Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

Happy birthday, Superman

Yes, by tradition, today is the birthday of my favorite superhero.

Xerox PARC pioneers

Four legendary guys who worked at Xerox PARC inventing stuff we now use every day have won the prestigious Draper Prize. (Read more here.)

Congratulations to Robert Taylor, Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, and Charles Thacker.

And no, the prize is not named for John Draper.

Send 'em a message! (via cell phone)

If you've ever sent an e-mail to a text-message-capable cell phone (which is most of them nowadays), you know that you have to construct a long e-mail address that usually involves some variation of the recipient's phone number and carrier name. Now the folks at Teleflip have a service that lets you send an e-mail just by addressing it to phonenumber@teleflip.com , where phonenumber is the number of the cell phone you want to send to. I tried it and it worked for me. This is pretty cool, although you can imagine the possible spam issues. The company says they'll aggressively fight spammers who try to use the service.

TV alert! Bartman ball blow-up

Baseball fans remember the incredible incident last fall when Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman interfered with a ball in play and helped cause the Cubs to miss what would have been their first World Series in 58 years. Now a Chicago restaurant is going to destroy the ball tonight on live television: MSNBC at 8:00 PM EST on Keith Olbermann's show. According to the story, a Hollywood special effects guy is devising an undisclosed "'evil' method" to destroy the ball. If you and your TiVo miss it, it's being repeated at midnight EST.

Here's what the manager of the restaurant that's killing the ball says:

"It’s like the ring from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and we’re kind of like Frodo, trying to get it over with."

I know! Pete Rose will try to steal the ball, and Bud Selig will bite it out of his hand and fall into the Chicago River.

Dealing with hobbyitis

I have this problem with hobbies: I tend to cycle through them. I might be intensely interested today, but then tomorrow, not so much. These hobbies often involve collecting things (comic books, stamps, baseball cards, books). I have learned over the years that I have to deal with these collecting hobbies in a sustainable way -- that is, don't get myself in too deep during the manic phase, so it's easier to deal with the disinterested phase.

This sustainability is especially challenging for things like comic books and stamps, which come out anew all the time and require some attention. For comic books, the best way to handle my cycling interest is to set up a standing order ("subscription") at a local comic shop, then drop in periodically to pick up my order. The key is not to subscribe to too many titles during my manic phase, because they'll inevitably pile up unread when I lose interest again. My subscription is at Lee's Comics, an excellent local store where I've shopped for about 15 years. I have a good but occasionally testy relationship with Lee's: after I inevitably ignore my comics for a couple of months, I end up in the "bad subs" box and sometimes they even threaten to kick me out as a customer. Of course, during the manic phase, I'm there every week to pick up new comics.

For stamps, I collect new issues from the United States and Åland (which as you know is an autonomous Swedish-speaking island province that belongs to Finland). For my stamp collecting, I've signed up with a wonderful place called Davidson's Stamp Service in Indianapolis. A couple of times a year, Mr. Davidson sends me my new stamps, as I run up an astronomical bill of $50 or so. When Mr. Davidson was sick, Mrs. Davidson took over. Because the stamps only come a couple of times a year, I can safely ignore them most of the time, but I still get to collect them, the perfect hobby situation for me.

My motto is "Excess, but in moderation".

Much ado about eating

If you like erudite, obsessively detailed discussions of fancy food, be sure to check out Hillel's site as he documents his amazing dining and cooking adventures around the world.

Don't tug on that

As I have mentioned here before, I'm writing a book about doing fun stuff with your iPod and iTunes. On my desk I have a PowerBook and a Dell laptop, two iPods, and a nest of cables. I'm constantly plugging and unplugging the iPods as I move them between the two computers to play with various iTunes hacks and wacky shareware.

Yesterday I shuffled the iPod connections around and I got a strange reaction: Windows said it had detected a new device and wanted to install it. That wasn't right -- the iPod wasn't a new device at all. And, the PowerBook wasn't seeing its iPod. Plus, the iPods were refusing to acknowledge that they were plugged into the computers. What was going on? Some kinda iPod virus? Revenge of the computers?

I found out what was wrong when I performed Standard Troubleshooting step 2, Check Your Connections*. I had cleverly plugged the computers into each other, and the iPods into each other. The PC reacted by thinking the PowerBook was some kind of wonderful new external FireWire device. The Mac didn't visibly acknowledge the PC. And the iPods seemed to simply ignore each other and just go on living. Fixing the connections made everything OK again, with no harm done (unlike the time I plugged a printer into the video-out of an Apple ///, which resulted in the computer's smoky death).

*Step 1 is Make Sure the Power is On.

Own a supercomputer! (.09%)

Apple made news last year when Virginia Tech built the third-fastest supercomputer in the world out of 1100 PowerMac G5s. A few months after Virginia Tech got the thing working, Apple announced the XServe G5, which is rack-mounted and therefore much better suited for stringing together into a supercomputer. So what's Va. Tech doing? They're selling off the pieces of their original supercomputer, complete with certificate of authenticity.

Link courtesy of Dori.

Same-sex marriage in SF

Some folks in Minneapolis decided to support same-sex couples in San Francisco by sending them flowers. The idea has caught on in a big way.

Here's a great photo album from Valentine's Day weekend, when thousands of couples got married.

A poll says that 44% of Californians support and 50% are opposed to same-sex marriage. But in the SF Bay Area, 58% support the idea and 37% oppose it.

Big big diamond

BPM 37093 is a burned-out star whose core has crystallized into a diamond. How big is the diamond? 10 decillion carats. That's this many:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Too bad we just missed Valentine's Day.