Blogging since 2002
There is a little store on 48th street that sells jewelry maker’s tools. I was walking by it on many an occasion, but never ventured inside. Today I went there because I needed a ring gauge for ordering that titanium ring I wrote about. I also ended up purchasing a very fine 20x loupe. They have really amazing metal working tools. Mmmm. I should pay them another visit when I have more time.
Assign yourself 5 deadprogrammerTM points if you recognize the reference in the subject line.
Six posts and not a single comment. Looks like I’m loosing it.
Here’s a quote from an email that I’ve got this morning from the Atkins Center with the subject “Why “Diet” Is a Four-Letter Word”:
“What a relief it was when people started saying they were “doing Atkins.” It was so much better than that hideous alternative: “I’m on a diet.” ”
Well, me – I am not “doing” Atkins. I am on a fricking Atkins diet.
This is so amazingly cool. Ooooh.
Well, it turns out that the whole third floor of the Newscorp Building has been turned into the News Club which is open to the employees of all Newscorp companies. It consists of a number of conference rooms and classrooms, a gym and an espresso bar! They have a pretty decent superautomatic machine. The coffee is Moka D’oro (check out the logo on the site), which is no Espresso Vivache by a long shot. From packaged brands Illy and Lavazza are much better than it too. But it’s still a passable brand. And the barrista is keeping the machine very clean. And they serve espresso in porcelain cups. And it costs one dollar!!!
The gym is $5 a week. Woooo! I am joining.
See, and I was just complaining about how there was no club I could go to. News Club rocks! Laptop ports, papers from all over the world on the tables, view of Radio City Music Hall. I don’t want to go home to my dumpy apartment.
You know, those four espressos that I’ve had there today boosted my morale much better than Team Newscorp yacht.
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But I’m going to be a bit more scientific about this. I am going to buy a book.
As always, Amazon reviews are informative and amusing:
“The book could have been summed up in a paragraph or less. “cut meat and dry it””
“This is NOT the definitive book for beginning jerky-makers, but it’s probably a good buy for an experienced jerky-maker to add to his/her library. “
“A Book for Big Fans of Jerky”
Ok, and it looks like the somewhat suggestively named “Just Jerky : The Complete Guide to Making It” is the winner.
I’ve been fooling around with Amazon.com SDK today. I’ve always wanted to write a wishlist manager. I tried to export my wishlist out, but not all records are being returned. Looks like it’s a known bug according to their bulletin board. Ok, I guess I’ll have to extract it page by page (it seems to be working a page at a time).
At the same time I discovered a silly bug in the way wishlist results are displayed. To reproduce” modify “registry.page-number” part of the query string in the url, to jump a few pages forward. Then press “previous button” : numbering of items will turn to negative numbers. Yeah, pagination is usually tricky to code right. But if even I can do it, so should Amazon programmers.
Regular shopping cart pagination uses “pg” token, and works ok with this manual jump.
Right now I am in the process of consolidating all of my information in a hyperlinked map. The tool I am using is called Treepad. But it’s late, I’ll write more about that later. Good night.
Since I am talking about my bathroom, here’s another thing that I want to get to complete the picture. There’s this gimmicky “stolen” White House towel.
Well, you know, it’s a fact that Clinton’s staffers stole a bunch of crap from the Air Force One and White House (including many “w” keyboard keys). I was hoping that some real towels would show up on eBay, but it looks like White House bathrooms have paper towels (which makes sense, right?)
Item description:
“Last time being offered here. LOW RESERVE! Plain and simple. I was in the Oval Office, meeting the President, (President Reagan), I used the bathroom and these were in there. He’s getting on in years, 92 this year I believe. A fantastic Reagan piece of Presidential memorabilia. You’ll never get this anywhere, probably ever! They were used and thrown away. Now they are all gone. I kept mine. I take PAY PAL, check and money order. Check to clear before shipping. Winner to pay shipping. Own a very unique piece of American history from a President that is ill and almost 92. Thank you. “
More on the subject of my bathrobe. Turns out that it’s possible to order an authentic NASA nametag, like the one astronauts wear. In fact, these nametags are made by special order (it takes a couple of weeks) by the same company that makes them for NASA.
So now my bathrobe is decorated with this:
Now I need to file an astronaut application (see my old post about that), get a rejection and frame it.
One ljuser posted this bit of news a while back:
“KINGSTON — Two students face charges after engaging in a sex act on a school bus while other students cheered, police said. The alleged incident happened on Dec. 12 as the bus was en route to Silver Lake Regional High School in Kingston and Silver Lake Regional Junior High School in Pembroke, said police Lt. David Griffiths. Griffiths said a 15-year-old female junior high school student performed oral sex on a 16-year-old male high school student as three students cheered. School officials reported the incident to police the same day. Griffiths said all students involved, including those who cheered, will be charged within a week or two. “We’re not exactly sure what we’re charging them with,” he told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy.”
There was a similar incident in my high school. A Russian girl was discovered dispensing sexual favors to two jocks in the men’s locker room. For months students and faculty alike cracked jokes about the “locker room incident”. I don’t think the perpetrators got anything more than a short suspension. I think all of them graduated the same year as me.
The girl in question lived on the same street as me. Now here’s the interesting part. My grand-aunt ( who happens to be my least favorite relative for a variety of reasons) knew that girl’s family. A short amount of time before the “locker room incident” she offered to fix me and her up. Naturally I agreed. Next time I saw my grand-aunt and asked her about the girl, she said that she had no shortage of suitors. In fact, (here comes the punchline) there was a whole queue of people wanting to date her, she said.
When I was in high school, I got into this summer program for underprivileged kids. We’d work 4 days in a children’s camp near Floyd Bennet Field, and then for 1 day we’d spend a day in a training center.
The job was somewhat easy – a couple of hours cleaning and then helping camp counselors with activities. I mostly helped with fishing – casting the rods and baiting the hooks and such (I was the only one in the lot of us who had that skill). One kid even caught a fluke once. But everyone involved got a nice tan and a lot of fresh air.
The training part was a bit demeaning though. I remember how they staged a little game show where if you answered a question right, you got a condom. White for 1 point, red for 3 points and black for 5 points. Many of my co-workers already had children, so the idea was valid. But geeks like me usually don’t get to have sex in high school, so that was a bit demeaning. I am not even talking about the fact that the instructor chuckled when he assigned color values to the “prizes”.