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Behold the Power of eBay!

There are amazing man-made materials out there. Super plastics, super ceramics, super metals. We mostly read about them in science magazines. One of the reasons these awesome materials do not get used as much as they should is because they are expensive or hard to get. But a more important reason is the simple fact that an engineer building a prototype probably missed the news article about the material, or could not get her hands on a sample in time.

iDEO, a design company that I worship has a very cool tradition: keeping a special box with all kinds of crazy material samples in every office. Engineers and designers can borrow pieces just to play with them or to use them in projects.

One of the examples that I know of, is the special rubbery plastic that they used to isolate TIVO‘s hard drive in order to reduce vibrations and sound. My TIVO is very quiet.

Interestingly enough, these days many super materials can be purchased on eBay. Take for instance that aerogel plastic that was recently used to capture some comet dust that will surely bring an end to our civilization. Photos of it look like some crappy Photoshop special effects.

Well, you can have a sample of your own for about 30 bucks.

Or how about Fluorinert? It’s a completely non-conductive liquid made by 3M that Seymore Cray (hey, have you seen this post of mine?) used to immerse his supercomputers in. Yes, you can have your own computer in an aquarium with the help of eBay!

Unfortunately it looks like nobody is selling LN2, so you can’t do this. Or make LN2 ice cream.

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Cheaper! Faster! Kitschier!

NASA kitsch from the Space Coast of Florida where I spent my vacation:

A ticket booth in Kennedy Space Center. It’s a great symbol of all government space programs.

This obscene looking 3d mural greeted me in the airport. This is a great illustration for this proposed technology.

A phone booth in a shape of a Mercury landing module. Classy.

It’s awesome that I didn’t meet the mascot that I’ve seen on the KSC brochure.

I would have kicked him in the nuts.

Oh, did I mention that they piped horrible Christmas MuzakTM everywhere?

Well, on the other hand I’ve seen some cool things there. But that’s for another post.

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Happy Winter Solstice

You know, it’s winter solstice and stuff. So on our lunch “hour” me and my wife went to see the Sun Triangle sculpture in front of McGraw Hill building do it’s thing.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

“In winter the Sun’s path across the sky stays low. Its rays align exactly with the lower side of the triangle at noon on the winter solstice (December 21), when the Sun ascends no higher than 23° in the sky. At noon on the spring and autumn equinoxes (March 21 and September 21), the Sun’s elevation is intermediate, aligning exactly with the third (upper) leg of the triangle. No side of the triangle is vertical—for good reason. At no time of day and on no day of the year is the Sun directly overhead in New York City.”

Major disappointment. First of all it was cloudy. Second of all the lower edge of the triangle points directly at an ugly wedding cake skyscraper which name I don’t know.

Besides maybe I got the date wrong. According to most tables I’ve seen solar noon occurs on December 22nd in 2003, but I see a lot of references to it occurring on December 21st.

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Dream Blog : Destroyer Of Worlds Or Darn Usability

Here’s a dream I had recently:

A girl that was partially my wife and partially somebody else got a hold of an incantation that could destroy the world. She pronounced it and world destruction began. My former English teacher uploaded an “antidote” function into my Powershot G3. I tried to execute the function. I kept pressing buttons and scrolling through menus, but could not find it. A popup window (which happened in the air, not on camera’s screen) gave me an ominous warning “World destruction in progress. Now only elementary math functions and the contents of this room remain”. The lens and the electronics of my camera were gone, leaving only a shell with buttons. Even though a bit of time remained, I could no longer access the menus. And that’s when I woke up.

Interesting, this is at least a second dream with a camera that refuses to work.

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Two Cars in Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish

Awesome! FDA decided not to mess with them, so genetically engineered zebra fish is going to become available beginning January 5, 2004 (well, at least according to their website). I am going to ask clerks at my local pet store if they could special order some for me.

Some interesting snippets from the website:

“GloFishâ„¢ fluorescent fish are beautiful and unique fish that were originally bred to help detect environmental pollutants. It was only recently that scientists realized the public’s interest in sharing the benefits of this research.”

“What if a fluorescent zebra fish is eaten?

Eating a fluorescent zebra fish is the same as eating any other zebra fish. Their fluorescence is derived from a naturally occurring gene and is completely safe for the environment. Just as eating a blue fish would not turn a predator blue, eating a fluorescent fish would not make a predator fluoresce.”

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John Crapper Would …. Hmmm, I Don’t Know How He’d React.

Now, robotic cat crappers have been around for a while. I’d get one too, but my wife is a litter box Luddite. I am thinking of buying a Roomba vacuum cleaner because there are clearly not enough robots in the Deadprogrammer household.

The surrealism of this cat box impresses me to no end:

Another fine choice is the C.A.T.S (Cat Approved Toilette System) which was clearly designed by a retired missile silo designer

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Die Kunst Der Rant : Shopping Cart Issue.

I don’t care what you call it – a shopping cart, a shopping bag or a shopping sack, but the following retarded things are going to cost you some sales:

1) Expire the shopping cart. There’s nothing that makes me want to complete my order than coming back in the morning and finding out that 20 items that I picked the night before are gone and my shopping cart is reset. Even better, store the cart id in a memory only cookie so that the cart will be reset even sooner.

2) Before checkout ask – “do you have a coupon”? Hey, the fact that there is a possibility that a coupon exists makes you feel that you are getting the _best_ possible price! Nobody is going to use that popular search engine dealy to try to find that coupon, and then to search for a better price on an item. No siree Bob.

3) Save money on copyrighter’s and photographer’s fees. A one line explanation and a tiny pixilated picture is enough. Even if the photographer gave you a big image file, that stuff will only confuse the customer. Product dimensions are irrelevant. I mean, what moron cant’s figure out the dimensions of a product from a tiny image with white background?

4) Don’t link the product in the shopping cart to the page with the description and photo of the product. A 10 pixel by 10 pixel image and a cryptic description is good enough. Who can forget what he added to the cart earlier?

Arrrrgh.

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Wanke Wanker, Nike Style Developers and The Big Secret

An interesting article about Windows developers:

“This late in the development process, bugs are often passed along, or “punted,” to the next Windows release–Longhorn–if they’re not sufficiently problematic.
….
On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, “F#$% ’em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It’s in Longhorn. Next bug. “

I bet that when Dave Cutler was around, nobody missed meetings like that. Probably because Cutler would have punted them.

And this is just a good proof of what Joel keeps saying about superstar developers :
“I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, ‘just go and fix it.’ One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows] .NET Server. Let’s just say that there are people I trust, and people I don’t trust. I told these guys, ‘don’t tell me what you’re doing. Just do it.”

From the first part of the article
“Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn’t have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That’s why we called it NT, because it worked on the ‘N-Ten.’ “

Huh. Now they tell us.