Kevin Warnock

Today the final Space Shuttle launched successfully. Even though the launch happened just hours ago, there’s already a full Wikipedia article about just this final shuttle launch.

NASA, the United States agency that runs the shuttle program, prepared and distributed this comprehensive press kit, as a PDF.

Thirty years ago, in 1981, I was studying astronomy and computer programming at UCLA.

I didn’t have a television, like most students, but my friend Marcel Samek did, so a group of us hung out in his room in the Sproul Hall dorms, where we both lived.

Samek was extremely interested in the first launch, more than anyone else on the floor. I remember having to stay up all night to watch the launch, but I can’t remember why we couldn’t wake up early to see it. Was there a last minute delay? Anyone remember the launch time? According to Wikipedia, the first shuttle launch was April 12, 1981.

Final space shuttle launch cover for NASA press kit, July 8, 2011

I credit Samek with particularly sparking my interest in computers and writing software. He went on to be CTO of Electronic Arts in Los Angeles, California, and now is CEO of his game startup Machinima Magic. I haven’t spoken with Samek in about 25 years, but we’ve exchanged a few emails in recent years.

Samek taught me a lot about UCLA’s IBM 4341 minicomputer, which is what I learned to program on. I just learned at the Wikipedia link I just cited that the maximum memory for the IBM 4341 was 16MB. This computer supported dozens of simultaneous users I recall, and that memory had to be shared among all of them.

I still remember the Televideo brand black and white character only dumb terminals. These monitors I viewed as a sumptuous luxury, because some of the older students were still using punch cards, like my father Robert Warnock used to use when I was a kid. I can still remember the substantial racket the punch card readers would make. Each card contained one line of programming code, so if you dropped your deck of cards it was a problem.

Watching the first shuttle launch was very exciting, even as exciting as watching the first person walk on the moon. I was so young for the moon walk I don’t remember much about it. My main memory was it was the first time we ever got to watch television at school. A teacher brought in her personal flip up portable black and white TV, with a screen about 10 inches across. Dozens of kids gathered around that screen for the event.

http://www.nasa.gov home page July 8, 2011

I just read a nice tribute to Michael Traynor, an attorney I was friends with when I worked at Cooley LLP years ago. I haven’t thought much about Traynor since I left Cooley in 1994, but today I was reviewing profiles on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, looking for entries about people I know personally.

Micheal Traynor, past president of American Law Institute

Traynor’s father Roger Traynor has a Wikipedia entry, and Micheal is mentioned in that entry. I knew Traynor was an important attorney when I was at Cooley, but I don’t think I realized that his father had been Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court from 1964-1970.

Micheal Traynor was extremely nice to me. His office was about 40 feet from my first office at Cooley, on the 20th floor of One Maritime Plaza in San Francisco, California. Later, I moved to the 19th floor.

Traynor was aware of the political storms I navigated before I prevailed and got a special promotion and an attendant committee of partners to report to. He offered multiple times to intervene on my behalf with the powers in charge. I never took him up on his offer, as I had others like Tony Gilbert helping me and it didn’t seem kind to involve Traynor.

I knew Traynor for almost five years, and he would always say hello to me, and I always felt like he was my friend and that he approved of the work I was passionate about at Cooley, which was encoding the expertise of lawyers into document assembly software so that less experienced attorneys could create documents that incorporated Cooley’s best thinking on a topic.

Until today I didn’t know Traynor was president of the American Law Institute.

I’m not surprised.

Naked Suits unveiling party June 25, 2011 - Adisa Banjoko, Ming Chang, (guest) Kevin Warnock, Judy Hoang.

On April 27, 2011 I was a judge for the Made for China Entrepreneurial Pitch Competition and Startup Fair at University of California at Berkeley.

This was a fun evening, and I made some new friends, including Ming Chang, CEO of Naked Suits.

Liu Nan had earlier arranged for me to be a judge. I met Nan at the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum about six months ago, and we stayed in touch.

I love judging business plan competitions.

The winner of the Made for China event is a fascinating company with the provocative name Naked Suits. Here’s a video of the team receiving their first place prize at the actual competition. They win at 5 minute marker in the video. (You can see me in the far lower right at the 5:45 marker, taking a picture with my iPhone.)

Naked Suits is a clever name.

The Naked Suits idea is that their suits are so breathable, lightweight and durable that you feel as if you’re not wearing anything at all.

While their website doesn’t say so, I understand they are using fabric that is made with nanotechnology so that it repels water and most stain causing substances.

At the unveiling, Chang set up a testing station with fabric swatches and bottles of Two Buck Chuck, the famous red wine sold by Germany’s Trader Joe’s grocery store.

I personally poured an entire glass of red wine over a Naked fabric swatch and the fabric did not get stained. The wine rolled off and the fabric remained dry once I dusted the droplet balls of wine off the fabric. None of the wine balls absorbed into the fabric. I was impressed, and that’s why I’m writing this post.

I don’t wear a suit more than about twice a year. I will put on a suit for a wedding or funeral, but I never wear a suit for work or for a date. I’m much more into sports jackets and jeans for all but the most formal occasions. So I’m not likely to buy a Naked Suit, at least until they come out with a line of sports jackets.

The suits are nice.

They are handmade in Shanghai, China without fusing, a kind of heat activated glue used on many suits.

There is red piping along the inside lining that just pops visually. It’s very eye catching, and when someone catches a glimpse of the inside of a jacket, this red bead should signal that this is a costly and luxurious product. I’ve never seen such an eye catching detail on the inside of a men’s suit jacket before, and I have looked at a lot of suits over the years. I used to wear a suit five days a week when I worked at Cooley as a programmer.

Naked Suits are a bargain at USD $695. Handmade suits usually cost a lot more. I wish Naked Suits the best of success with their exciting venture. In all my years of judging business plan competitions, I have never seen a team attempt to enter the hotly competative fashion industry. Chang and his team show a flair for the dramatic, so I like their chances. Check out the flyer they put together for their Naked Suits unveiling. This looks like it could have been produced by an established fashion brand. I’m a photographer and I like it.

Naked Suits advertisement, June 25, 2011

The picture at the top of this post shows me with three members of the Naked Suits team.

Jim Buckmaster Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org, photo from boredborg.com

Until recently in order to push a Craigslist posting back to the top of the listings, one would have to delete it and then repost it, a many step process.

I noticed not long ago there is now a ‘renew’ link-button in the ‘manage’ column of options. When one clicks this renew link, the post is reposted to the top of the listings. This is a big time saver.

Thank you Craigslist.

Dan Rather, by Ed Schilpul March 12, 2007

Dan Rather is still out there working hard.

Looks like some lawyers got some egg on their face.

Given that USD $1,500,000,000 was ‘lost’ due to this mistake, and given that JP Morgan and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP are involved, I predict this won’t get worked out for a while.

I suspect the letters LLP at the end of the law firm’s name will be their three lucky stars that will keep them in existence.

When I used to watch television news, I would watch the CBS Eveninig News with Dan Rather.

I thought CBS was horrible to Rather when they fired him over a story he read on air. I doubt he personally verified everything he read on air, so to fire him for something that turned out to be incorrect was wrong.

The issue at hand was not important at all compared to the stature of Mr. Rather.

I would argue the stature of Rather surpasses by far the stature of the US President in charge when Rather was fired.

The Cube Project house - http://www.cubeproject.org.uk/

Here’s a small house that a lot of thinking went into. It’s called The Cube Project.

The Cube Project is an initiative of Dr. Mike Page at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, Page is an engineer and Reader in Cognitive Psychology at the University’s School of Psychology.

Here’s a video tour of Page’s impressive net zero house.

I want one of these in my backyard!

GoAmerica home page

It was 10 years ago today that a mobile product I helped create — Mobile Office — won a CNET/PC Expo award.

CNET was the TechCrunch of its day.

To commemorate the day 10 years ago I wrote the blog post Mobile Office, a product I helped create, wins CNET/PC Expo Best Business Solution Award.

I wrote the post as I would likely have written it 10 years ago, so I assigned it a publication date of June 28, 2001. I disclosed that fact in an afterword at the bottom of the post.

I am writing this brief additional post to alert you to the ’10 year old post’ that you probably would never see otherwise.

Cooley 2010 annual review cover

I just got an email that noted the Cooley LLP 2010 annual review report is ready for downloading.

I worked at Cooley LLP for about five years, so I looked through the report, marveling at the scope of projects that law firm works on.

I’ve written about Cooley before, so you know I like this firm.

I recommend Cooley to my friends running companies.

When I was looking for a job 3 years out of college, I had never heard of Cooley (then Cooley Godward Castro Huddleson & Tatum). I just got supremely lucky to get hired by such a quality firm.

My advice to new college graduates:

Select your employers carefully since you may remain connected to them forever.

Here is a fun video that shows a guy getting on the Internet via his modern laptop from home via a 1964 wooden boxed 300 baud acoustic coupled modem.

Students at my high school were using acoustic coupled modems in 1977. The modems were connected to terminals that I believe were connected to a large computer at University of Chicago.

When I say dumb terminal, I mean pretty dumb, because they didn’t have video displays. They were essentially electric typewriters hooked to a large computer that could support multiple users at once.

You would type a command, which would be printed on the fan-folded computer paper in front of you. The command would be sent ‘quickly’ over a 300 baud modem, and the textual response would be printed on the same green bar computer paper for you to read and act on.

Sadly, I never got to use these terminals, as they were for older students. I was in 9th grade at the time.

Here’s a video of one of these old DEC computer terminals in use with an old DEC minicomputer.

I wonder what advanced technology students at my high school are using today. I have little doubt they have access to supercomputers and exceptionally fast Internet connections. I’ve only used an exceptionally fast Internet connection for a few days, and it was like being on a local network. I downloaded a 500 megabyte file from 6,000 miles away in less than a minute. This connection was at a Dutch military college in The Hague, Netherlands, where I was staying during the ConTeXt conference in 2009. We had to plug our laptops in to jacks as there was no Wi-Fi available due to security precautions.

I understand residents in Hong Kong have similarly fast Internet connections for a low price. We should have these connections in the United States — why don’t we?

Below is a picture of a DECwriter III terminal like I remember from high school.

My mother Martha Warnock used to use at work a DEC PDP/11 minicomputer, but with a video terminal. I used to program on a DEC VT320 video monitor hooked to a DEC VAX minicomputer cluster. My brother Andrew Warnock used to help my mother program her DEC, and I remember to play video games on the DEC he needed a way to press the Enter key rapidly to make the game easier to play and more fun. He took apart the keyboard and soldered wires to the Enter key connections. Then, he made a motorized switch with rotating contacts that would make and break connection with each revolution of the motor. He attached this switch to the wires from the keyboard he had installed and now he could press Enter as fast as required by his game. This might sound rediculous to my readers, but this was in about 1979 or 1980, when the Commodore VIC 20 was considered a hot computer. My brother had one of those, but getting to use a DEC PDP/11 that cost tens of thousands of dollars I suspect was more exciting than using the VIC 20.

LA120 DecWriter III (from http://decpicted.posterous.com/)

Greenerati.com blog post about aquaponics at PCBC June 22-24, 2011

Blogger, writer and consultant Keith Rockmael wrote the post Aquaponics Outside PCBC and West Coast Green about my aquaponics system that’s been on display this week at PCBC in front of Moscone Center in San Francisco, California USA.

Here’s a screen capture of just the first part of the post… please be sure to click on this link to send him some traffic.

The house in the background is by New Avenue, Inc.

Moscone North is to the immediate left, as this house is sitting in the driveway in front.

New Avenue personnel staffing the New Avenue eco house told me that representatives from three other trade shows asked about getting an aquaponics display for their shows. If these trade show representatives are reading this post, I am interested in helping out, even though I am not in the aquaponics business.

I’m a software entrepreneur that’s simply fascinated by aquaponics.