Tag Archives: life

Steve Jobs On Life

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Steve Jobs in interview for PBS’ ‘One Last Thing‘ documentary, 1994 (via Wikipedia):

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

I’ve always admired how he pushed the limits. I can’t help but read “… embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it” and think of the “Crazy Ones” ad campaign’s: “because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”.

He was a crazy one.

Gadgets And Work-Life Balance

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On this rainy Saturday I was reading a NY Times article about work-life balance, obviously with my work email open in another tab.

The topic is somewhat interesting considering when I entered the work place it was just a few years into the 24×7 work treadmill that quickly became the new normal. On top of that, supporting a 24x7x365 news site it seems even more natural. In my eyes the days of a 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Monday-Friday job are clearly dead and unlikely to ever return. While my primary task is day-to-day development, I also support the site, meaning when there’s a major news even (planned or unplanned), or a technical problem, that means we’re stepping up. Election nights are planned, shootings, major deaths, etc. are obviously not. Systems fail, things need to be upgraded, scheduling with a 24x7x365 newsroom who needs to always be ready to go is hardly easy. I should note that’s in addition to having a top-notch 24x7x365 operations team a phone call or email away. The repeated use of “24x7x365” is intentional.

Throw in my extensive reading to keep up on things, constant need to hack on things, occasional desire to write about things, and I think I find myself identifying with the people profiled in the article to some small degree. Truthfully I was like this in college already, having a job just replaced the academic part.

On a side-note, while I was reading this article I did a double-take when I saw John Lilly’s name mentioned. I’ve seen his name in the press on many occasions, but never unexpectedly ;-).

Project 365

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For the past week I’ve been participating in Project 365 with Frédéric Wenzel (who was the first I saw to blog the idea) and Mike Morgan among others.

Unlike many who are doing it purely for the love of photography for me it seemed like an interesting way to force myself to either look for something interesting/odd/unique/interesting each day, or to go out and find something that would be worth while. Perhaps walk a slightly different route to work, or just notice what I always overlook in the rush of life.

Unlike many I’m also doing it mostly with my standard issue iPhone 4 vs. a fancy $1,000 camera and several hundred dollars worth of lenses. This adds a pretty interesting challenge (low light is tough) but also makes it a bit more easy to just reach in my pocket when opportunity arises.

Week one is done, week two is now under way. I can’t say for certain I’ll last 365 days (that’s a LOOOONG time), or even finish the month.

I will allow myself to hit the archives of photos I have for some days, though I’ll try not to do that too often. I’ve actually got some pretty interesting things just sitting around that I’ve yet to actually publish. They will just get sprinkled in.

As a bonus, I’ve been using this as an opportunity to learn a bit more about post-processing photos.

They are all published to Flickr and so far to this blog. I’ve yet to decide if I will blog them all or just select ones. If anyone has an opinion let me know.