hatch)
and on
and on. And then it went on some more, but I got tired of clicking.
The black ambulance style car looks scary, but even scarier is the creep-o-van behind it. I later saw a few of similar cars outside our building – they were crazy eery, for inside was a full-size cubicle, complete with gray cloth pinboard and fluorescent light overhead. I can’t describe the look very well, but I did not have the nerve to take a picture. It was almost like a portal into a dreary office somewhere, but in a shiny black van.
They found a primo parking spot for the two limos
Some flesh was pressed
You probably saw the rest on TV
And away they went. From the looks of it the logistics of this were mind-blowing and the price tag was significant.
I work at Word Trade Center 7, so on the day after Osama got iced here’s what I saw.
There were more media trucks than I’ve ever seen before.
Some tv journalists broke apart from the pack and cornered some construction worker
Some small entrepreneurship has taken place
“Talent” (a jargon term for talking heads and other on-camera personnel) was striking poses and emoting all over the place
Cops were reluctantly serving as tour guides
Construction workers were having lunch
Some more small business ventures
And some more “talent”
My favorite part was a small collection of support personnel sitting in trucks with open doors, surrounded by blinkenlights, going around their business
I stumbled upon something called erowid.org forums. According to these people almost anything from absinthe to yoga can be abused. Grind up some caffeine pills, add ammonia, microwave the mixture – bam – freebase smokable caffeine. It’s a thing. Can you abuse blue cheese? Can you have a bad trip on chocolate? It’s crazy stuff.
I noticed that twitter sapped much of my blogging mojo, and I am not happy about that. Wasting a perfectly good photo from my iphone on a twitpic feels painful: it takes an extra effort to view it, and a triple effort to annotate. Here’s my message to Twitter: images should be seen but link urls should not. It’s the other way around, you wildly successful jerks.
Castrating my thoughts with a character limit is unpleasant as well. How much information do I need to sacrifice for the ease of posting? Twitter is like Procrustes, a Greek mythological dude who would chop off the legs of his guests to fit the length of his bed. Twitter’s procrustean limits mess with my procrastination. See, a painful pun like this is impossible on Twitter.
Facebook has much saner character limit and link/image handling, but I really don’t want to place my junk in the “walled garden” of “a host of a party who goes through the pockets of the coats his guest hang up” (I don’t remember the source of the second metaphor, but I like it a lot). I got tired of twiddling settings every time Zuck’s army decided to opt me into yet another privacy nightmare. I dumped my old account and created a new one that I only use for work-related testing and development.
So, over the weekend I redesigned deadprogrammer.com. Here are my new rules for blogging:
1) The blog post input form goes on the front page. I’m basically aping WordPress’ P2 theme. Having a post form staring you in the face instead of being a few clicks away is amazing. It changed the way WordPress developers blog, and I’m hoping it will do the same for me (it seems to be working).
2) Big images. I’m tired of small images. The screens are big, the bandwidth is cheap, almost everybody has a fast connection, my camera takes amazing pictures that lose much of their life when squeezed into 600 pixel width. Then New standard width is 1000 pixels.
3) The P2-style post form is the first step on removing friction out of posting. But that’s a topic for another post – I need to keep my missives manageable. I’ll break things up: there will be pithy posts, and medium length ones, and then there will be long David Foster Wallacian ones (I just need to figure out the best way to do footnotes).
4) Facebook and Twitter will get posts from my RSS feed. That’s all they are good for.
If you board a number 6 train at Brooklyn Bridge station on the downtown platform, look out the window, shielding your eyes from the fluorescent glare as the train, screeching like a banshee, returns to the uptown platform, you can catch a glimpse of the fabled Old City Hall station.
For years conductors used to sweep the train cars ejecting people trying to take a look, but these days you are allowed to ride the City Hall loop, and if you buy a Transit Museum membership and be lucky enough to score a ticket, you can tour the station in person.
You can gawk at the vaulted ceilings,
see the remnants of tar from WWII blackout on the skylights.
Take in the atmosphere. It’s eery.
The brass chandeliers no longer have beautiful carbon filament lamps (which can be purchased for about $20 a pop), but are almost as dim.
The passing trains produce a deafening noise navigating the roundest piece of track in NYC.
There are more skylights and more tar (they used to be completely covered in it because of wartime considerations.
The lobby does not have the original ticket booth, but there are no turnstiles ether. Your metrocard is no good here.
Things are a little shabby, but the abandoned station is pretty well preserved and restored. It’s truly a pity they don’t use carbon filament bulbs.
The combination of modern trains and the ancient station is unsettling.
It’s freaking magical.
Yep, the protagonist of the novel “From Time To Time” could use for time travel.
And then they bring out a special wooden bridge, and it’s back to modern times.
This particular train of thought went through my mind a bit too often lately:
1) Hey, here’s a good idea for a blog post
2) Nah, I’ll just tweet it
3) Hmm, I can’t fit it in a tweet
4) Maybe I’ll just tell my co-workers at lunch
5) Nah, they won’t appreciate it.
6) Oh, hey, here’s another good idea
The legend goes like this: a Japanese shogun broke his favorite Chinese tea bowl, and sent it back to the same artisans who made it for repair. The bowl came back properly repaired with glue and metal staples. The shogun could not believe his eyes: ugly staples connecting delicate pieces of porcelain – surely that was not the right way to do it. In response Japanese artisans invented kintsugi: a technique of repairing broken pottery with special gold-containing laquer resin. Pieces repaired in that way became even more beautiful and valuable than when they were whole. After seeing a few repaired pieces in museums I have no doubdt that the story about wealthy Japanese breaking their favorite tea bowls on purpose just to have them repaired is true.
These two bowls were on display in a museum somewhere in Washington.
I recently purchased this Karatsu tea bowl. It was excavated from an old kiln and is estimated to be of the 1570-1620 vintage. It was repaired by a modern craftsman using a similar technique called doutsugi which uses a gold-copper alloy. It cost me about $180. Is it authentic? Probably – the dealer seems to be reasonably reputable. I’ll greatly enjoy drinking tea out of it.
This (as it’s often the case) made me think of my own craft. A huge part of my job is putting software Humpty Dumpties back together. Is any of my work this elegant? Of course not, but I can think of some examples. Apache – or “a patchy” comes to mind. It’s a beautiful piece of code glued together with other beautiful pieces of code. Then there’s Pressflow – a fork of Drupal that glued it back in many places where the original was cracking.
When I began my career hiring managers still said things like “we work hard, and we play hard”. The “playing hard” usually consisted of drinking tequila shots after work and having either a ping-pong table or an arcade machine or two in the office.
Free tequila shots were always a crowd pleaser. Not so much with the games. The worst offender was the Packman machine. The silly little tune and “WAKA-WAKA WAKA-WAKA WAKA-WAKA” got old really fast. The ping-pong table was even worse: it’s hard to write code late in the evening in the middle of a death march project while system adminstrators click-clack the celluloid ball for hours. Both were gone quickly.
The lone “play hard” straggler was the awesome APB arcade machine that was placed near restrooms. “Help, help”, “yeah, yeah” and the awesome mumbling of the commanding officer deeply etched in our collective brains.
Besides insidious noise pollution, arcade machines make coders burn out even faster: staring into blinking phosphorus is not good after a long and hard day.
So, how can a startup stay true to the Silicon Alley/Valley cliche? I think I figured out an answer. A claw machine otherwise known as a “skill crane”.
My co-worker recently got obsessed with an obscure iphone game called Clawzilla. The original purchase price is a bit steep, but it includes free game tokens. The graphics suck big time, but the remote control functionality and responsiveness is top notch. In theory you can even claim toys caught by you by using a claim code and providing a few bucks for shipping, but that part did not really work for me.
In any case, me an my co-workers somehow rediscovered that claw machines are awesome. I spotted a toy claw machine at a drugstore and could not resist buying it. I cut the wire to the speaker that blasted circus music, but it’s still a bit noisy (but not as bad as the video makes it sound) because of poor gear alignment. We filled it with memory sticks, a titanium spork, minifigs and other geek items, culminating in a business card of our MIA CTO.
It’s still kind of lame. Unfortunately there are no affordable “real” mid-size claw machines on eBay: they were only created recently for prizes like the iPod. It’s kind of interesting: there’s a claw machine for iphone, and an iphone for a claw machine. In any case, these small machines can only be found brand new and cost several thousand dollars. Meanwhile, eBay is full of fully functional $500 claw machines.
Those are great. Load it with old phones, unwanted swag for conferences, etc. Use the proceeds from the quarter slots for charity (be it beer for developers or a real charity), and watch your employees and friends unwind trying to grab that lobster harmonica. It’s a dumping ground for swag accumulating in the drawers as well as a way to refocus and rest your eyes.
The best part? Have your designer make decal featuring local headcounts and localized title card and decorate your machine with them.
