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.
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.
Yesterday I did something I hadn't done in about 30 years:
I got on a bicycle and rode it.
My kindly employer provides shared bikes to help people get around our increasingly sprawling campus. I've been wanting to ride one, but I've been a little worried that I might embarrass/kill myself if I tried. Last night, I worked until about 8:00 PM, and I was leaving, I decided it was late enough to avoid embarrassment and traffic, and still light enough to ride safely. So I grabbed the bike, put my briefcase in the basket, adjusted the seat, and jumped on.
You know that saying that you never forget how to ride a bike? Oh yes you do :-(. When I first started pedaling, I had serious concerns about losing my balance and falling over. I soon got over that, but then discovered I couldn't seem to get the thing to go in straight line. So I dragged the bike to the back of the building where there were fewer cars parked and tried again. Better! As I got up some speed, I got less wobbly, although I still wasn't traveling as straight as I would have liked. And then, the old feeling of being 12 years old and flying to the comic book store on my banana-seat Schwinn, wind in my face, returned all at once.
I made one quick loop of the parking lot, being very careful not to crash to my doom (imagine the headline: "South Bay Man Dies in One-Bike Crash"). After riding for less than 10 minutes, I was already winded. But it felt great. And then I got into my comfortable car and drove home.
I've never been into cars (although I drive a lot -- I'm a Californian, after all). I get a new car about every 8-10 years or so, after I've driven the previous one into the ground. One of the advantages of getting a car that infrequently is that each new car feels like a tremendous leap forward in techmology.
This time, I really hit the nerd jackpot: I got a Toyota Prius. Yep, I'm one of those.
I chose this car for several reasons, in increasing order of importance for me:
I love the cool tech in this car. I got the navigation system -- I waited a couple of weeks longer because of this -- and it's well-designed, useful, and fun. I love that the "key" is really a transponder, so I can unlock the doors just by touching the handles and I can start and drive with the key still in my pocket. I love that it has Bluetooth, so I can talk on the phone hands-free and without plugging the phone in to anything. And I love that it's silent when moving slowly and running without the gas engine or when idling.
For the first time in my life, I really like my car, instead of just being OK with it.
When you visit the Old City of Jerusalem, you understand a lot about the history and relationships between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The Temple Mount was the location of the two great Jewish temples of ancient times, and was the site of the Ark of the Covenant containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.
The remaining Western Wall of the Temple plaza is the holiest site in Judaism. (That's vegetation, not burn marks or other damage, that you see on the wall.) But wait -- the former location of the temples themselves on the Mount, right above the Western Wall, is a holy site in Islam and is home to the Dome of the Rock (the golden dome peeking over in the pictures) and Al-Aqsa Mosque (the gray dome). You can stand at the wall with the Jews and hear the muezzin calling Muslims to prayers from the minaret above. And by the way, right next to the Temple Mount is the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of Christ's crucifixion. Israeli security works with many different religious organizations, such as the Waqf, to provide access to these sites. And most of the time, it's peaceful there.
As mentioned earlier, I just returned from 10 terrific days in Israel. And while I was gone, two products that I've been working on for a long time saw the light of day.
Google Checkout went live last Thursday. Google Checkout is a cool service that lets you buy stuff really fast using information from your Google account (including a Gmail account). I wrote the API documentation, which helps merchants hook up their stores to Google Checkout. If you don't have your own online store, but you want to try selling something with Google Checkout, take a look at Buy Now buttons, an incredibly easy way to sell something and get paid through Google Checkout.
And also last week, on a more personal scale than Google Checkout, Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh was published as an ebook (paper version coming soon). The estimable Mark Dalrymple of Advanced Mac OS X Programming fame wrote this one, and I went through and polished it a bit. This process reminded me of the way comic books are drawn, where one artist creates the art in pencil, then another redraws in ink, erasing and touching up a bit, so we decided to use comic book terminology for the credits and a comic book theme for the design. If you have any interest in learning or improving your Objective-C skills, I highly recommend this book. Getting Mark Dalrymple to teach you Objective-C is like having Michael Jordan show you how to play basketball.
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