May 16, 2005

Supermarket bagels

My usual breakfast includes a bagel or three, so I buy a lot of them. I don't know why it is that supermarkets cannot sell a good bagel, but only bagels that are light and fluffy. Bagels should not be light and fluffy. They should be chewy.

I tried a brand from Albertson's called "Country Farms" bagels. For supermarket bagels they are OK (here's a review from the San Francisco Chronicle) but I think the name itself gives away that they can't really be right. Bagels' brand names should not conjure up images of midwestern farm country; they should conjure up images of ethnic urban scenes. Noah's, whatever your opinion of their steamed-not-boiled bagels, has the branding right with their subwayesque mosaics, Yiddishisms, and New York-themed interiors. My gift to any aspiring bagel shop owners: Try "Stickball Bagels."

(I do have to admit a certain fondness for "Boogie Woogie Bagel Boy." If they are incorporated, would it be as "Company B, Inc."?)

Permalink | From the observations department | Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 at 9:22 am PDT

What's write-only memory?

Write-only memory is, of course, the opposite of read-only memory.

From the Jargon File:

The obvious antonym to read-only memory. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the ‘erroneous’ ones. Later, in 1972, Signetics bought a double-page spread in Electronics magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke. Instead of the more conventional characteristic curves, the 25120 “fully encoded, 9046 x N, Random Access, write-only-memory” data sheet included diagrams of “bit capacity vs.: Temp.”, “Iff vs. Vff”, “Number of pins remaining vs.: number of socket insertions”, and “AQL vs.: selling price”. The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, ±2%.

A page linking to scanned copies of the magazine ads.

Permalink | From the observations department | Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 at 9:03 am PDT

Wow, I've started a blog!

Well, Write-Only Memory, my long-in-coming but not long-awaited blog, is now up. I hope to add comments (for as long as I can stand dealing with comment spam) and maybe other features soon. Meanwhile I have seeded the blog with stuff from my web site. I will probably eventually redirect the old web site links to the blog entries.

Permalink | From the meta department | Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 at 2:00 am PDT