Tag: New York

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Again With Time

Setting Wright’s book aside, I went on to read Jack Finney’s “Time And Again” which was up  next. I’ve read it in Russian translation many years ago, but understood very little of what makes it so very special a book. My mom seemed to appreciate it better back then, because it remains the only science fiction book that she ever liked. This time, in English and after a quarter of my lifetime spent in New York, the book truly resonated.

“Time And Again” is a time travel story, with a novel and decidedly low tech approach.  The idea is that the past really exists, but we do not slip back into it because our minds are tethered to the present by a web of knowledge that is increasingly time specific: computer is a machine, not a person; Microsoft is a giant corporation,not a tiny little startup; Altavista is forgotten, Google is the best search engine; webpages are out, blogs are in; I just opened Semagic to write this post, I just typed this sentence.  We are constantly reminded of when we are: our computers hum, there are airplanes flying overhead, if we look out of the window there are cars parked outside.  We call them cars, not automobiles most of the time.

To travel back you need to find a places that exists both in the present and in the past unchanged, potential portals. If have certain talents, go to such a place, dress in the style of the past, eat what people used to eat then, become saturated with the lingering atmosphere of the past. And then, trough self hypnosis, make yourself temporarily forget about modern things – and back you go, into the past.

In the book, a government secret project taps a talented, but loosely and dissatisfied illustrator Si Morley who successfully uses an empty apartment in the Dakota Building near Central Park to travel back to the Eighties. The Eighteen Eighties.

Just like Jack Finney is better known for “Invasion of The Body Snatchers“, the Dakota is better known as the building where John Lennon lived and inf front of which he was killed. It’s a monster of a building with 14 ft ceilings, very thick walls  and giant apartments. From the top floors all you can see is Central Park, a place that is kept true to Frederick Law Olmsted’s master plan as much as possible. In short – a time portal.

What I especially love about the book is the fact that it is very well illustrated with photographs and drawings which are presented by the protagonist in line with the narration. Why in this age of computer augmented publishing  so few other books show photographs next to the text that describes them is beyond me.

Here’s Si Morley’s photo of the Dakota side to side with my version:

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The Macbeth Problem

You might have noticed that the pictures were a bit too dark lately, right? I just about gave up trying to adjust my home and work double monitors for reasonable color, contrast and gamma. So I decided to part with some monetary units and requisition myself a fine color calibrating apparatus. Just like Intuos2 tablets that used to be prohibitively expensive but are more reasonably priced these days, calibrating devices can be had for under $200.

For instance, Colorvision Spyder sells for $129.99 at the site powered by the mighty Obidos.

But then I hear that a slightly more expensive GretagMacbeth Eye-One is much better. But the company that houses Rufus the Dog does not even sell those Eye-One thingies.

What’s a poor programmer to do? I am not sure it’s very practical to spend over 200 bucks on a device that I might use three-four times…

I bet it would take a long time to explain my problem to the owner of Macbeth Artificial Daylighting Company of New York in 1915

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RNC In NYC

Conventioneering Fingerlicans and protesting Tastycrats are out in full force, but so many New Yorkers got out of the city that the streets are almost empty (by New York standards of course). In honor of those who left the city the Empire State Building was yellow yesterday (despite the fact that the official website says that it’s in honor of US Open).

I’ve seen a lot of regular police officers and semi-military ones out before, but I haven’t seen such a concentration of police brass performing regular cop duties. There was a police lieutenant guarding the subway turnstiles, another lieutenant directing traffic and a captain guarding what looked like a normal transit bus with police “Christmas tree” on the roof filled with cages and lockers of assault rifles (and probably other stuff). They even posted a sergeant and a couple of cops to guard Victoria’s Secret (probably from Republicans who might want to find out what it is).

I took this picture because my wife was egging me on. Now she wants credit.

There was this cool bigbrothermobile driving around. Hey, it doesn’t matter if you are in a velo-rickshaw. You gotta get your 2 minutes of hate on.

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WML : Screw You, Computer Hardware Manufacturers!

Continuing with the screw theme, let me share with you another piece of fastener lore that I’ve learned over the year. As any person who ever cut her hands on ragged edges of cheaply made computer cases knows, when you buy a filthy overpriced little baggy of computer screws there’s a weird and confusing variety inside.

Here are the most common, left to right: chassi screw, cd-rom screw, floppy screw and hard disk screw. Now here’s the confusing part – The hex headed chassi screw is a bit bigger than the very similar cd rom screw. But the soft metal of computer components makes it possible to use it to fasten everything – floppy drives, cd roms, hard disks. It is the most useful screw of the four. I get the feeling that the hard drive screw is just a tad bigger, which makes it almost as useful, but it will get stuck if you try to attach a floppy drive with it. The cd rom screw and the floppy screws are next to useless – without knowing the proper type of screw to use, most people already embiggened the holes with chassis screws, and the little cd rom screws end up pretending to go in, but then falling out. They end up filling up all the useful space in the little box where I store my accumulation of computer screws.

Since I mostly buy cases with motherboards already mounted in them, I am not going to delve into the whole plastic vs. metal motherboard standoffs. I’ll just mention that the metal ones sometimes cause shorts by themselves, and plastic ones are sometimes not strong enough to prevent shorts from flexing. There, I said it. Now I’ll merrily continue my screw rant.

But at least the computer screw weirdness makes peoples life harder not on purpose. But some fancy pants computer (cough Hpaq cough) and consumer device (cough TIVO cough) manufacturers use torx screws and tamper proof torx screws. For that exact reason I own a whole bunch of torx screwdrivers. That is a bit sneaky.

But not as sneaky as the hardcore tamper proof screws made by Tamperproof Screw Company of New York:

Snake Eyes®, which I see a lot in elevator button panels, Tri-Wing® that I hear is used in GameboyTM devices, OpsitTM, which is which is built to make mockery of the holy mantra of “Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey” – it tightens conterclockwise (just like MTA lightbulbs). Тhere are other weird things like philips or torx screws with a pin in the middle and one way screws.

Also there seem to be a whole bunch of Pozidriv screws around. I think that the last cam out fiasco that I had was caused by me trying to use a Pozidriv bit on a Philips screw or the other way around. It’s very hard to tell them apart. Luckily I had screw drill out set similar to this one. It works ok on easy cases, but for every screw that I remove with it there seem to be a couple where I end up just completely breaking down the head of the screw leaving the rest under surface.

Wow, it looks like Philips screw company has special aerospace screws, like this wicked looking ACR Torq-Set. I would be way cool to get a box of those.

This is just like one of my favorite Russian sayings – “Ð?а каждую хитрую жопу еÑ?Ñ‚ÑŒ хуй Ñ? винтом. Ð?а каждый хуй Ñ? винтом найдётÑ?Ñ? жопа Ñ? лабиринтом”.

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Glass or Plastic?

Why, glass, of course. I hate soda sold in plastic bottles. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

Here in New York in many restaurants you can find Coke and rarely Pepsi in glass bottles.  Yes, Coke in the original bottle shaped like the cacao tree seed pod instead of the coca seed. They are made in Mexico, I think found out the reason why they taste much better than the plastic bottled ones:
“She told me that they were bottled in Mexico and I nodded since I already knew that and said, “I think it is because they use real sugar.”
She shook her head, “No, no, not the sugar. It’s the water.”
She leaned in like she was telling me a secret, “Mexican water is the BEST water in the entire world.”
Just then a smaller woman leaned in beside her grinning with a single eyebrow raised and whispered.
“It’s MAGIC water!”

Apparently it is not Montezuma’s revenge that assails unsuspecting tourists, but the magic waters that sour in the bellies of the unimaginative, somewhere South of the border.”

Remember I mentioned Pepsy Crystal?  People called it second New Coke, but I actually liked it. Well, these days it’s a bit more expensive – single can sells for $20-25 on eBay. Overall “coca cola unopened” and “pepsi unopened” bring back very interesting results.

Apparently they still make Moxie and Diet Moxie. Yep, the drink that gave us a word for “ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage“.

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NYC’s Syntactic Sugar

If you buy food from New York’s street vendors long enough you will notice that New Yorkers developed some of what programmers call “syntactic sugar“. As I mentioned in my post about coffee and Greek cups, “coffee, regular” stands for “milk, two spoons of sugar”.

There’s a more extreme example. I gained a bit of weight recently after I started to have “low carb” bagels from a nearby bagel store for breakfast. I highly suspect that those things are a low carb version of non-fat yogurt from that Seinfeld episode. But while having breakfast there I remembered another example of New York’s syntactic sugar. “Bagel, scooped”. From what I hear a scooped bagel is New York-specific.

Here’s how it’s made : the bagel is cut in half, and then each half is hollowed out with tongs. When you put the two halves back together the hollowed out space forms an empty channel inside the bagel. Thus altered topology of the torus is highly conducive to non-falling-out of cream cheese or egg salad. Indeed, a scooped bagel with cream cheese is much easier to eat on the train without violating the rules about littering. (Although I’ve seen MTA ad signs that say that eating in subway is prohibited there seems to be no rule against eating and drinking non-alocoholic beverages in the Rules of Conduct).

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Untitled

Jaunted to the mythical Isle of Coney with my wife last weekend. And when I say jaunted, I mean took the train, not teleported. Idiots at dictionary dot com say “origin unknown”. Unknown my ass. The term for teleportation (and by extension for quick trip) was invented by Alfred Bester in his sci-fi story “Tiger!Tiger!” and is one of the few words that kind of became a part of English language. Not in the “robot” sort of way, but still.

Here’s my old workstation. And when I say workstation I do not mean computer.

And here’s Coney Island’s famous non-functioning parachute training tower. For some pictures of the tower in use please go over here as I do not own any cool postcards of it.

As a child I remember being scared of a tall towering structure on some beach in Odessa. I wish I could find a picture… It looked nothing like the parachute jump tower, but left me with the same haunting feeling.

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Armonk Blue

Speaking of the color. Here’s a magazine that was thrown out by some professor at my college:

IBM Systems Journal Volume 21 #4 1982:
“With the use of the computer as the art tool, our cover symbolizes the interaction between man and machine. Two of the papers in this issue discuss usability considerations for the design and development of interactive systems”.

There is no credit for the cover art, but my guess that it would be attributed to J.F. Musgrave who is listed as Art Director.

Screen closeup:

I like a lot of things about this picture. The sleeveless white shirt, the ugly tie, the beer gut, the coffee mug, the expression on the headcount’s face. The ASCII art on the screen. The eery transition effect in the background.

Don’t you think that “Armonk Blue” would be a good name for a Benjamin Moore paint?

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Correct Form Of Mythology

just loves to rant about how the majority Americans are ignorant, uneducated and not worldly at all like his beloved Europeans.

He would not let me live down the following hilarious comments from the excellent post in :

: “i took this with my picture phone, so in case you can’t tell: it’s a dog with boys (maybe men, but definitly of the male gender) sucking on it’s nipples. a very angry looking dog, i might add.

eta: so apparently this is from a story in greek, er, roman mythology. thanks for the info kids. but i still think its ugly. :B”

: “someone not study greek mythology in ancient history class as a kid?”
…

: “Ten bucks eh? I’d bid on it, just because I like the story of Romulus and Remus. Woot, greek mythology”

: “Even more w00t: saying the correct form of mythology. It’s Roman (founders of Rome), not Greek”
…

: “And incidentally, that statue looks more like a hyena to me, but ancient civilizations aren’t known for their realistic art I suppose.”

Having gone to one of the 12 toughest schools in New York I think it’s much more important to learn how not to have a photo phone stolen than to learn about “non-realistic Greek hyena statues”.