Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

Amazon MP3 store

Check out Amazon's MP3 store, new today, selling DRM-free MP3s.

What my iPhone sees all night

Last night I put my iPhone in its dock while the Camera application was running. I took a picture of what the camera was looking at.

World of Knaster

My last name, Knaster, is not common. When I was growing up, everybody I knew named Knaster either lived in my house or was no more distant than a first cousin. When I was 7 years old, my family happened upon Knaster's Department Store on a trip to San Bernardino. This caused great excitement. But that was about it.

Then the Internet came along. In about 1994, I found a guy in Sweden whose nickname was Knaster. I emailed him, and he told me that "knaster" in Swedish was slang for "cracking voice or scratchy record". I discovered that there's a Knaster-Tarski theorem, and other knasteria, courtesy of Bronisław Knaster. There's a Knaster inheritance procedure. And a whole bunch of people out there named Knaster that I've never even met, including a county official in Monterey and a prolific movie electrician.

I heard about Knaster Records, from Europe. I guess they're scratchy, or they have singers with cracking voices. (They seem to be gone now.)

Then, one day, a friend surprised me with a picture of the popular Knaster brand of hemp from Germany. (Eventually those nice folks sent me a tin of Knaster air freshener, along with a couple of Knaster lighters. Cool.)

Then another friend gave me a bag of Knaster decorative rocks from Ikea. Amazing.

Thanks to the Internet, I'm not alone any more.

Go Giants! Win state!

The San Jose Giants won the California League championship last night at charming San Jose Municipal Stadium, defeating Lake Elsinore 7-1 to take the best-of-5 series 3 games to 2. It was great fun, and Turkey Mike's barbecue was awesome as always.

What if they had a baseball game and nobody came?

The Washington Nationals played the Florida Marlins in Miami earlier this week, and about 400 people showed up. The "crowd" was all but invisible in the 75,000 seat stadium. It was so quiet that the umpire could hear a fan heckling him and threw the fan out of the park.

The Big Lebowski (book)

Even if you don't roll on Shabbos, you can still read, so why not read this new book?

Fun with powers of 2

Today I bought tickets for the San Jose Sharks upcoming season. Staring at my receipt for $256, I realized that I bought 2^3 tickets, and that each ticket cost 2^5 dollars, which is why I spent a total of 2^8 dollars.

I am such a nerd.

Memories #3: General Magic/Sony Magic Link launch

General Magic was a dream of a company founded in 1990 by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld (who had previously combined to create most of the original Mac's look and feel) along with Marc Porat. General Magic was founded to build handheld wireless communication devices, but the hardware and networking technology wasn't quite there yet, and the advent of the Internet undercut and overwhelmed the company's intentions.

I started working at General Magic in 1990, and it was a blast. I could tell a bunch of stories about the company, but for today I just want to post the artifact below. It's a faux "telecard", just as it might appear in the Magic Cap user interface, that we sent to our ISVs when the first Sony Magic Link device shipped, signed by the General Magic folks who worked with developers.

Google Sets

Here's something interesting you might not have noticed from O'Legog's search engine shop: Google Sets. When you visit Google Sets, you type in a few items that have something in common, click a button, and Google tries to figure out a bunch more items that belong in the set.

For example, when I type in Campbell, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose, Milpitas (cities near where I live), Google Sets says:
santa clara
mountain view
los altos
palo alto
saratoga
los gatos
morgan hill
menlo park
gilroy
fremont

Cool.

When I enter Bonds, Vizquel, Winn, Durham, and Aurilia (San Francisco Giants players), I get:

feliz
alfonzo
molina
roberts
alou
snow
linden
grissom
cruz
santiago

Yep, all Giants and former Giants.

You can even use it as a thesaurus. I entered joyous, thrilled, happy, excited, cheerful and asked for a large set. I got:

playful
fun
carefree
exuberant
energetic
sweet
rousing
summery
innocent
rollicking
freewheeling
confident
lively
boisterous
earnest
stylish
sentimental
passionate
warm
elegant
romantic
earthy
bright
whimsical
gleeful
sophisticated
light
humorous
smooth
gentle
swaggering
rambunctious
poignant
sensual
witty
springlike
organic
quirky
soothing
silly
naive

Handy.

For special fun, go to Google Docs and create a spreadsheet. Type a few items into cells. Then hold down option (on a Mac) or ctrl (on Windows or Linux) and drag through the cells and into blank cells below or to the right. The new cells will fill in with items from Google Sets. See here for more.

Big Brother redux

Stolen from Fake Steve.