Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

Happy birthday, Barbara!

Today is Barbara's birthday, so if you see her or have her email address, you can wish her Happy Birthday!

My bad

I have a .Mac account that I've used mainly for IM and for messing around with .Mac services. I rarely looked at email sent to that account -- when I did, I saw nothing but spam. Yesterday, after finding out that I'd missed an important email sent to that account, I took a good look, and I found some emails that weren't spam -- some of them very old. So to anyone who has emailed me at my .Mac address, I'm sorry for ignoring you, and I'll pay more attention to that address from now on. I guess I'm still new at this Internets thing.

Memories #2: Microsoft

I worked for Microsoft for almost 7 years, from 1996 to 2003. There were good times and less-good times. The beginning was terrific, when I got to work with the Mac Internet Explorer team (aka MS-Bay), a renegade bunch hired specifically to make Mac software that was not cloned from Windows applications. Early Mac IE was a great browser, designed and built specifically for the Mac by veteran Mac programmers, and I learned a bunch from that team.

My job was writing documentation and, by default, doing press, evangelism, and PR, since nobody in Redmond wanted to spend much time doing special stuff for the Mac. It was a blast. I enjoyed the dissonance of working at hated Microsoft but being part of a group that produced an excellent Mac browser. Very often we won folks over, because we had a great product: I even convinced my former boss Guy Kawasaki that IE was better. But some people would not be persuaded. Once, at Macworld Expo, we were handing out CDs with Mac IE on them. One guy asked for extra CDs. Hey, great, I thought: a fan. No, he said: he liked to put them in the microwave. At another Macworld I was interviewed live on local radio while a crowd gathered behind me and made rude gestures. Ah, memories.

After the Mac team, the jobs weren't as great as often, but I stuck around. I liked a lot of things about Microsoft, but I also wondered how such smart people could turn out products that were, let's say, not always smart, and I wasn't a fan of all the company's business practices. I guess that makes me something of a hypocrite, because I stayed there for years. But when I saw the item pictured below in the Microsoft company store, I thought it was a great statement about the company and lock-in: get 'em while they're young.

New Year's Eve when I was a kid

When I was a kid, my parents went out for New Year's Eve and I stayed home with my brother. I usually had Jeno's Pizza Rolls for dinner and watched some of the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, the one and only sporting event that took place on New Year's Eve. After the football game, I listened to my favorite radio station, 95 Fabulous KIMN-AM count down the year's top songs. At midnight, KIMN played the year's #1 song, and then changed its request line phone number so that the last 4 digits matched the year, e.g. 241-1969. Then I usually decided to go outside in the freezing cold and shoot baskets in my driveway for a while. And then I went to bed.

How to get handcuffed in New York

During my visit to New York, my company held a cool scavenger hunt, organized by a local company. Teams of 5 people got to run around midtown Manhattan taking required photos (e.g. famous person lookalike, performing with a street musician, etc.), performing little stunts, and solving puzzles. One of the instructions was to take a picture of a team member being handcuffed by a NYC cop. This proved challenging: we met a friendly but serious police officer in Times Square, but he refused to handcuff anybody. When we pressed him, he gave us the bottom line: "You want me to handcuff you? Go out in the street and do something retarded."

Back

I've had an interesting few days. Last Thursday morning, I lifted a 6-gallon jug of water into the water cooler, just as I've done thousands of times. But this time, I did something wrong. I immediately felt a tweak in my back. During the subsequent 24 hours, it got more and more sore, and by Saturday I was having trouble bending, standing, or doing anything else that requires your lower back (which is just about anything physical).

By Monday morning I literally could not get out of bed. I was having frequent back spasms, with contractions every 90 seconds or so, although the baby never came. When I finally got out of bed to go to the doctor, I had to pause every few steps while my back decided to seize up.

The doctor diagnosed a lower back sprain, said it would take 4 weeks to heal fully, and prescribed a muscle relaxant and anti-inflammatory. And the drugs have worked miracles. Less than two days later, I'm up and around with almost no trouble. And yes, I'm being careful.

There are a couple of problems:

1. Every day about 2 PM, the muscle pills knock me out cold for about 2 hours. That's a little too relaxing.
2. Yesterday I dropped a 600mg ibuprofen pill. The dog said "candy!" and gobbled it up before my wife and I could stop her. After a trip to the vet, she's fine now. But that wasn't fun.

Christmas week off

The Silicon Valley tradition of giving people the week off between Christmas and New Year's Day started decades ago with the semiconductor companies. Nowadays many companies are officially closed that week, and at many more, lots of people take time off. This year, for the first time in many years, I took a big stay-at-home Christmas vacation: 11 days, from Dec. 23 through Jan. 2 -- three of those were vacation days, and the rest were weekends and company holidays.

I had big plans for the vacation: family outings and personal projects. The day before vacation, I listed what I wanted to do and planned out each day of the break. And how did that work out?

Hahahahaha.

We ended up doing only a fraction of the tasks and events we had planned. Most days ended up with lovely lazy unplanned gobs of quantity time with my wife and kids. We stayed up very late, and slept in the next day. We watched movies and TV shows. We celebrated Hanukkah and New Year's, and saw a few friends. We went to a couple of hockey games. We ate too much and exercised too little. We hunkered down and looked at the rain, of which there was plenty. I celebrated my 46th birthday. And yes, we accomplished a few tasks (set up Devi's new computer, installed a new backup system, reorganized my office, caught up on postal mail, changed that very hard-to-reach light bulb) and completed a few fun outings. Barbara's theory is that after months of highly programmed work, school, and puppy care, we just rebelled and let go. It was pretty sweet.

So, happy new year! How was your vacation (if any)?

We got a puppy

Her name is Sophie.

Wedding anniversary

Getting older brings milestones. Barbara and I married young. So it is that today is our 25th wedding anniversary. Happy anniversary to us! Getting and staying married is the best thing we've ever done.

All WWDC, all the time

Yep, that's what I'm doing this week, and it's difficult/impossible for me to think about or work on anything else. Monday's announcement of Apple + Intel was a thrill, of course, but the real fun of WWDC is seeing old friends, so I've been doing plenty of that. If you're at WWDC and you want to get together, leave me a comment below. Or just meet in the Moscone West lobby at 11:45 tomorrow for a lunchtime dim sum adventure...mmm...dim sum!