Steve Jobs

only what is truly important


Stanford University Quad Sky

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“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”—Steve Jobs – Stanford University Commencement Address, 2005

Jobs gave what is arguably one of the best launch speeches ever in his 2005 commencement address to Stanford University students. Filtered through his own intimate acquaintance with mortality, he boiled it down and handed it on a platter to kids who’d only ever received anything sans much struggle anyway, so it’s doubtful – given their age and relative privilege compared to most – that any of the young adults in attendance that day took Jobs’ words and ran with them. 2005 was still “booming times” with “limitless growth potential”.

And I would guess that anyone who did give his words more than a cursory second thought misapplied the advice in a material Jeffersonian “pursuit of happiness” way that is typical of Americans and those who follow the model. Following one’s heart is not about “happiness”. There are more important things that simply being “happy”.

Happy, like sad, or satiated or angry or blah or anything that a person can feel is transient. It’s like weather. Wait long enough and it will change – for better or worse.

What is truly important boils down to surprisingly little when one is willing to measure it against the finite amount of time we are alloted. Love, giving more than receiving but also not giving just to receive. Knowing our true self well enough to realize that it is the only true north compass we have. Realizing that we are ultimately more than the shells we inhabit and the stuff that supports our shells. Being thankful for everything because the universe didn’t owe us any of our experiences but gave us the opportunities anyway – to learn from or not as we chose.

Mostly though what is important is the fact that we are the authors of our lives. Dramas, romantic comedies, tragedies. We dwell in the narratives we’ve written for ourselves.

iMourn: How Steve Jobs Made Me Love Computers


The Macintosh 128K was the first commercially ...

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I can’t say that my first exposure to the computer found me instantly smitten. I didn’t even know what it was and, looking back, it was amazing that my dirt poor Catholic grade school even had a computer that students were allowed to use. Not that we used it for much. The only thing I can recall doing with it was playing one of the lame original versions of The Oregon Trail. I can’t recall if we were supposed to actually learn something from the experience but, periodically, small groups of us would be sent to the small office behind the main office, where the sacred computer was housed, to “play” this game. Perhaps it was a teamwork thing?

No matter. I didn’t love computers at that point. With their dot matrix print and slower than blobs of spit drying on the pavement processing, they lacked even the basic personality of their fake television and movie counterparts. As far as I was concerned, even that most boring of video games – Pong … or Ping? was more interesting and I use the term “interesting” quite loosely, even for me.

There were computers at university. I have vivid memories of the Math Lab and playing endless rounds of games that were supposed to help me learn algebra. The tutors were so confident when they assigned them to me and so deflated when they realized that they were simply going to have to teach me math the hard way – by actually tutoring me.

I did not learn to love computers then.

My first brush with word processing was on an Apple II during my student teaching at Northwest Junior High in Iowa City. They had a computer lab with computers;  thirty-five of them. Enough to take an entire Language Arts class at once. I would never have such a thing again in twenty years of teaching, by the way, which is more sad than I can tell you.

The program was FredWriter, an open source version of AppleWorks. Already possessing competent typing skills, thanks to dear Sr. Deborah back at Wahlert High School, word processing unleashed me, freeing me from my own bad spelling and typos with the ease of backspacing.

From there it was the Apple IIe and the Macintosh’s.

Not a single teacher at Hoyt Middle School in Des Moines wanted the Mac Classic when we were finally alloted our five. Five. That’s it for a school with close to 700 kids in it and 35+ staff members. The principal had to actually beg people to take one and try it out.

Not me.

“Give my a printer,” I said, “And I’ll figure out how to put it to use.”

Between my Mac and a small writing lab with about 10 IIe’s, I taught every single kid who came through my classroom in the next three years how to use a word processing program. This was years before we had Computer teachers and well before English teachers began to stop regarding spell check as something evil and anti-dictionary.

Sadly, the first computer I owned was an IBM. Apple had a program for teachers to buy computers from them but they wanted over $1000 more than IBM was asking for a similar package. PC’s, I soon discovered, mostly suck. They don’t make sense. They assume that one cares about why they function and the programming that makes the function happen. Which is incorrect. The majority of computer users want the computer to perform. The DOS of it is beside the point

Sometime in the late 90’s, my school district threw over Apple for Dell. And Windows.

And I coped.

Learned just what I had to in order to do the things I wanted and needed to do, and missed Apple and Mac’s.

I didn’t own another Apple product until 2005 when their store arrived at the nearby mega-ish mall. I bought the cheapest computer they had – a cumbersome eMac which, in spite of its ungainly size and retro appearance, did everything a Mac should do. Work. Without my needing to know or care why.

Two iPod’s later – and really, the iPod saved my sanity – I finally had the capital to purchase my beloved MacBook. Sleek. Sure. Friendly. Wonderlicious. If ee cummings had owned one, he’d have written the perfect poem about it. If Hemingway had written on it …. well, okay, he still would have come off as whiny and effeminate, so bad example.

Shakespeare would have rocked the house with a MacBook though, that I am sure of.

When Steve Jobs announced that he was taking another medical leave not long ago, I knew he would die soon. He was lucky to have lasted as long as he did, but it was folly to think that someone with that particular type of cancer can continue to beat the odds forever. The last photos of him on the web clearly showed a man with little time left. And I am not so trite as to believe that even leaving behind the legacy that he has made leaving any easier for him or his family.

But isn’t he lucky to have touched so many lives?

I think so.

Rest in some kind of peace, Steve. And thank you.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

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The Macbook is (almost) Dead


The macbook’s history is a relatively short one. Purchased the day after Black Friday in 2006, it enabled me to go wireless, which ended up really facilitating the courtship of Rob and I after we met in mid-December of the same year. My desktop, also a mac, was inconveniently located in my bedroom. Inconvenient because Dee still slept in my bed and her bedtime was early. I couldn’t be on the computer once she was tucked in for the night.

But now, the macbook is near history. Problems this summer with the blue-tooth led to its being turned off and now it’s developed some sort of corruption that crashes the internet browser every five minutes or so. It roars like a jet plane most of the time due to a fan that rarely stops running.

Sigh.

I guess it is back to PC’s for me. We have a house full of computers – literally – and financially it makes no sense to run over to the Apple Store to replace the macbook.

I will be able to archive files on an external hard drive and transfer them. Which is good. I have way too much writing and three years of photos and music on it. Rob thinks he can wipe it and reprogram it, but there is no guarantee it will fix the issue or that he will have time anytime soon to do this.

“Do you want a new macbook?” he asked. “We could just replace my laptop and use it and the desktop.”

“And the netbook,” I added.

I like macs. User friendly in the extreme as long as nothing ever goes wrong. But when something glitches? Forget it. Steve Jobs has designed them to make it impossible for the ordinary person to identify and fix the issue. There is just no mechanism for diagnostics for the user. The physical make up even is such that a person needs special training and tools just to get into the dangit things.

Much as I would like one of the new desktops. They are too expensive and ultimately they all possess the same fatal flaws that keep user in thrall to the Genius Bar* at the Apple Store.

As long as my writing is saved and re-archived on another machine, it doesn’t matter what the machine is. Computers are computers. Tools to an end.

Alas then poor Macbook, I knew it well, Horatio.

*The Genius Bar is where you take your Apple products to be fixed by in-store techs, who often can do little more than replace or box up your mac to send away to be replaced/repaired. The “genius” part is how no one questions the fact that macs either work great or just intermittently and that by getting a customer in the store periodically, more product can usually be sold to them despite the defective by design nature.