Dead Programmer's Cafe

Blog

  • Bonjurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, Ya Cheese (ok, you know the rest)

    From an article called The Problem With the French by Gene Weingarten. Washington Post, Sunday, September 7, 2003; Page W14

    … “Well, we like big portions back in the States,” I say, patting my tummy. “I was wondering if you agree that American chefs are better than French chefs because they give you more food.”
    Maurice listens to the translation. There is a moment of silence. And then he begins to speak very rapidly.
    “He says French chefs make love to their food . . .” Jerome translates.
    And American chefs? I ask.
    Now Maurice is really elocutionizing. His hands are flying. He appears to be pointing to . . . his derriere. I don’t really have to wait for the translation, but when it arrives, it does not disappoint.
    American chefs, he says, make love to the food, too. But in a most unnatural and deviant way.
    Voilà. …

    They are just jealous that they did not come up with deep fried Oreos.

    Little known fact about : during his tenure at Nathan’s Famous at Coney Island sometimes worked at the seafood station, where among other things he deep fried and served frog legs. They taste like something that was breaded and deep fried.

  • Hemmed by Book Nerds or But It’s Literature!

    doesn’t disappoint.

    : “…all of the people who work in the book section are old, and know everything about all shitty books and treat me like i’m stupid because i thought that Hemmingway went in the general fiction section, when it’s literature (since EVERYONE knows that…) …”

  • Uhhh, Ummm, Technically, God ….

    This morning I was looking into ways to customize Ultraedit and came up upon this interesting piece of Ultraedit trivia:

    … On March 18th 1996, we had received 11 “registrations’” for UltraEdit. This was a good day, and of course was an encouragement to us – But will it stop – is one product enough? This was tough, I didn’t have time to generate more products.

    As I went to bed that night, I was praying about the situation, and I just felt like saying to God “If you give me 20 registrations tomorrow I will KNOW that I should quit my full time job, that it is your will”. As soon as I said this, I was excited, I felt sure it was going to happen. I also prayed for forgiveness if I was wrong to ask – I don’t like to try and make deals with God but really wanted his confirmation.
    …
    I got home later that day and checked the mail – No registrations! I was disappointed. I checked the fax machine, there was an order for 10! I couldn’t wait to log on and found additional registrations – a total of 21!!!

    I am embarrassed to admit, at this point, being a technical person, I mentally noted that 21 was not 20 – I had asked for 20
    …

  • I Am Sorry :(

    Sadly the Company is no longer in eBook business. On the other hand, because of this you can do much more with your eBook device than ever in terms of creating your own content.

    iDEO designed descendants of Softbook (REB1200 and GEB2150) are probably the finest eBook devices that were ever available to consumers. Rocketbook descendants (REB1100 and GEB1150) gave a better bang for the buck, and were marvels of engineering in their own right. And now all you can do is hunt down some of them on eBay.

    I am going to write more about hardware eBooks later, but for now enjoy this funny error message from my REB1200.

  • Chrysler Building : Peekaboo, I See You

    Heh, heh. This is an interesting idea. I should try that.

  • One Hundred Views Of Empire State

    So I was buying overpriced fotoclips at the photography museum shop. Then I decided to buy a few postcards for sending to my non-writing friends. The only one New York picture I liked half way was the one on Empire State Building with the subway globe. But then I quickly remembered the globe itself was half a block from where I was. So there it is. Zero creativity, 100% cliche. Saved 75 cents.

  • And On The Editor Front

    Looks like I am switching to Ultraedit from Homesite.

  • WML: The Perfect Teapot

    After some research and trial and error I finally found the best tea making device.
    It’s a Bodum Assam teapot. It has two advantages over the clay teapots. First of all it’s clear. It makes it very easy to judge the strength of your infusion. Second, the french press like plunger filter stops the infusion process, yet you don’t have to take out and discard tea leaves immediately. One drawback might be that the tea cools down faster than in a clay pot, but I actually like cold tea.

    By the way, I highly recomend Kitchen Kapers. I buy a lot of my kitchen gadgets from them.

  • Auto Moto Velo Photo

    My two favorite photography books about New York are David Bradford’s Drive by Shootings : Photographs by a New York Taxi Driver and Harvey Wang’s New York.

    You might have noticed a decorative border that I almost always put around my photographs. I first seen it in Harvey Wang’s book. I asked my photography professor in college about how that effect was achieved. She explained to me that Wang took his negative holder and filed down the edges. This projected not only the picture from the negative, but also a little bit of the edge and film sprockets onto the paper. Besides looking cool and framing the picture nicely this also was a way of showing off – this shows that none of his photographs were cropped. It’s like he was saying – look, my framing is perfect, cropping is for wussies. I am a wussie. I crop like there is no tomorrow. And since I am only using digital these days, I rely on a Photoshop plugin called Extensis Photoframe.

  • Lomographic Fotoclips

    Lomography kind of reminds me of Feng Shui. Long before I knew about Feng Shui I used to follow some of it’s rules. For instance I have an absolute hate of sharp corners pointed in my direction. I usually arranged all my books and other objects so that there would be no sharp corners or edges pointed at me. Same thing with Lomography. When I was a poor college student I used to always carry a single use camera in my bag, and sometimes I would shoot “from the hip”. Even now I use my Powershot G3 in a similar manner. But even after reading a bit about Feng Shui and Lomography my adaptation of their techniques follow Sturgeon’s coefficient. I am not into hanging crystals on things and taking overly abstract pictures. I still only do what feels right.

    Anyway, Lomography is a big business these days. One of the outragiously priced products that I recently purchased and like a lot are stylishly misspelled fotoclips (~$10 per 100). They are tiny and somewhat badly cast pieces of plastic that allow you to make 2d and 3d murals out of your pictures. These would work great for and his wall of postcards and ‘s “webcam” pictures. Lomo has one of these retarded shopping cart engines that doesn’t let you easily link to products, so use froogle to score some.


    (both pictures taken from lomography.com)