Dead Programmer's Cafe

Tag: New York

  • Sometimes I Hate Being A Fat Dude On Atkins

    “It’s like racial harmony in your mouth “. Huh, it’s been years since I’ve had one. I did not know that it was such a New York thing though.

    is worth a read (I’ll work more on more this weekend).

  • TT: Though Tally : Linkage Galore

    * “iTimeMachine – a mere $5 let you travel back into the heady days of the end of last century” or “Office party like it’s 1995”.

    * God is a member of AAA

    * Doesn’t this picture from Cassini Imaging Team’s website just give you a major case of heebie-jeebies (turns out this technical term was invented by the author of the original Google)?

    * After reading Kitchen Confidential I though that the wild life was typical only of cooks in New York’s fancy-pants restaurants. Nope, I was wrong. The same sort of stuff is routinely happening at IHOPs in the middle of nowhere. Well, not to say that is doesn’t continue happening in Manhattan’s restaurants. Yep, right through the pants.

  • Don’t Make Me Bust A Cap In Your Rink

    For the first time ever Rockefeller center rink was “capped” with a tent, its floor covered and filled with orchids for the The 24th New York International Orchid Show.

    Strange. It turns out that the first time I ever stepped on the Rockefeller center rink it had no ice.

    Interesting to note that the white orchids in which Prometheus is taking a swim in on the picture are my favorite type. I know that reception desks, spas and offices are full of them. Still, even with them being a horrible cliché, I can’t stop liking them. They are classy. Right, ?

  • More Useless Rockefeller Center Trivia

    Rockefeller Center buildings are not overembellished with decorations. A few major buildings have beautiful art deco relief’s on their facades, but most lesser buildings don’t have those. On the other hand an underground tunnel that connects the buildings has this beautiful mural on the wall.

    I’ve been passing it by for many years without thinking too much about it. I called it “A Half Naked Punk Whipping Two Naked Women”.


    I came by a photograph showing this bas relief on a side of a building. But it’s in the underground tunnel, I thought. Well, as I learned from the book (and could have learned from the little plaque on the wall), the bas relief is actually called “Radio and Television Encompassing The Earth” and a similar plaque used to be on the 49th street facade of the demolished RKO Roxy Theater aka Center Theater. The piece if based on a watercolor of Hildreth Meiere. I wonder what happened to the original plaque..

    Here’s what the Roxy Theater used to look like inside:

  • The Mystical Isle Of Coney

    Wow, I haven’t been to Coney Island in years. Holy crap, just look, look what’s happening there!

    The terminal is disassembled, Philips’ Candy Store is gone.

    I probably purchased my first candy apple and salt water taffy in America there with hard earned money. I used to pass them by every day when I worked at Nathans. And now I don’t even have a photo of my own to remember it.

    Well, on the other hand the new terminal looks pretty cool.

    It reminds me of Tesla’s Wardenclyffe building.

  • Developers! Developers!! Developers!!!

    is my favorite Microsoft blogger:

    “… When I was interviewing for jobs, I got more questions about the very oldest job on my resume than any other. Interviewers would say “Monkey Boy? You put Monkey Boy on your resume?!”
    “Well, sure. I spent a summer in high school in charge of the care and feeding of 120 juvenile new-world monkeys. And I learned plenty that was relevant to the software industry. Like, when someone is being really disagreeable, you can just pin their little arms behind their back with one hand and control the legs with the other. Just keep their teeth away from anything you don’t want bitten.” … “
    (full article)

    I used to include my job at Nathan’s Famous of Coney Island in my resumes. Coding is just like working in a clam bar — you hands hate you for it.

  • Lunchtime TT

    * Somebody already executed a hack I was thinking about.

    * A snippet of conversation overheard in the streets of New York today:
    Woman 1 – … Gin and something.
    Woman 2 – Gin and Tonic?! For breakfast??!!

  • Lunchtime TT : Thought Tally

    * I purchased and used caffeinated soap (nice and minty, but I don’t think soaping up provides a viable caffeine absorption pathway). You think I am not going to try caffeinated steak? I’ll let you know how it is.
    (See my old posts Enema of the State and Steak ala Deadprogrammer)

    * lynspin came up with a perfect answer to “YOURE GOING TO DIE FROM ATKINS”.

    * Coca Cola marketoids were giving out cans of Diet Coke With Lime. This kind of reminded me of Pepsi Clear years back. I wonder what it would take to get a can or a bottle of that stuff these days. Just out of curiosity. Also I remembered a story about “Marshall Zhukov .. getting a stash of Coke smuggled into Stalin’s USSR with the caramel coloring removed, in clear bottles with a red star on the cap”. One of my co-workers told me about Pepsi Kona, a coffee flavored Pepsi which never made it into the wild from marketing studies. The whole cola flavor distribution thing is kind of weird. New York area for instance is not getting Diet Mountain Dew Code Red, but it’s available in Florida.

  • Alma Mater Is In The News Again

    Looks like I’ve got some street cred, yo. I graduated from one of the 12 toughest schools in New York City.

    “We are cracking down on the schools with the worst safety records,” said Michael R. Bloomberg. “They will be getting more police officers and a top to bottom review of all safety and disciplinary procedures.” …”
    …
    The Impact Schools are as follows: Evander Childs, Adlai Stevenson and Christopher Columbus High Schools in the Bronx; South Shore, Canarsie, Thomas Jefferson, Sheepshead Bay, Franklin K. Lane High Schools in Brooklyn; Washington Irving High School in Manhattan; and Far Rockaway High School in Queens. Two Bronx middle schools, JHS-22 and IS-222, were also included.
    …

  • Unrussian Profession or Dig Me My Grave Long Wide and Deep

    Thanks to a recommendation from I bought “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs“. It’s really a tribute to an older book called “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do”.

    Gig consists of monologues of a wide cross section of working people. There’s a porn star, a software developer, prison guard, a prisoner (don’t know if that’s technically a job), an air force general, a high school teacher, a journalist and enough representatives of other professions to make a thousand “x y and z walk into a bar” jokes.

    My favorite little story was about a single mom who had a gig as a psychological warfare specialist. She ended up getting my dream job when an Army recruiter asked her about her specialization preference. Since “spy” was not an option she took the next best thing.
    Modern psywarriors, like this girl, sometimes hail from rather somewhat rural places, so they get a lot of multicultural sensitivity training. One point brought home to them is that it is very important to never refuse native food or drink that is offered to them by friendlies, even if it’s gross. In training they even have a mock dinner during which they have to down “weird” drinks and eat “weird” food. That training kind of came in handy to our protagonist, as she was offered “gruel goat” meal in Africa which you had to eat with your hands. She handled that well.

    Turkish coffee turned out to be a stumbling block for her : ” … Turkish coffee. It’s got like a half an inch of grounds on the bottom. Well, I didn’t know if I was supposed to eat the grounds or not …”

    What to do, what to do? Of course she decided to ask one of the guys. Guess what kind of advice he gave her. Riiight. I’d do the same thing.

    Anyway, you can read her story here tanks to the guy at Amazon who sneaked full text search past the lawyers.

    touched upon the most fascinating topic of what professions “Russian” immigrants never choose. Police officer appeared rather often on the list of professions suggested by her readers. Well, a guy who’s desk was right next to mine in a High School pre-calculus class finished the Police Academy here in New York. I am not sure if he actually became a cop though.

    One story that he told me was kind of funny (I can’t judge it’s truthfulness though) . He smokes a lot. And once he was caught smoking right next to what he described as an “ammo dump”. The instructor who caught him came up with a creative punishment. My friend was forced to dig a proper human size grave and then bury the cigarette butt in it. Yeah, being an NYPD cadet is tough.

    Another “Russian” classmate of mine became a US Marine. I wonder where he is right now. “Semper Fi” means the same thing even with a Russian accent. Yeah. By the way, the motto of NYPD is “Fidelis Ad Mortem”.