After we had put the kids to bed, I went out for a long walk. I kept thinking about Steve Jobs, and for a long time it was as though I had just that moment heard the news, like it was a problem I kept staring at in my mind and could not solve.
One of my first thoughts was that we should not mourn his death. Everyone dies. It is unfortunate that someone like him should die at such a young age, when without his disease he might easily have lived another thirty years. But it is no less fair for Steve Jobs to die of cancer than it is for anyone else. We should not mourn him; instead, we should celebrate his life and accomplishments. We should recognize our good fortune to have been able to share in and benefit from his work, and to watch an authentic genius develop his powers in such glorious profusion.
This is all true. Yet even so, I was sobbing. You can't explain sadness, any more than you can do funny by explaining the punch line to a joke. It's a horse, see. It has a long face. No. You must come at it another way.
There is a misconception among people who don't care for Apple products any more than any other computer or electronics gear that people who buy Apple constitute a kind of a cult. We are snowed by good advertising, by the newest shiny plaything. We desire not the thing itself but the logo only; we think that owning these objects with that logo will admit us into the cult, and will apply to us whatever magic we imagine in the advertising.
I hate this kind of thinking. Not because it is aimed at people very like myself, but because I truly don't care about those things. I love Apple for entirely different reasons, and to dismiss Apple as a cult is to deny that the good it represents is possible.
The products are, of course, excellent. They are easy to use. They are free of the hundreds of tiny annoyances that plague other computers. They remove obstacles between me and my work, photos, correspondence, and music. They are built very well, of high quality materials. They look nice; thy are even beautiful. They are durable and require little maintenance. They are full of affordances and opportunities that increase their usefulness. They reward my loyalty by working well together; a new Apple TV is not just useful in itself, it expands the usefulness of my Macbook Pro, my iPhone, and my iPad.
They invite you to create. Edit a film. Record an album. Write a book, and design and print it besides. Take goofy pictures of yourself. Draw a picture.
Yet even defining all of these qualities does not quite get it, the sadness.
It is personal. I of course never met Steve Jobs, and I'm sure I don't know anything about him that he didn't want the public to know. I know him only through the products of his work. But Steve Jobs treated me and everyone else with great generosity and respect. Steve Jobs did not see the public as an ignorant mass to be exploited, as Facebook and Google do. He did not insinuate himself into our lives and then use our dependence to extort us, as the banks, phone carriers, and cable companies all do. He didn't compromise his product to save money, or pander to us, the way the auto makers do. He worked relentlessly to create the best products, and he hoped we would have the sense to buy them. It is capitalism at its simplest and best: sell a great product at a fair price. And it worked so well that the company Steve Jobs created literally from nothing is now the biggest and richest in the world.
Through its products and its own success, and in turn through its transformation of the many industries it touches, Apple has created and delivered the future. Can you name another entity that can do this? Can you name a person, a school, a company, a city, a country whose vision of the future is as optimistic, as credible, or as appealing to you personally as Apple's?
Maybe it is this: I mourn Steve Jobs because he made me believe in the future. It's a future where high quality, powerful tools for expanding man's creativity and knowledge are available to everyone, and are easy enough to learn that anyone can use them. Virtually every field of creative work today uses, and in many cases depends on and could not be imagined without Apple's products. And it's all because Steve Jobs had that vision, and had the will and ability to make it real.
]]>Via TPM.
]]>]]>The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be. My supervisor was friendly, decent, and treated me as an equal. Wal-Mart allowed a liberal dress code. The company explained precisely what it expected from its employees, and adhered to this policy in every detail. I was unfailingly reminded to take paid rest breaks, and was also encouraged to take fully paid time, whenever I felt like it, to study topics such as job safety and customer relations via a series of well-produced interactive courses on computers in a room at the back of the store. Each successfully completed course added an increment to my hourly wage, a policy which Barbara Ehrenreich somehow forgot to mention in her book.
But listen to this:
"I don't think he expected to leave there alive, and were it not for the hasty actions of some of the other people in the sanctuary there may have been more fatalities," Owen said.
The suspect fired three blasts before being subdued by congregants.
Killed was Greg McKendry, 60, a church member who apparently stood in front of the gunman and shielded others from a shotgun blast.
That's an astonishing act of heroism by Mr. McKendry.
]]>]]>Pointing to polls that show Obama leading McCain 94 percent to 6 percent everywhere on the inhabited globe except the United States, where most polls give Obama a narrow one- to three-point lead, the entire world suggested that Americans might not be sufficiently informed about the U.S. election. "Look, this isn't funny," said a world representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "You've got one candidate who has a reasonably sane and comprehensive foreign policy combined with detailed knowledge of American domestic affairs, and another candidate who isn't always sure which country he's talking about and whose domestic policy consists of telling people to stop whining. Why are you even throwing this open to a vote? Are you people out of your minds?"
And a postscript regarding the tone of some of the comments in the Flickr thread: Constructive criticism of the design itself is, of course, OK. Gentle ribbing is OK. Personal insults are just wrong, though. Criticize the design, not the designer; the work, not the person.
Well put, sir.
]]>More at ShaunInman.com, which he has designed into the web design equivalent of a $2500 suit.
Via Jason Santa Maria.
]]>]]>He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as 'pouring money down foreign rat holes', and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.
In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as 'the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress', voted against a supreme court justice because she was 'likely to uphold the homosexual agenda', acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord.
Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I'd stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.
While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at Wall-E were in deep contemplation of a world in peril--and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?
Penny and I saw Wall-E yesterday, and it was wonderful.
]]>I was completely convinced that, when the water pressure had become intolerable, I had firmly uttered the pre-determined code word that would cause it to cease. But my interrogator told me that, rather to his surprise, I had not spoken a word. I had activated the "dead man's handle" that signaled the onset of unconsciousness. So now I have to wonder about the role of false memory and delusion. What I do recall clearly, though, is a hard finger feeling for my solar plexus as the water was being poured. What was that for? "That's to find out if you are trying to cheat, and timing your breathing to the doses. If you try that, we can outsmart you. We have all kinds of enhancements."
Via BB.
]]>But the funny part is looking over the list of the 10 original sponsors. Most of the names are predictable — Brownback and Inhofe, for example — but there are two others whose names stand out: Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho).
Yes, two of the principal sponsors of a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage include one far-right Republican who hired prostitutes and another far-right Republican who was arrested for soliciting gay sex an airport men’s room.
Via TPM.
]]>Is it Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney? Have they found a member of the American administration to take the rap for the disgusting scenes in Abu Ghraib?
Is it Blair, brought to book after the Commons failed to impeach him? Is it Alastair Campbell, unrepentant sexer-up of the dodgy dossier? No, my friends, we are not so lucky. None of the major players is going to be arraigned for the Iraq disaster, and the long arm of the law is instead reaching out - incredibly - for me.
I am informed by my friends in the Metropolitan Police that I am shortly to become the one and only Western politician to be brought to justice for crimes committed in Iraq. My transgression? I have somewhere in my possession a cigar case that once belonged to Tariq Aziz.
Via MeFi.
]]>Look at the iPod. It's not just a device, and never was: it is, broadly, how digital music works. (As an aside, I am always impressed to look back at things Apple does and see what a long view they have. For example, iTunes, the Mac application, was released in January 2001; the first iPod wasn't released until nine months later.) By itself, the iPod would have been problematic, like it was for all the other MP3 players of the day; you'd have to get the music off the CDs, store it on your computer in some way, and handle sync to the device. But at Apple, design is how it works. You're not buying shiny-new-device, for its own sake; you're buying listening-to-digital-music. iPod is actually iTunes + iPod + iTunes Store.
The AppleTV is a platform that has been slower out of the gate, and is still beset by some problems, but that could yet become a success. The platform they're aiming at here is enjoying-digital-video. It's more difficult because movie and TV files are gigantic, even with today's ever bigger and cheaper hard drives, and thus harder to store, download, and transport. But as a way of buying, watching, and storing movies, iTunes + AppleTV + Mac is not such a bad way to go. The only thing keeping me from buying it is price and selection--I get more from my $13.99 Netflix account, in selection and quantity, than I could from iTunes. But they could add movies, get the studios to agree to lower prices (*cough*) or open up the AppleTV--an API that would talk to Netflix or Blockbuster, say--and bring me into the fold.
And now there is MobileMe. Despite its unfortunate branding, this is a much better value than mac.com/dotMac ever was, and a more compelling platform. If you think of it in the terms of its predecessors--it's online access to all your stuff!--it may not seem like a big step up. But if you look at it as a platform, it's a good bit more attractive. It's All-My-Computer-Crap-In-One-Place. With the introduction of two key features, push sync and Exchange support, you now have, on your phone:
All synched automagically. And that's just the AMCCIOP stuff--that's not even counting all the video games and Google maps with GPS and new App Store gewgaws.
With today's new offerings, Apple now has a music platform(iPod/iTunes), a video platform (don't laugh, AppleTV could be big and strong one day!), and an everything-else platform, which is the Mac itself.
And what about the Windows machine at work? You can access your MobileMe apps through Windows Safari (released, what, a year ago?), your documents through MS Office for Mac or Apple's own iWork apps, and now your work email and calendar through your iPhone. The tectonic plates for a work platform are drifting inexorably together.
]]>