Dead Programmer's Cafe

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  • Two and Four-legged Bomb Protection

    JWZ posted a link about a trained hawk that attacked a Chihuahua in Bryant Park. The hawks were used for scaring away pigeons. The hawks were well fed, but still tried to kill a pigeon or two. And of course they could not pass up Mexican food. Yeah, it’s tough to be a lap dog in NYC. If the swans in Central Park won’t get you, the hawks in Bryant Park will.

    Of course ratbirds are annoying and a health hazard, but in this case we are talking about the exact spot where Tesla fed pigeons. These are the descendants of Tesla’s pigeons! I guess he’d be pretty pissed about the hawks.

    So now it looks like the hawk program will get canned because of the stupid lap dog. That’s too bad – trained hawks are pretty cool. Too bad I didn’t know about the hawks before, or I would have taken pictures. In fact I think I saw the hawk dude in the park, but I thought that he was in for a renaissance fair or something.

    Hawks are not the only critters that keep New Yorkers safe from bombs. On my way to work I pass up a guy with a bomb sniffing dog standing in the area where trucks are unloading in the building where I work. In fact, there are a few of these dogs around. I wonder if they found a single bomb.

  • Post While Waiting For Defragmentor: Blogger Exultant

    My favorite modern science fiction writer, John C. Wright, Esq. , also started a livejournal, . I must warn you, that Mr. Wright is as controversial as he is brilliant. A retired lawyer and journalist, Libertarian turned Conservative, a self described Christian Atheist and Stoic he is nothing like a common livejournal blogger.

    I strongly urge you to buy Year’s Best SF 3, a book containing a short story called “Guest Law”. This story made me a big fan. Copies of Year’s Best SF can be had for as little as 50 cents + shipping at Amazon.

    Unfortunately Mr. Wright’s other short stories are rather hard to obtain, but you absolutely must get his Phoenix Exultant trilogy books. I’ve read the first two volumes and I can’t wait for the third one to come out.

    The only thing short story of Mr. Wright’s that is available online is a William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land tribute titled “Awake in the Night“. Now, I am a staunch detractor of the fantasy genre. And I absolutely hate fan fiction. In this case I am willing to make an exception. Yeah, yeah, you heard me say that. But even though
    “Awake in the Night” is a very good read and it revealed to me Night Land books which I will definitely pursue, I still wish it was an original Wright story instead of a tribute.

  • Lunch Time Post I : Now, About That Lunch…

    finally started a blog. To offset this sign of weakness he is planning a round the world trip in his airplane. Maybe he’ll finally visit me in New York and we’ll go out for lunch. I haven’t had lunch with anybody other than my wife or co-workers in a very long time.

  • I See a Gondola. Impulse Speed, Engsin. We Are Off to the Races!

    News in photography from : How to take “Panasonic” pictures.

    From The drama with tandems, gondolas and POGs in Sears.

    Now, store display, design and marketing always fascinated me. So I did a bit of digging around:

    Apparently this is a gondola (the long shelves) with end caps :
    (from http://www.leggettsfg.com/)

    Tandems seem to be Sears specific type of shelving. I wonder, who invented gondola shelves and why made that person name them so.

    I found Glossary of Aftermarket Terms and dug this stuff up:

    SKU: Stock Keeping Unit. Refers to each single item carried by a retailer. Every color, style and item having its own vendor or vendee number has its own SKU.
    Keystone: A markup of 100% or more.
    Loss Leader: A high-demand product such as motor oil or spark plugs, sold at cost or below to draw customers into a store.
    Velocity Price: Pricing system based on relative movement within a product line (usually discounting faster moving items more deeply than slower movers).
    Ad Slicks: Black and white reproducible artwork used for packaging and advertising.

    When I was working on online stores, I once asked in a meeting what SKU stood for. Interestingly enough nobody knew the correct answer. I looked it up on the Net later.

    You know those strings of items that festoon the shelves that we now know are called gondolas?
    (image from http://www.hubert.com)

    Apparently those are called “impulse strips”. When will they come up with warp strips?

    Now, this is an interesting name for a suprmarket layout:
    (taken from http://www.discountshelving.com)
    (Illustration 1) Racetrack Layout
    Racetrack Layout consists of a main aisle that will lead customers from the front area, around the whole store, and leads them at the check out counter. It is designed for two-way traffic that directs customers to what they are looking for.

  • The Engineer’s Itch

    On Saturday I’ve got the Engineer’s Itch. You know, the itch to take apart something that is working perfectly well and try to improve it. To scratch it I added a second video card and a monitor to my computer.

    All I had in my box-o-junk was an old video card and a crappy 15 inch monitor, but even with that a dual monitor desktop is absolutely awesome. It works really great with Photoshop – I can move all the annoying toolbars to the left screen. I also moved the mess of shortcuts, install files and folders with junk to the left. Now my main desktop is very clean and organized.

    It’s great for having multiple browser windows open, doing some reading during long and annoying installs (you can have a non-resizable window on the first monitor and another one on the second). Ok, next step is to buy decent lcd monitors and setting them up like that. I don’t want to go back to a single monitor setup.

  • 999

    The scary thing about the newer Rockefeller center buildings is that from Times Square they look kind of like the perished World Trade Center towers. If you add outright “satanistic” “999 Pharmaceutical” and “DOG” ads and a jet plane trail, the picture becomes even scarier.

  • Culinary Adventures In K-Town

    One of my favorite places to eat out when I feel depressed is the row of Korean restaurants on 32nd street. My life seems to be saturated with tsures lately, so I dragged my wife there on Monday.

    That area is known as K-Town, Koreatown or Little Korea even though it’s just one city block (32nd between Broadway and 5th). It’s a very interesting place. Towering over it is the Empire State Building.

    The street is composed mostly of traditional Korean restaurants,

    gleaming cafes (I wish I could have some bubble tea or other types of the sweet sweet goodness that they sell there)

    and other businesses sprinkled in between.

    What I usually go for is Korean BBQ. It works like this: you sit at a special table with a fire pit in the middle. The waiter places hot coals into it with a well practiced movement. Every time I see that maneuver I think about how much their insurance must cost them. Then they bring you your choice of raw meat, seafood or vegetables and you proceed to grill it. You also get a ton of little side dishes, souses and very fresh lettuce leaves to wrap your grilled food in.

    I really like food wrapped in lettuce. I even thought about opening a little street vendor cart selling lettuce wraps. Lettuce wraps in my opinion are much better than burgers. They are Atkins friendly too.

    Korean BBQ is not extremely cheap – expect to pay $15-20 per dish (and even though you don’t get a lot of meat, combined with side dishes and lettuce it’s a filling meal). You also have to order at least two dishes to be seated at the grill table. I highly recommend marinated tongue.

    Another unusual food that I tried there is raw beef. It’s very fresh and is served marinated and very cold. Great stuff.

  • More LN2 Stuff (with hey-hey-hey-it-hurts-me)

    Ok, remember, when working with LN2 do not wear open-toed shoes. Otherwise there is a high probability of you having to perform LN2 ballet. is pretty good. would probably also enjoy this post.

    Sunday’s Foxtrot comic is about LN2 icecream.

  • Even Swans Are Tough In NYC

    posted a link to an article about a dog-eating catfish that died in the German city of Moenchengladbach. This kind of reminded me about a family of swans that used to live in a lake in Central Park. They became famous in 2000 for killing Donna Karan’s Jack Russell terrier that stupidly tried to swim to the couple’s nest. Now one of the swans was found dead and another one is missing. I think I might have a photo of the swans somewhere in my photo archive.

  • Back Me Up, Baby

    This is very embarrassing. I have been without a decent data backup strategy for a very, very long time. Yesterday I finally did something about it. My backup setup is rather ghetto – a 120 gig hard drive (about $100 bucks at a friendly neighborhood computer store) and a USB 2.0 enclosure (another 50 bucks). For software I used the backup utility that comes with Windows 2000. At least now my photos and mp3s that took forever to rip from my scratched up cds live in more than one place. Why didn’t I do that before? Because I am a lazy moron.

    Later on I will probably put together a backup server with a couple of 200 gig drives (about $200 a pop) that will do backups automatically over the network every couple of days. I will also probably take a look at books about how backups are done professionally. I mean, ideally I should have had an off-site backup service. But one look at what those cost sent me reeling. Besides, it would take some bandwidth to upload or download in case of a crash 30-50 gigs worth of files. I also looked at tapes, but cartridges often cost more than equivalent hard drives, and the drives themselves are not very cheap. I don’t really see a better affordable way to keep backups right now.