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.

It’s Almost Lunch!

Happy Friday, everyone.

Had a pretty good dream this morning. I was working on a project with . We were building a gigantic mecha robot. I was surprised with the efficiency of my work. I accomplished much more than I thought I would. My task was building a whole bunch of rack mounted compartments, including the main radio. The robot was about the size of the 5 story building I live in.

I guess this dream is pretty easy to interpret. First of all I am planning to rebuild all of my computers in inexpensive rack mount cases (these things sell for about $60-100 a pop on eBay). I’ll also probably get a cheap and slow, but sexy 1 unit rack mount computer for an mp3 file server, home automation and other always-on type services. They are also within a range of a few hundred dollars on eBay.

Second, I came up with an idea last night. There’s an application that I want to write. First I got to make sure nobody else has written it already. It’s gonna be extra awesome!

Now for a bunch of unrelated cool news:

1) Google started spidering livejournal and other blogs again! Sergey probably read my rant and repented. Yep, that’s what it must have been. Oh, and google’s new toolbar is so damn awesome. It even has a popup blocker. http://www.livejournal.com/users/deadprogrammer has pagerank of 4, but deadprogrammer.com – of 1. Link to me more, people.

2) Some Cubans tried to reach the US Junkyard Wars style, in a 1951 Chevy with pontoons and an engine driven prop. I can’t believe Coast Guard sent them back. That just sucks!

Rantosourus Rex – Part I

Here I sit, in my favorite seat on the Q train facing the window, writing this post on my Blackberry TM.

Remember, I promised to write a long and involved post about pen computing, mind mapping, memex and electronic books? Well, I don’t think I can cram all of my thoughts on the subject into a well organized linear article. Instead, I think I’ll write a series of hyperlinked rants. I think that will be even more appropriate. So here goes.

Joel Spolsky likes to refer to “future so bright, you’ll need sunglasses”. Most of the people I know, are wearing Mylar goggles. But that future is not bright enough right now, so it only seems like eternal night with a few sparks here and there. That future is electronic books and pen computing.

So, I sit on this train with a copy of the New York Times. And I’ve just read an article about a woman with a Masters degree from Columbia who sells her short stories for two bucks a piece from a cardboard box in a subway station. There is so much wrongness here. And a parallel : me, struggling with turning pages of a gigantic broadsheet that is the NYT, in a cramped subway seat, my hand filthy with newsprint by the time I found something interesting among the piles of information that the editors and advertisers thought I should read; and her, crouched on the cold cement floor, with a pathetic cardboard box, selling her information that way because nobody wants to publish it.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!

The first thing that is wrong is that the NYT is published in broadsheet (as opposed to tabloid) format. Which means that to read it you need to use some weird folding techniques.to read them on a train. This is something that I might enjoy, but I am absolutely not typical. I enjoy practical applications of the science of topology. I can tie many nautical and surgical knots, and I fold and stack my t-shirts in a way so that the design of the shirt always shows up on the same edge. And I learned how to fold broadsheets from my High School Economics teacher. And even I am annoyed.

So dead tree newspapers are not ergonomic. But that’s not all. I can’t get only the information that I want to purchase. If I were rich, I could employ the services of newspaper clipping service. I would gladly pay to read ‘s articles if they were clipped from Ediot Achronot and translated into English somehow. Even right now I pay 10 dollars a year to get newspaper and online comics from http://www.mycomicspage.com.

Unfortunately most information providers want to lump together everything that they’ve got and sell it as a whole. Out of a couple of hundreds of cable channels that I pay for, I am interested in maybe 15 – 20 shows that run on a few channels. But to get only those channels would cost me just a few dollars less than the whole deal. And that sucks! I am subsidizing a whole lot of stupid no talent shows at the same time when shows that I crave are being canceled. Firefly, Futurama, The $treet – gone. I’d give up 180 channels just to get those three shows back. And so would many, many people.

Sirius satellite radio has two things that I like immensely – a good jazz channel and their hypnotic callsign. Everything else I don’t care about. But to get that I would also have to pay for every other channel they provide. And I am not gonna.

This is socialism, people. Few talented information creators feed hundreds of no-talent parasites. What is even worse, there is a certain threshold that is equally hard to overcome to both talented and non-talented people. That threshold is the editors. They are a proxy, a layer that is supposed to filter out crap. But the filtered stuff has the same proportion of crap in it (governed by Sturgeon’s law).

For instance, a few years ago I picked up a book called Year’s Best SF. I was reading crappy story after crappy story. But one of the stories, “Guest Law” by John C. Wright, Esq. was definitely not crappy. In fact, it was so good that I tracked down every single piece of Mr. Wright’s prose. In fact, after sending money to some two bit sci-fi rag that published one of the stories, through almost half a year I had to send a few dozen emails to the publisher just to get that one magazine with the story. And it was worth it. To me, but not to Mr. Wright. What is very upsetting, is that instead of paying the author directly, I had to pay the derelict editors and all the other authors I don’t care about.

All of these problems can be solved with technology, and I’ll write about that in the next post.

Asperger Smasperger. The Important Thing Is, Michael Likes to Categorize.

Are all engineers autistic? Looks that way to me.
If by some chance you missed this Wired article, by all means read it. Interesting stuff.

Continuing in the vein of making a mockery of the scientific method, here’s a test for your amusement.
How autistic are you : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

I scored 31 which is pretty much borderline. My wife tells me that this is all silly, and I am just trying to find a fitting category for everything and everyone including myself. Hey, isn’t that a symptom? Besides, how can she dispute the two minute test from a magazine?

I didn’t get enough answers on the two minute short-term memory tests I posted previously to make any interesting conclusions yet.

Lehman Brothers: Matrix Reloaded.

Turns out the Lehman Brothers led display is modular. One morning I’ve seen the maintenance people changing some burned out leds.

Some interesting stuff I learned from http://videosystems.com/ar/video_new_dimensions/ :
One Reality Check project involves a corporate installation in Times Square in New York City. It’s a huge, animated sign on the side of the Lehman Brothers building. The sign shows a mix of animation, information, messages, and mood based on changes in market news, the weather, time of day, or Lehman’s discretion.

The sign is a huge system of LEDs, 5340×736, that stretches vertically from the third floor to the fifth floor of the building. Horizontally, the sign wraps around the building from halfway down the 49th Street side across the entire length of building facing Times Square, then halfway down the 50th Street side. Uniquely, the building’s windows are not obscured by the sign. Rather, the sign is built around them.

By incorporating the sign into the building’s facade, the architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, followed the letter and the spirit of a new city ordinance pushed by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. That ordinance required any new construction in Times Square to have electronically lit signage with a size compensatory to the size of the building. While on many buildings those signs are little more than placards jutting off a facade — a giant Coke bottle or lit billboard — the Lehman Brothers building is itself an electronic sign.

Of course, the odd shape of three large horizontal bands connected by narrow vertical bands of LEDs between the windows of the building begs non-standard content. There are no 4:3 video images here to captivate the tourists.

The sign is kind of cool. I sometimes go to the Starbucks across the street to sit there and watch it.

Music to My Ears

I would like to note, that I am not one of those people, who say “I can’t live without my music”. You know, the kind that never go anywhere without a walkman or a music producing device of some kind. I would give up music rather than literature or visual arts. I absolutely hate dance, but that’s another story.

My musical tastes followed a rather strange path. As a kid, I didn’t have much preference for music. I tried to get into classical music, but it seemed either boring or cartoony to me. Then, came the Beatlemania period. I really, really liked the Beatles. For me Beatlemania happened in the late eighties / early nineties. I still have an email address that reflects that.

Having listened to all the Beatles albums it was the time for me to find something new. I tried classical music again, got bored and got into jazz instead. Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk and the like replaced the fab 4 for me. I can’t get into blues too much though. Too depressing.

I started exploring a little further. Unexpectedly I liked bluegrass. Bluegrass is a type of country music that sound more like jazz. The Carter Family and Doc Watson became my new favorites.

Now my tastes are getting curiouser and curiouser. I noticed a black musician who plays an exotic instrument sometimes in the subway. He never failed to get a dollar or two from me. I did a little bit of research, and turned out that the West African instrument that he plays is called a Kora.

(picture taken from http://www.kora-music.com/ )

And the musician is in fact a Griot, a master historian and story teller. I bought some Kora music cds from Amazon, but that only made me realize that the guy in the subway was a Griot and Kora player of a highest caliber. Maybe the gleaming columns of the 34th street station added to my enjoyment for jazzy and modern, yet so ancient sounds of the Kora.

Unfortunately this Kora player didn’t have a cd, but he did have a little business card (a printed piece of paper in fact) that said that his name is Lankandia Cissoko and gave a phone number for his agent. You know, how come those crappy new agey idiots that play in Times Square have a cd, and this guy doesn’t? Totally unfair.

I always held electronic music in contempt. makes me think about giving that a try. I am thinking about exploring Theremin music first.

I Am the Lowest of the Low

I am a fanboy. There are these people on the Internet whose web pages I stalk. I don’t stalk the people themselves, of course. Otherwise I would have been a raging fanboy. And I am not. And never will be. I just read most of the stuff that these people write. And learn things from them.

Here’s the list (in alphabetical order):

Philip Greenspun
site: http://philip.greenspun.com/
for : for creating an amazing company and for clarity of thinking

Tom Jennings
site: http://www.wps.com
for: his amazing art

Tema Lebedev
site: http://www.design.ru http://www.tema.ru
reason : for creating an amazing company and for clarity of thinking

Dan Maynes-Aminzade
site: http://www.monzy.com http://www.monzy.org
reason: being funny

Jesse Reclaw
site: http://www.slowwave.com
reson: for his amazing dream comics

Joel Spolsky
site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com
reason : for creating an amazing company and for clarity of thinking

Matthias Wandel
site: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/index.html
reason : for the gadgets that he made

John C Wright, Esq
site: http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/index.html
reason : for proving that there are still good science fiction authors around

Jamie Zawinski
site: http://www.jwz.org
reason: for brilliant use of hypertext

New York in a Cup

I was always addicted to coffee. In the Soviet Union, a country of tea drinkers, brewed coffee was a rarity. The most commonly available coffee was instant, and even that slop was very scarce. I still remember the time when our distant relative from Australia sent us a big parcel, which among other things contained a humongous can of Folgers instant coffee. I was able to beg my mom to share it with me from time to time. Among the things in the parcel was a pair of extremely thick Levis jeans, but that’s another story. Oh, and that relative was a mayor of a small town in Australia. Also another story.

In any case, the first time I tasted non-instant and non-Turkish coffee was probably in the US. I continued drinking instant, sometimes with lemon ( coffee with lemon is mostly unheard of in the US). Then I learned that coffee could easily be purchased in bodegas 24 hours a day.

My tastes were becoming more and more refined. I purchased a cheapo steam powered espresso maker for $50 and learned the art of making espresso with. Even with the crappy equipment I was able to make half decent espresso and cappuccino once in a while.

After I purchased a semi-decent pump machine for $150 I stopped drinking drip coffee altogether. Then I purchased a semi-professional pump machine for $650. It was very nice, but broke after a few years of service. It’s possible to get service for commercial machines of that firm, but not for the consumer products. The machine sits in a box in my bedroom, and every night Tilde the cat mutilates it’s cardboard box. That is the punishment of the espresso gods for failure. Yeah.

Meanwhile I rediscovered the bodega (deli) coffee. Most bodegas have commercial Bunn brewers and grinders. The coffee is fresh.

There are a few coffee customs that are very specific to New York.

The first is that the expression “coffee, regular” refers to a small cup with sugar (usually two spoons) and milk. The second is the cup in question. Most frequently the cup is either a Sherri Cup Company “Anthora” design or one of it’s clones or relatives. If you’ve seen a film or a show about New York, you’ve seen this cup. It’s very very distinct. It’s blue and white, it features a Greek pattern and the words “we are happy to serve you”. The official name “Anthora” is a misspelling of “amphora”.

From http://www.caffmag.com/caffmag/features/grk_cup.html
“The design has been around since 1963,” said Wayne Meadowcroft, Sherri’s vice president of sales and marketing. “At the time, most of the diners and delis were Greek-owned, so the design, which was by an employee, Leslie Buck, was a natural.”

While ownership of diners has expanded to include other ethnic groups, the cups are not unique to Greek-owned restaurants. At Italian pizza shops, in Indian diners and Jewish delis, the cup of choice is almost always the same and can be found stacked high in plastic covering near the coffee pots.

This Leslie Buck must have felt like that woman who designed the mac icons.

In any case, there are variations of the “Anthora” design floating around. See the clone gallery here (it’s really worth a look. Clicky.)

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

mentioned in a post that his ship used to have gas turbines while in military service, but then was refitted with diesels. I realized that I did not know how a gas turbine engine works. I new that jets use turbines, but not much beyond that. Well, http://www.howstuffworks.com came to my rescue.

The article mentioned, that there is a surprising amount of activity in home built gas turbine engines. Surprising doesn’t even cover it. “HOLY CRAP” is more like it.

Check this out:
Mike’s Home Built Turbojet Engine
Larry’s gas turbine jet engine
John Williamson’s gas turbine and pulse jet stuff!
And that’s just the first page from google!

The dudes who make ray guns out of microwave magnetrons pale in comparison.