Posting for Wordless Wednesday
Tag: inspiration
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Main House, Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Republic of Ireland -
His name (Jobs) is listed on the patent for the white power brick used by the MacBook as well as its magnetic connector with its satisfying click.
—steve jobs, by walter isaascson, chapter twenty-six: design principles
My MacBook Air at the AWP Annual Conference in Philadelphia, March 2022
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Self is about a third of the way through Steve Jobs (If anyone is DYING from all the Steve Jobs quotes and hoping she just moves on, the answer is: newp)
At this point, Jobs has been kicked out of Apple, humiliatingly, by the man he helped install, John Sculley. He’s had temper tantrums culminating in “bursting into tears” right there, in the office, in front of his team.
Let me tell ya, the bursting into tears thing is something Jobs does often. He is so temperamental. There will never, ever be anyone who takes his job as seriously as Jobs did. No, it wasn’t just a job, it was a passion. Self does not think it is anything to be ashamed of.
He takes a time-out by going to Europe with his girlfriend. When he returns to the San Francisco Bay Area, his ever-restless mind leads him to place a call to “the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA.”
Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks to nurture an experiment and get a result. “Why don’t you simulate them on a computer?” Jobs asked.
— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter Eighteen: NeXTStay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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From an interview with David Sheff, a writer for Playboy:
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck on those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back . . .
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere.
— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter Seventeen: Icarus
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When Jobs took over the (MAC) Project, he decided to sacrifice portability for a distinctive design that wouldn’t take up much space on a desk. He plopped down a phone book and declared, to the horror of the engineers, that it shouldn’t have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the computer box, with a keyboard that was detachable.
— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter Twelve: The Design -
Andy Hertzfeld on his boss, Steve Jobs:
- The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.
Walter Isaacson:
- To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling.
The thing is, self loathes Trump but understands Jobs. Jobs gave her laptops that traveled with her to Dharamsala, Venice, Pasadena, New York, the Philippines etc It did belly flops on concrete (It was brand new, too! Self thought for sure she’d have to get a new one, but no), got beer spilled on it, got left behind (once) at Shannon Airport in Ireland, got left behind again in Don Salvador Benedicto (Negros Island, central Philippines). The product is not a grift; it delivers. In addition: she can walk into an Apple store anywhere in the world — Paris, London, Dublin — and the staff there will know how to get her the right product to interface with her MacBook so that she is more efficient. This is beautiful. It’s better than a cult.
Walter Isaacson:
- He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something.
- People who ended up not being crushed ended up being stronger . . . In both his personal and his professional life over the years, his inner circle tended to include many more strong people than toadies.
To Steve Jobs, making laptops was an art. He didn’t apply to Stanford because, he said, “The students were not artistic.” He had “a passion for making a great product, not a profitable one.”
Stay tuned.
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Still reading Hunger, Book 2 of The Gone Novels. FAYZ stands for Fallout Alley Youth Zone. It’s the name the kids of Perdido Beach, California have given their little dystopia, where no one is over the age of 15.
Albert: “What you do if you have money, instead of just trading things, is you can have a market where everyone brings what they have to sell, right? All in one place. And everyone is walking around with pieces of gold, not their fish, or a wheelbarrow full of corn or whatever, trying to make deals.”
Quinn: “Either way, I’m standing around with my fish. Either I’m walking around selling them at this market of yours, or I’m standing still and people are coming to me to trade, but either way — “
Albert: “No, man. Because you’re selling fish to someone who sells it to other people. You need to be out fishing, because that’s what you’re good at. Not selling fish. Catching fish.”
— Hunger, p. 238Self: this is good advice for you. Stop sending your work out. Just concentrate on what you’re good at: Writing. Get someone else to do the selling for you. Like an agent. An agent will take care of all the selling.
Stay tuned.
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Self is participating in bushboy’s Last on the Card Challenge.
Her Last on the Card for June 2022 is a real heartbreaker: Roman Ratushny’s obituary in The Economist of 25 June 2022.
A Ukrainian activist, Roman Ratushny volunteered the first day of the Russian invasion. He was killed near Izyum on 9 June. He was 24.
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Self is a lover of gardens. In the past week, she’s visited two local ones: Filoli and Gamble Garden, looking for ideas for drought-resistant plantings.
She loved the planting combination in this flower border.
Posting this for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
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The Merton Borders were sown in November 2011. The purpose was to create a natural plant environment by sowing, directly into the ground, seeds of plants that would not require intensive management (i.e. no artificial irrigation, no fertilizer).
This is how the Merton Borders look today. Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day:
Kanlaon 