I took this picture out of the front end of an R40M train with the serial numer 4464.
Rock Center At Night
Group portrait of the newer, uglier Rockefeller Center buildings: Newscorp Building, McGraw Hill Building and Exxon Building.
Jewelry district with the view of the illuminated glass crown of the Bear Stearns Building. The crown houses machinery and water tanks.
Wheeee.
For some weird reason green traffic light turns blue on my photographs.
Mitch Kapor Would Have Liked This
Deadprogrammer’s Favorite Skyscraper
My favorite skyscraper is a little obscure (like many of my favorite things). Today it’s called the AIG building. When it was built, it was called the City Services Building or Sixty Wall Tower.
The soaring art deco tower was built for City Services Corporation, a company willed into being by one Henry L. Doherty. Doherty was a thoroughly Randian character. A self taught engineer, he started off by leaving school in 1882 at the tender age of 12 to go to work for a local gas company and went on to build one the biggest electric, oil and gas companies worth 1.3 billion in 1930. A technophile, Doherty traveled around the country in his personal train car with telephone and wireless equipment to keep in touch with his empire. Even his bed had phone connections, and electric fan, heating pads and electric motors that could move it through remote control swinging doors onto a porch of his penthouse apartment. He was a very good executive and salesman, but always took a title of Chief Engineer. He even applied for an official engineering license (as he didn’t have any academic credentials). He did have 150 patents to his name and had many articles about oil refining and economy published.
The architectural firm of Clinton & Russel, Holton & George was given the task of designing City Services Building, but Doherty and his engineers had a hand in it too. The building’s heating and air conditioning system was designed by City Services engineers, and Doherty himself suggested double-decker elevators, and terraces with aluminum railings. The building was planned as an embodiment of Doherty’s vision.
The tower starts of as a chunky block wide “wedding cake“. The reason for that is New York City zoning laws. NYC building had to have “setbacks” that would allow light to reach the ground. This was required so that the shadow of a skyscraper would not permanently block daylight on the street. But higher than a certain level you could build without setbacks though. And that’s exactly what the architects did in this case: above the “wedding cake” is a tremendous tower.
The building is recursive: there are two columns shaped like it on it’s sides.
When I was reading The Fountainhead”, this is how I imagined the Dana Building. Coruscant City towers look very much like the City Services Building.
Doherty was planning to live in a penthouse apartment on top of the building. But his health gave out, and after spending some time in sanatoriums he died. Instead of the penthouse apartment an observation gallery was built.
City Services building also became the final masterpiece of it’s architects, Clinton & Russel, Holton & George. No major work came their way after senior partners Clinton and Russel died, and then one of the junior partners, Holton died and George retired.
City Services Inc was hit hard by The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935: they were told that no company could sell or produce both oil and gas. They chose oil and became CITGO. The company moved it’s headquarters to Tulsa selling City Services Building to AIG. AIG renovated the building, but closed off the lobby and the amazing observation deck to the public. Now the observation deck serves as an executive lounge. If you have some juice at AIG and could give me a tour… Well, that would make me happy. Well, it could happen.
Much of my information for this article came from a very good, but poorly organized book called Skyscraper Rivals. I could not find any books about Henry L. Doherty except a $350 “Principles and Ideas for Doherty Men”, a compilation of his articles and letters.
Wegee was a big fan of City Services Building, a book “Weegee’s People” chronicles the life inside the tower. When I get it, I’ll write another article about the double decker elevators, the all-female redhead elevator operators and other marvels of the City Services Building.
Henry L. Doherty and the City Services Building (from “Skyscraper Rivals”)
This is how I get to see the AIG building from a train window.
Coruscant City from Star Wars (image from http://www.wizards.com)
TT: Thought Tally #1
Ok, just now I came up with a name for the “slashback” type posts in my journal. They will be called “Thought Tally” or “TT”. The other type of “named” post that I have is “What Michael Learned” or “WML”.
Just now I looked up the word “tally” in a dictionary and learned the following about the word’s origin:
… Originally, a piece of wood on which notches or scores were cut, as the marks of number; later, one of two books, sheets of paper, etc., on which corresponding accounts were kept.
Note: In purchasing and selling, it was once customary for traders to have two sticks, or one stick cleft into two parts, and to mark with a score or notch, on each, the number or quantity of goods delivered, — the seller keeping one stick, and the purchaser the other. Before the use of writing, this, or something like it, was the only method of keeping accounts; and tallies were received as evidence in courts of justice. … “
Pretty cool, huh? Of course I got the idea from listening to that Survivor CD that I like so much.
You see, many bloggers put way too many posts with small tidbits of information, single thoughts. I find it hard to read
So, here goes.
* Had a dream about winning an Emmy award for something (must have been for blogging, har). Even though Emmys are a dime a dozen, this one was supposed to be from the last batch to be given out. Somebody stole it from me later in the dream.
* Last evening was trying to find a good archival scrapbook album to buy. Bought some deacidification spray. The damn thing is expensive. I wonder what’s the main ingredient. Unobtanium? Tears of virgins (the non-geek variety)?
* Need to start shopping around for new computer and monitor for my wife. God, how many different types of ram are there? Oh, and it’s so difficult to find a good motherboard review that doesn’t cater to stupid overclockers. I don’t want marginal speed improvement. I want stability, dammit.
* Ordered a fat caliper.
* Need a good .NET hosting solution. And a good .NET based Wiki. Maybe I’ll write my own though. Thinking about making a canonical list of Microsoft project code names in a Wiki.
* Another thought – I’ll probably undertake a small project of making an app that will tell the train car model from a serial number in NYC subway. Could be a cool Pocket PC app (but I don’t own one). Could do it in Tablet PC in order to learn something, but it’s not very practical. On the other hand it’ll make an awesome web app on the manner of Where George. Yeah, that’s probably what I’ll do.
* Stay tuned for a monumental rant about innovation. And I am still planning that post about eBooks. Yeah.
Outsiders.
Do I have any readers outside of Livejournal? Leave me a comment if you are such a reader. Any Microsofties out there?
P.S. If you need an LJ code, just ask.
Looking At The Things Flashing By
Lj user saltdog reminded me of something from the not so long gone era of dotcoms. Back then there was a tremendous proliferation of web development companies that called themselves “agencies”. I worked for one back then.
These companies behaved kind of like bacteria in a pool of agar-agar. At first they multiplied. Razorfish, iXL, Scient, Viant, Sapient, Agency.com, Organic, Xpedior, Proxicom. Then they tried to enlarge themselves. Some by what they called “organic growth” which is like when a bacteria that grows more cells. If I remember correctly Razorfish tried doing that. Others engorged themselves by swallowing smaller companies like some corporate amoeba. A prime example of that was iXL. Then there was a type of companies that multiplied by cloning. Scient, Viant and Sapient even had cloned names.
Clients that wanted websites (agar-agar) were plentiful, but coding monkeys (minerals) were the growth limiting factor. The agencies spent much of their profits on advertising to lure in potential employees. One of the more creative ways I’ve seen at Sapient (I think, it could have been some other -nt clone). They rigged their website to detect referrals from ip addresses that belonged to other agencies and present a customized front page that presented top reasons to leave that agency and start working for the clone.
A magazine ad (I think from Silicon Alley Reporter) that stuck in my head and what lj user “saltdog” reminded me of was rather unique. It was just a copy of a ticket. A real ticket given by an MTA cop to some codemonkey at some now defunct agency. It was a little hard to read and probably not very eye catching. In the memo field of the ticket it said something like this: ” MTA police officer [Cop’s name] encountered [Codemonkey’s name] riding between the cars of the [some letter or number] train. When asked about what he was doing [Codemonkey] answered, that he was “looking at the things flashing by” “. The ticket was for $25 or $50 dollars, or something like that. The copy below the ticket invited people who like “looking at the things flashing by” to go work for that agency.
Yeah, that in itself was the epitome of the dot com era. Looking at the things flashing by. Then the amoebas, multicellular scum and clones ran out of agar-agar and began to merge, become swallowed by more evolved corporations and die.
Ride With The Motorman
This cartoon is not too far removed from reality. It is possible to get the motorman’s view in some of NYC subway’s cars. The trick is finding the correct train model.
Train cars built in the sixties and earlier had a “half-width driving cab”. This means that the motorman’s cabin took up only a part of the front car leaving a nice window in the front of the car and some space for seating on the left. I was so used to seeing the full width cabs that completely block the view that I was pleasantly surprised to encounter a handful of trains with a window in front.
Passengers can look through the middle window in the first car of the R32 train:
R68 train also has a window in the middle, but there is a painted door behind it that cuts off the view.
The experience of looking through a front train window is similar to looking at stars with Televue eyepiece and a good telescope: it’s kind of like a spacewalk.
Now, here’s a neat way of figuring out a model of your train: look for a unit number on the wall (it’s usually a sticker on the back wall of conductor’s cab). Using this web site you can convert that unit number into a model name. Actually this is a prime candidate for a handheld application. Maybe I’ll tackle that when I have the time.
This is a good site with pictures of different train models.
11th Hour
The Last Martian
Dr. Ede Teller is dead.
Just a few days ago I was reading an article in the Bulletin which badmouthed Teller and praised Ulam as the true inventor of the Big One. I hope the author feels bad now.
Tom Jennings, the inventor of Fidonet, drew this great portrait of Dr. Teller.
“He is rendered here in materials befitting his life; water color on lead; ground electron tubes frame and pockmark his face, the whole embalmed in layers and layers of yellowing shellac. The materials used should last 10,000 years, hopefully longer than his effects. “
Avoiding the cliché of mentioning Dr. Strangelove, Jennings compared him to Dr. William Haber of “Lathe of Heaven” and Thufir Hawat of “Dune“.
I always liked both of these characters, and thought that I would have tried to do what they did in their position. Even if the odds are bad and your actions might make the situation even worse, something needs to be done.
Now, may I point your attention to an article by
Oooh, I want this poster.
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