Steve Jobs

RIP Steve Jobs: He Let Us Inside the Media
By James Poniewozik
Time magazine


I spend most of any waking weekday inside Steve Jobs' idea.

I wake up to an alarm clock set by my iPhone, which is docked to it. I get up and go for a run, listening to my iPod Nano on shuffle. Back home I get dressed, listening to NPR (iPhone app). Breakfast time and I read the paper, which is not on the doorstep yet but is on my iPad. Walk the kids to school, checking tweets on the way back. Spend the day at my desk, looking into a rectangle with a glowing Apple in back of it. At night, I'm in front of the TV--usually with the iPad on my lap.

That's where I was when Jobs' death came to me as he would have wanted it to: as a news alert on my iPad. I was watching Jeopardy with my kids, and found myself trying to explain why I would be sad about the death of the founder of a giant company, whom I didn't know. So I told them about all the things they use and see every day that came from Jobs: the computers, the touchscreens, the Pixar movies, the computer mouse.

(VIDEO: Jobs' Career In 2 Minutes)

But really what we got from Jobs and his company was an idea: that computers were something that belonged in your life, not in a science lab. That you would want to use them, play with them, touch them, carry them with you. That they were for not just numbers but music, movies, magazines, creation, communication. A lot of people made computers in the past decades, but it was Steve Jobs who understood that he was making media.

And by making devices an extension of ourselves, he helped change our understanding of media; it would no longer be just a system you got information from but a system you contributed information to. As he envisioned them--before the rest of us knew we wanted this--computers were not tools of calculation but of communication.

And that's part of the reason that Jobs' aesthetic sense for Apple--so famously fastidious and demanding--was so key to what he did. The look and feel of Apple products was not just about making them beautiful, or making you feel cool, but about communicating an idea about the world. The borderless touchscreen of my iPhone says that this Star Trek Swiss Army Knife of information in my pocket should become, wholly, whatever I want it to be, with no form factor getting in the way. It should not run Angry Birds, it should become Angry Birds. The slab-of-glass iPad was his last and truest expression of what a computer should be in its ideal form: a window, a pane that you brush against and reach through.

That, as I was trying to explain to my kids, is the reason I felt so deeply sad about a guy who ran some company: because my experience of his products, like I suspect many of yours, was so personal. Yes, it's partly that Macintoshes were the first computers that I ever used in a college computer lab, that I wrote my first newspaper stories on them, played Dark Castle on them, discovered the World Wide Web on them, and edited my kids' baby videos on them. That's personal; that's nostalgia.


But it's also that the things Apple made were expressions of the idea that technology should be an extension of ourselves, that it only matters to the extent that it can add to what we find important and beautiful in life. Which is why I'll spend much of tomorrow, too, inside Steve Jobs' idea: that a computer should be an elegant, simple frame, and we should fill it with the things that matter to us.

I.T. and FRUIT

WELCOME BACK!

Jack-o-lantern

The Irish brought the tradition of the Jack O'Lantern to America. But, the original Jack O'Lantern was not a pumpkin.The Jack O'Lantern legend goes back hundreds of years in Irish History. As the story goes, Stingy Jack was a miserable, old drunk who liked to play tricks on everyone: family, friends, his mother and even the Devil himself. One day, he tricked the Devil into climbing up an apple tree. Once the Devil climbed up the apple tree, Stingy Jack hurriedly placed crosses around the trunk of the tree. The Devil was then unable to get down the tree. Stingy Jack made the Devil promise him not to take his soul when he died. Once the devil promised not to take his soul, Stingy Jack removed the crosses and let the Devil down.

Many years later, when Jack finally died, he went to the pearly gates of Heaven and was told by Saint Peter that he was too mean and too cruel, and had led a miserable and worthless life on earth. He was not allowed to enter heaven. He then went down to Hell and the Devil. The Devil kept his promise and would not allow him to enter Hell. Now Jack was scared and had nowhere to go but to wander about forever in the darkness between heaven and hell. He asked the Devil how he could leave as there was no light. The Devil tossed him an ember from the flames of Hell to help him light his way. Jack placed the ember in a hollowed out Turnip, one of his favorite foods which he always carried around with him whenever he could steal one. For that day onward, Stingy Jack roamed the earth without a resting place, lighting his way as he went with his "Jack O'Lantern".
On all Hallow's eve, the Irish hollowed out Turnips,  potatoes and beets. They placed a light in them to ward off evil spirits and keep Stingy Jack away. These were the original Jack O'Lanterns. In the 1800's a couple of waves of Irish immigrants came to America. The Irish immigrants quickly discovered that Pumpkins were bigger and easier to carve out. So they used pumpkins for Jack O'Lanterns.

 from:http://pumpkinnook.com/facts/jack.htm

SPEED DATING

The origin of speed dating

The concept of speed-dating originated in Los Angeles, California

in 1999. It was invented by a rabbi to help singles in the Jewish

community find a partner. Originally singles were given eight

minutes together, to make an impression before moving on to

the next potential partner. At the end of the rotation they wrote

down who was hot and who was not, and in the case of a good

match contact details were exchanged.

The concept was soon exported, and took off in London in 2000.

The craze soon spread all over the UK, and spawned Speed

Dating Agencies and an Internet Site for finding Mr. or Ms right.

The eight minute limit is supposedly based on science. It is the

time required for our hormones to tell us whether the person

opposite us is a potential mate. In our increasingly busy lives,

where traditional courtship rituals are disappearing this time

limit has now been further reduced to only three minutes, about

the same time it takes us to brush our teeth.

The Big Bang Theory

Leonard and Sheldon are brilliant physicists, the kind of "beautiful minds" that understand how the universe works. But none of that genius helps them interact with people, especially women. All this begins to change when a free-spirited beauty named Penny moves in next door. Sheldon, Leonard's roommate, is quite content spending his nights playing Klingon Boggle with their socially dysfunctional friends, fellow CalTech scientists Wolowitz and Koothrappali. However, Leonard sees in Penny a whole new universe of possibilities... including love.

LOL

What are you doing?
Size ratio was all wrong.
Couldn't visualize it.Needed bigger carbon atoms.
Sure, sure.
How did you get into this place?
Back door has a five-pin tumbler system,single-circuit alarm.
Child's play.
You can start sorting protons and neutrons while I build carbon atoms.
No, I don't think so.
We need to go home now.
But I'm still working.
If you don't come out of there,I'm going to have to drag you out.
You can try, but you'll never catch me.
For God's sake.Sheldon, come here!
Bazinga.

Script

Off with his head

Someone has stolen three of my tarts!
- Did You steal them?
- No, Your Majesty.
- Did You?
- No, Your Majesty.
- Did You steal them?
- No, Your Majesty.
- Did you steal my tart?
- No, Your Majesty ...
It´s cranberry juice.
- I was so hungry! I did not mean to ...
- Off with his head!