Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It is generally credited with being the first "graphical" adventure game, and was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(computer_game)

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Warren Street NYC

My first real job as a Systems Administrator was at Salomon Brothers at 7 World Trade Center. A short walk north from the office is Warren Street, home of two of my usual haunts.

First was The Raccoon Lodge. To call it dive would be a complement.
But for us back office grunts of Wall Street, it was our little watering hole to forget about the days events. The interesting thing about the bar was that from about 5pm to 7pm it was mostly us white shirt analysts. Then about 7pm the bikers showed up. There wasn't any problem with that. It was just the juxtaposition of business suits and motorcycle leathers. In an odd way, I sort of envy those bikers. The seems much happier then us.

The second, and bit more relevant for here, was Warren Street Books. It was the tech book mecca of NYC. Aside from practically every book on programming and computers currently in print, it had a selection of practical engineering and architectural books as well. These were not text books (that was a different store and those depended on the subject) but the reference books that anyone would want to use on a day to day basis for their profession. Also being close to the NYC financial district it carried a good supply of books on market analysis.

I miss both places.

When I first moved out west, I did have San Diego Tech books, but that store went away. There is another technical book store for Engineering, Architecture, and other construction related fields, but it does not have a computer section. So no longer do I have a good place to look over books on programing and specifically game design.

My local B&N isn't too bad. It has quiet a few rows dedicated to tech books and for basic programing they have all the big names. But for the esoteric game design books, it is very lacking. Depending on the day, they may have a dozen or so books in the "graphics" section dedicated to computer gaming. Though most of them are Gaming for Beginners or focused on scripting languages for specific platforms.

Now there is one good thing. Safari Books Online. The site is sponsored by O'Reilly and Associates and offers their complete library as well as the collections of many of the major tech book publishers online. It is a fee service though, so I am waiting till I get though all my physical books before I sign up. Also I have a bit of traveling scheduled for June and I as much as I will have lots of dead time, I can not access the internet while up in the air. I had an account a while back for another project so I know it is worth it.

Even then. There are times I prefer a real book over something online. Though I don't mind electronic versions. My MBA texts were all electronic format. So I am comfortable reading texts and technical documents on my laptop. As I mentioned, I did like Safari Books. Many of the books that I want to read are mostly "read once" anyway so I don't need to keep a physical copy after I am done.

Now if I only had a dive bar with in staggering distance.

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