RIP Steve, Ya done good.

I know that everyone and their  uncle is got a piece to say about Steve jobs. But this man touched and influenced my life and today I'm very sad.

Some may disagree but Steve Jobs, to me, was an amazing heroic figure.

Steve changed my world in a very real sense.

The Macintosh and the LaserWriter allowed me to accomplish, in-house, what before only an advertising agency could do. This made for very quick time span between idea to campaign to results. There was many days when I would walk out of a Organizational meeting with a vision of what was needed and by the end of the day with the help of in house personnel have an ad in hand reflecting that vision.  This was a huge advantage over our competition and melded with an aggressive advertising philosophy nicely.  In fact, I named that first in house advertising agency "Advision".  But that advantage came to us in an affordable machine through the work of Steve Jobs and the Macintosh.

Jobs for me was also a model. He was driven by his ideas. He lived the customer experience. He knew what he wanted to do and didn't let to many people move him away from his vision. I tried to emulate that in my career but it's a lot easier to do when you run the company than it is to accomplish from within. But I had success at it.

How valuable was Jobs, when he left Apple for 12 years they almost went bankrupt. He left because the company he founded and the guy he brought in to run it had decided to veer away from Jobs  vision.  SO they fired him. This was a real trial by fire for us advocates of the Mac. But Apple brought him back. All he had done in the meantime is build the finest animation house in the country at Pixar and develop the NEXT brand computer. Next was literally the software that allowed networkability, a Jobs vision and the one that Tim Burners Lee built the internet on.
Jobs came back to Apple and took charge and the rest is history.  The Next OS became the basis for the Mac OSX. Great Products were released that didn't come out of committee, couldn't have come out of a committee but were the results of one mans passion to make the customer/user experience exceed their expectations. And with his passion and drive he changed the world.

You can argue that it would have changed anyway but think of how the personal computer as a home computer has changed your life, a lot of that was influenced heavily by Steve Jobs. Then Apple pushed the laptop market. Easy internet access, entertainment light business all done with style and an elegance just missing from competitive products. iPhone changed the telecom world bringing mobile computing to your pocket. The iPad took the step one more step making a bridge between laptops and phones. The iTunes store brought a whole new distribution model for electronic wares.

The recording industry, the advertising industry, the total publishing industry, the movie industry all had to change direction to adapt to the new way Jobs pointed the computer industry and the way it was sold.

This man in my humble opinion may just be the most important man in the last 100 years. Our lives for good or bad, but I think for good, have been ushered down the road of Steve Jobs insight and vision.

I used to be the only guy within a quarter mile radius with a Mac. A mile radius with a Mac portable.
Today Apple Computer is the most valuable company in the country. Today, in this coffee shop where I am writing this there are 8 laptops visible and 6 are Macs.

Rest in Peace Steve ya done good!

Little gems rise from the ashes

PAIN

We never know how much we are addicted to something until we are deprived of it.  I have had that happen a couple of times in my life, to be deprived of something that I took for granted and then found how much a part of my life it inhabited.
I found myself in computer hell.  The anxiety I felt, the itchy feeling, the fidgeting that I experienced was on par with a minor opiate withdrawal.
My computer is my source of news, an outlet for my info addiction, entertainment,  communication,  as well. And all of a sudden it wasn’t there.  And I was adrift.

This particular lesson in life came when I was performing maintenance on my computer equipment. I have two laptops both Macs, one about four years old and one about two years old.  The older one is the warhorse that I used for most of my trip across the country a couple of years ago. The “A” key doesn’t work (a coffee spill in Memphis) then the shift keys gave up along with the enter key. I solved all of this in creative ways but finally bought a $10 USB keyboard and found a good used  Mac Book to take up my computing needs.

I use four external USB hard drives that backup data and warehouse the stuff I have not gotten to yet. That’s a bunch! About 1.5T. On my laptop alone, I have over 10,000 songs in my iTunes library, 50 audio books,  probably 150 e-books,  and about 50 movies.  I have 3 three  ipod nanos with different content on each. I watch no TV, listen to no radio ( I think I have a portable radio somewhere besides the one in the van)
SO my computer equipment takes a higher priority in my life that in most peoples.
I try to keep it all cleaned up and purring nicely inside and out. I was defragging my laptops 500G hard drive when WONK. The screen went dark and the machine froze.  I felt my stomach churned and I tried to figure out what happened.  It took three days to resurrect the laptop.  Not a hardware problem thankfully but all the system software drivers were toast.  I had to download a 7 Gig system and that takes time over borrowed Wi-Fi connections. Then figure out how to make a boot disk on the old system that was 3 generations of software older than my ruined one.

Pleasure

It wasn’t pretty but I finally got it going, the electronic equivalent of a push start with a cross-wired ignition. Then I took the opportunity to look at some of the stuff I had on the machine that I forgot about.
So, I decided to take a couple of jewels out of this mess and share them with you.  These are just some random samples of stuff on my machine, kind of the dust bunnies of my room.
This is old but it was recently accessed as I was remembering Beatles tunes with a friend. I dug this out and shared it with them and then with another, it was neat to see it again even if you saw it years ago. This was viral before the word viral was defined. It is a YouTube clip of a juggler named Chris Bliss. Chris does stand up for corporate activities and then closes his act with this juggling routine that he does to the Beatles songs Gloden Slumbers/Carry that Weight. Great act with Great music that reminds us that the Beatles were a lot more than the Musac tunes we hear today. Here is your link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8f8drk5Urw

Then there was the chalk. Street Chalk = artists extraordinaire. The depth and aspects of this art is amazing. Here are some examples but a simple Google image search keywords "Street Chalk Art" will keep you gawking for hours. This is all on flat sidewalks, proving perspective is everything. Check out some of the time lapse stuff.





Just amazing stuff I would like to see some of this sometime.



















Then there are the “Demotivator” posters kind of the Opposite of all those “Teamwork”  “Live your dreams”  “Achievement”  “Consistancy” posters that hang in corporate offices everywhere. Again here is a sample just Google “Demotivator Posters” and enjoy a few chuckles.  I have about fifty stored on my machine to help make my point in e-mails and some forums that I post on.

Ahh yes people of Wal-Mart. Google "People of Wal-Mart" click on photos and see what the "not so beautiful" beautiful people are up to. Here is a sample.

And those pics reminded me of my chicken finger sucking,  lip smacking "Slurp Sisters". Well it happened again and I stared at them but they didn't stop making the disgusting slurping sounds. So I moved but I did however, pull out my phone and capture them practicing there eating habits and them exiting. Here they are:

OK I guess this is long enough, I started with computer Jonesing, then reconnected and rediscovered pure gold buried under a ton of data in the mines of my hard disks. So just remember: