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What's All this Then?

My name is Michael Krakovskiy, and this is my blog.

Here's what you might find interesting:
100 Views of the Empire State Building project: I try to take 100 interesting photos of Manhattan's (sadly) tallest building.

My Gastronomic Adventures: I eat weird food - from 13 year old New Coke to Durian and parasitic fungi.

My attempts to grow exotic plants: pineapples, coconuts, etc.

My photos, mostly of New York City.

My musings about architecture mostly illustrated with my own photos. Would you like to learn about a mental patient who died at 103 who served as a model for some very famous sculptures? How about Brooklyn's ugliest building? How about a wooden skyscraper?

I find myself frequently writing about logos. The most popular article I ever wrote is about the redesigns of the Starbucks logo.

I wrote a series of "Best Sci-Fi You Haven't Read" posts:

Psywarrior
Yes, Virginia There Is Synergy
Call Time Police - We've Got a Time Traveler

Other topics that interest me include NYPD, New York City subway system, Japan, and things made out of titanium. On top of all of that, I seem to be interested in pigeions and Rupert Murdoch.

Dear reader, please browse around. You are sure to find something interesting. I could really use some help in bringing in readership: subscribe to the rss feed, digg the stories (there's a convenient button at the bottom of every article), link to my blog from yours, write some comments. I put in a lot of effort into writing, and I really appreciate your attention.

If you don't want all this pseudo-intellectual and want some lolcats? Please don't go away. Here, I have that stuff too. Here, here's another. And another. And another. I lied about not posting cat pictures.



Month of December, 2003

Cheaper! Faster! Kitschier!

Tue, 12/23/2003 - 09:33 — deadprogrammer

NASA kitsch from the Space Coast of Florida where I spent my vacation:

A ticket booth in Kennedy Space Center. It's a great symbol of all government space programs.

This obscene looking 3d mural greeted me in the airport. This is a great illustration for this proposed technology.

A phone booth in a shape of a Mercury landing module. Classy.

It's awesome that I didn't meet the mascot that I've seen on the KSC brochure.

I would have kicked him in the nuts.

Oh, did I mention that they piped horrible Christmas MuzakTM everywhere?

Well, on the other hand I've seen some cool things there. But that's for another post.

Happy Winter Solstice

Tue, 12/23/2003 - 00:16 — deadprogrammer

You know, it's winter solstice and stuff. So on our lunch "hour" me and my wife went to see the Sun Triangle sculpture in front of McGraw Hill building do it's thing.

Here's how it's supposed to work:

"In winter the Sun's path across the sky stays low. Its rays align exactly with the lower side of the triangle at noon on the winter solstice (December 21), when the Sun ascends no higher than 23° in the sky. At noon on the spring and autumn equinoxes (March 21 and September 21), the Sun's elevation is intermediate, aligning exactly with the third (upper) leg of the triangle. No side of the triangle is vertical—for good reason. At no time of day and on no day of the year is the Sun directly overhead in New York City."

Major disappointment. First of all it was cloudy. Second of all the lower edge of the triangle points directly at an ugly wedding cake skyscraper which name I don't know.

Besides maybe I got the date wrong. According to most tables I've seen solar noon occurs on December 22nd in 2003, but I see a lot of references to it occurring on December 21st.

Dream Blog : Destroyer Of Worlds Or Darn Usability

Sat, 12/20/2003 - 23:54 — deadprogrammer

Here's a dream I had recently:

A girl that was partially my wife and partially somebody else got a hold of an incantation that could destroy the world. She pronounced it and world destruction began. My former English teacher uploaded an "antidote" function into my Powershot G3. I tried to execute the function. I kept pressing buttons and scrolling through menus, but could not find it. A popup window (which happened in the air, not on camera's screen) gave me an ominous warning "World destruction in progress. Now only elementary math functions and the contents of this room remain". The lens and the electronics of my camera were gone, leaving only a shell with buttons. Even though a bit of time remained, I could no longer access the menus. And that's when I woke up.

Interesting, this is at least a second dream with a camera that refuses to work.

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