Source: https://blog.miproconsulting.com/tag/steve-jobs/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 02:27:48+00:00

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Posted April 25, 2014 by Jeff V.
Honestly, I save pages all the time to Pinboard (if you collect pages/links for future reference, let me be the first to say this is worth a one-time fee of $10.37), and it’s been quite some time since I’ve emptied my queue. I’ve scoured the entire internet to bring these to you, which is no small feat. You’re welcome.
Anton Checkov on the 8 qualities of cultured people.
I want this hole to another universe for my son’s bedroom wall.
Steve Jobs’s most inspiring quotes.
Nike has fired its FuelBand team and seems set to exit the wearables market. This is interesting to me for two reasons: (1) the FuelBand was widely met with good reviews, and (2) Tim Cook wears a FuelBand. And he’s on the Nike board. My wildly-speculative guess is that Nike knows something we don’t about, um, a disruption in the wearables space. Just a hunch.
The Crossroads of Should and Must: easily the best thing you’ll read all weekend. I mean it.
Interesting: Sherpa pay on Mt. Everest is $2k-$4K per season, compared to a median income of $540. It’s a good (but obviously insanely dangerous) gig to have, and their lives are insured up to $23K. Talk about endeavoring risk for reward.
Honestly — no kidding here — I love dodgeball. Yes, I know that’a a terribly awkward sentence for a 45-year-old to write. Nevertheless, it’s too bad the game has been demonized to the point of extinction.
I’ve wondered this myself: why is national anthem singing so much better in hockey than other sports?
Posted April 12, 2013 by Jeff V.
It’s that time again, and I’m sorry to do this to you. Not so sorry not to do it, however. Good luck deciphering that ambivalence.
I indeed have an absolute bucketload of tabs open in my browser that I want to share, but that don’t quite warrant their own posts. I’ve done these linkposts before, and it’s time for another one so I can close these tabs and free up gigs (literally) of used memory. It’s all about my system resources, people. Here we go.
Here’s a video of Lionel Messi (the reigning best soccer player in the world) versus a robot goalkeeper. Lots of nerds arguing over this on the internet (nerds arguing? on the internet? no way!) about how this robot works. Regardless of how it operates (my guess is the small camera recognizes the ball’s trajectory, plots the path in some 3D space very rapidly, and moves the robot arm to intercept), it’s amazing. Nevermind the fact that Messi’s first two shots hit the post. We’re one step closer to the Rise of the Machines, folks. Get those canned goods stocked up.
Is your child bored sometimes? Good. They should be allowed to get bored.
Want to get the heebie-jeebies while you read something? No sweat. Check out Nathaniel Rich’s story about deep water divers. Exhilarating.
Consider this a PSA in case you haven’t heard: Google is shutting down its Google Reader (an RSS feed reader) on July 1, which means one of the key Google services I use is going away. I am using both Feedly and Reeder side-by-side to see which one sticks. I am not happy about this, and I know it’s Google’s right to kill their totally free service anytime they want, but I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t make me wary of putting my critical data in a Google app. Example: Google is trying to get people to try its new Google Keep. No thanks — I’ll stick with Evernote, which has this thing called a Sustainable Business Model, so a year from now my notes app will still exist. Not that I’m bitter.
I think Kilian Jornet Burgada is superhuman. If you missed Christopher Solomon’s piece entitled Becoming the All-Terrain Human two weeks ago, don’t miss it this time.
Speaking of superhumans, how much caffeine can you have before winding up in the E.R.?
The spider who couldn’t hide. Funny! Also scary! Mostly scary! But also funny! God I’m anxious about spiders.
Finally, I leave you with How Animals Eat Their Food, far and away the funniest thing on the Internet this week: learn more here.
Posted January 27, 2012 by Jeff V.
Posted December 13, 2011 by Jeff V.
Jobs believed if you build great products and services, the rest will take care of itself and sales will happen organically. Don’t get lazy, don’t forget what got you there.
Posted November 21, 2011 by Jeff V.
“You keep sending FedExs and calling. So let’s end it. What do you want?” Steve said, with his characteristic charm.
He had already hung up.
Forty five minutes later Steve released me. Sitting in my overheated car in the sunny Redwood City parking lot, my head bursting with the remarkable, complex, complete vision of Steve Jobs in my head, I made a commitment.
That’s how I still live today.
Great story that concludes with some very smart advice. Worth your time.
Posted October 7, 2011 by Jeff V.
Our normal Friday feature usually involves a meandering story followed by some links. I’m going to pass on that today to honor the passing of Steve Jobs, who died on Wednesday at 56 years of age. He was a hero to me and many others. He indisputably made the world a better place.
I’m an unapologetic Apple fan, and I have been since I was in middle school. It’s safe to say that were it not for Steve Jobs and the Macintosh, I might never have had my interest in computers kindled to the point where I would make a career out of staring at them. Say what you want about open vs. closed, the secretive culture Jobs built, or Apple’s products: nobody in the history of computing has cared as much about his users’ experience as much as Jobs did. Some would argue that he obsessed on UX to a fault, but standing here looking at Apple — especially the results of Jobs’ second act — those claims ring pretty thin. Even though the word ‘innovation’ is slathered in the cruft of marketing BS, Jobs and Apple actually honored the word in ways that most other companies simply cannot comprehend.
When I learned of his passing, I had just brought my son home from soccer practice and sat down on the couch for a moment with my iPad. Immediately after opening Twitter, I realized what had happened. I had a deep wariness that Jobs wasn’t doing well when I read the announcement that he was stepping down as Apple’s CEO, but I didn’t know the day was so near.
It was hours later when I finally realized that I learned of his passing on a device that he invented, as I’m sure many others did. The closest we had to a modern day Leonardo Da Vinci was gone, lost to cancer, a life cut short.
Before it’s too late, everyone should take a screenshot of Apple’s homepage. It’s a simple picture. A picture entitled, if you dig a little deeper into the filename, t_hero.png.
There’s all the news you could ever bear to read about Jobs’ passing and those who are honoring him all over the web, but I want to call out a few that I find poignant.
First, there’s John Gruber, who met Jobs up close once before Jobs’ final keynote and noticed grass stains on Jobs’ famous New Balance 991s. Why the grass stains? How’d they get there?
Mac app developer Panic says goodbye.
Want heartbreaking? Here’s Steve Jobs himself narrating The Crazy Ones. Gives me chills.
Here’s Neven Mrgan’s retrospective, simply entitled Steve. Don’t miss it.
Wired’s entire homepage is a homage to Steve Jobs. Some amazing, touching quotes there.
Whatever the afterlife may be, it just got a huge upgrade.
Posted September 2, 2011 by Jeff V.
You should never, ever, allow somebody you don’t know to build something for you where your safety is actually up for grabs. Invariably, when you are not looking, they will flub the job just enough to send you to an emergency medical establishment, where their uncles work and will pay them a handsome fee for sending you their way. This is a fact. Every year, the Coalition for People Who Build Unsafe Things for Other People gets together and figures out to what extent their unsafedness should be carried. You don’t read about this, but it’s true.
GUY 1: Okay, this year we need to make people more unsafe with our products and services. I move that we shoot for a quota of a great number of nasty maimings so my uncle Hank will keep making payments on my pet mongoose. I know that’s an ambiguous quota but what am I, a Stanford graduate?
GUY 2: (Reading spreadsheet) In my region, I can see to it that most of what I build is dysfunctional and very unsafe. About eighty percent, maybe.
GUY 3 (arriving late and bleeding profusely): Sorry I’m late, everyone. The plane I flew in on broke into thirds while we were landing, which I found to be rather unsafe, and I was the only one who made it. I would have been a goner, too, if a suitcase didn’t break my fall. Those suitcases are pretty safe.
GUY 2 (angered): Who’s in charge of suitcases?
GUY 2: Sack him. No way a suitcase should get in the way of some good unsafety.
And that’s how the agenda for Unsafe Things comes about every year. No joke.
Years ago, I experienced an Unsafe Product when I had a race mountain bike built for me by a number of the members of the Coalition. Of course, when I asked them to build it for me, I had no idea that they were borderline criminals and had every intention of eventually sending me to an emergency medical establishment in a large jar. But they stuck to their deranged agenda and did their horrid deeds without my knowing, using a mechanical prowess intentionally no greater than that of your average frog.
When I came in to pick up my completed bike, it looked as good and as solid as any other bike. I paid them real cash money, gave things a quick once over, and went on my way.
Two hours later, my good, safe, buddy Jim and I were at a not-so-local mountain bike trail, and I was a little more than excited to be riding my new, soon-to-be-discovered-unsafe race bike. While Jim was getting his bike out of his Amigo (remember those?), I glibly told Jim I was going to take a warm-up spin around the parking lot. I mounted my bike, clipped into the pedals, and began to accelerate down the length of the parking lot. After about five full pedal rotations, the back wheel on my bike, which really isn’t that important if you happen to enjoy having your nose ground down to roughly the width of a business card on the asphalt, decided that it wanted to fall off. So the back wheel did, in fact, fall off, and I was rudely launched over my handlebars onto my two front teeth in front of many, many, onlookers, all of whom had rear tires on their bikes.
Many of these benevolent onlookers rushed to my aid, most of whom were pointing at my clearly unattached back tire and spraying bike lube, olive oil, and many other safe fluids all over it. After ascertaining that I was okay, one onlooker in particular asked me what kind of jerk put my bike together in the first place. I told him the name of the shop that did the assembly, and he laughed a mighty laugh and said, with great conviction, “Those guys over there are a bunch of baboons!” With that, he helped me get my still-unsafe bike back in Jim’s Amigo, and went on his own merry, safe, way.
After that incident, I made it a point to try and find the sources of this growing epidemic of unsafeness. While I cannot identify nearly all of them, I have determined, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it cannot be tamed. Sorry for the disappointing conclusion. This story’s got to end somehow, right?
Here are some links for you to click and enjoy my overdue Steve Jobs-fest, which I know you’ve been anticipating. Dig in.
How Steve Jobs is similar to famed architect Norman Foster.
The Onion on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s new strategic vision: I’m Thinking Printers.
Holding the Door: a story about Steve Jobs, told by an Apple employee. Awesome.
Enjoy the long weekend, everyone.

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