My colleagues Rob Ostrom and Jennifer Sears put together an impressive display for this past April’s National Poetry Month at the entrance of City Tech’s Ursula C. Schwerin Library. Here are some photos of the display and titles that they curated for the installation.
While taking a walk in Green-Wood Cemetery this past weekend, Y and I discovered that our friend Wage the Uglydoll had gone missing! We first met him last year and visited him on occasion. He had been in his tree all through the winter and the beginning of spring this year. The last time that we saw him was in March 2025. Maybe he found a new home or went on a vacation. Wherever he is, we hope that he is safe.
Below is a picture of Wage’s cousin, Country Wage, who lives with us and is a friend to our Mose.
Ghostface is buried in a snowdrift in Green-Wood Cemetery. He’s seen better days.
Columbus Park, flanked by Borough Hall, Kings County Superior Court, and the Cadman Plaza US Post Office (the building in the background of the photo above), has been invaded by a hip giant metal robot sculpture. It’s Rappin’ Max Robot with a foot propped up on his larger-than-life boombox. The character first appeared in Eric Orr’s Rappin’ Max Robot comic book. It was built by Welder Underground, which according to the dedication plaque is “a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that teaches young adults to become certified welders and metal fabricators by partnering with established artists to build large-scale public artworks.” Coming full circle, Eric Orr, Jr. was one of the Welder Underground apprentices who worked on the project. I was happy to see this unexpected addition to the park around the corner from City Tech. In fact, I would like to see more hip hop robots. Let’s get the giant robot hero from The Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic” music video put up near Adam Yauch Park (RIP M.C.A.).
On our walk to the subway on the way to City Tech yesterday, Y and I found this Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) compact computer left out on the sidewalk. Originally priced about $1000 as a barebones system in 2018, it features Intel® Core™ i7-8809G Processor with Radeon™ RX Vega M GH graphics, two SO-DIMM DDR4-2400 RAM slots, and two M.2 slots for storage. It has numerous input and output ports on the front and rear. For something about the size of a hardback book, it is significantly heavy–I’m guessing its cooling system has a lot of copper. I didn’t have my hex drivers at school, so I wasn’t able to open it up to see how it is configured for RAM and storage. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a PSU, so I don’t have a way to power it up either. There are some compatible PSUs for sale on eBay, but they range from $150 to 185, which is too high for me to gamble on a possibly dead system. While I wait on a bargain on a PSU, I’ll add the NUC to the Retrocomputing at City Tech collection that I keep in my increasingly small office space.
