Harrison on Important Body Parts

Out of the blue my son Harrison said to me today:
"The most important part of your body is your heart." before I could interject, he added "Oh, and your brain. Your heart and your brain".
I was pretty impressed and interested, as I am with most of my sons non sequiturs, when he gave his explanations for why this is so. "Because your heart keeps you alive, and your brain is what you think with".
I asked him what other parts of him are important and he didn't know. I suggested the lungs, which help you breath, and he agreed.
Then I moved on to the stomach, to help you eat, and he scoffed at me!
"That's not important Dad!"
"It kind of is", I explained, "as you need it to eat".
"Well", he said after a quick ponder of the situation, "then so are teeth".

I agreed.
He agreed
"In fact", he said, "all of you is important".
"What about your little finger?", I rejoindered.
"Nah", he shot back, "not unless you need to pinkie swear".

Its times like these I really enjoy having created this little human being..

Well it is the first of November, and finally I have committed myself to taking up that famous monthly challenge that takes part this time of year.No, I will not be growing a ‘Movember’ style patch of facial hair (I lack the discipline to shave once a month, let alone manscape every day), as i have seen what that can lead to. The monthly challenge I speak of is NaNoWriMo.For those who aren’t in the know, let me explain what it is I am talking about here. I wasn’t just randomly toggling the caps lock up there, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, though it has since moved beyond the national level, which as with many things, was originally confined to the United States, but has failed to reflected its now worldwide appeal (perhaps soon it shall be WoNoWriMo?).NaNoWriMo is basically an Internet challenge taking place throughout November, whereby people try and write a novel of at least 50,000 words in a  thirty day timeframe. If you can manage to do that, you are labelled a ‘winner’: pretty easy hey?I first heard about this a couple of years back through Lifehacker, but each passing year I forgot to start on the appropriate day, and thus never built up the motivation to try and catch up.This year however it has been on my new year’s goal list, and in my Google Calendar, so I was sure not to forget. Also as this year I have fallen behind in some new year’s resolutions, I want this one to be a definite tick off the list of things to do.Rest assured I don’t think I will be writing a novel of any worth as my English skills aren’t really above par, but I think that I should be able to churn out something roughly coherent, and perhaps even entertaining. In the end however, it is probably only my beautiful wife Lizzie who will be subjected to reading it (though i will happily take requests).The best part I can see about NaNoWriMo is that there is a definite timeline involved. I am a man who gladly takes a mile if you offer an inch, so if I am given bounds which are a bit too lenient in scope, I am pretty quick find a comfy spot inside, and procrastinate the day away. However it is the Mo in NaNoWriMo that will hopefully spur me on.Not to mention that I have recently found out about this little gem, which gives you a free paperback copy of your novel, should you complete the challenge. And though I am certain that whatever spew’s forth from my keyboard will be far from a readworthy tome, I can’t help but feel it will be extremely cool to be able to say that I have written a novel, and then casually point it out on my bookshelf.So the ordeal has begun, and at the end of day two i find myself with 4677 words down (and I’m still writing). If I am reasonably confident with anything I write, you may find some excerpts on here for some comment. For the moment however, you might have to make do with the concept front cover I just designed in the last two minutes; enjoy!

Absense

To the few people out there who read my blog, you may have noticed my absence over the past few weeks.
There was recently a bit of a tragedy within my family, or at least our somewhat extended family.
A long time friend of the family, Garry Angus, was found murdered a couple of weeks ago, and I had been struggling  to write much since, as it seemed a hard thing to put down in words.
I have a few drafts I am working soon, as I want to talk about the man, and how his life meant quite a lot too our family, not to mention the experiences we had recently at his funeral, but for now I think I might try and get back on track, and leave this somewhat sad task for another night.
For the  moment however, I would like to share a wonderful photo of Garry and his wife Jenny that my wife found, which I think captures something of the wonderful person Garry was.

R.I.P Garry Angus

Who Ya Gonna Call?

My result of an experiment I did while being the custodian of Modern Vintage with my awesome family (for other members of my awesome family, who were in China). There is supposedly a young boy ghost in the building who plays with these toy cars.
My experiment basically consisted of leaving two cars on the floor, and waiting to see what happened.
Here are the photos I took of my experiment over the course of three weeks:

Original orientation

Week 2, *gasp* one car has moved slightly!

Week 3, if a ghost plays with these toys, he has a limited imagination.

Preliminary conclusion: reality is real, magical beings aren't.
MM

Out with the old license, in with the new...

Well it has been the standard however many years, when VicRoads starts to worry that I might not properly match my old license photo, and order up a new one.

I remember my old license photo day fondly, because my mum had to organise the appointment (due to my slackness), and drove me in at 9am in the morning, on my birthday of all times.

I did not want to be up early on my birthday, especially in my uni days when I rarely saw the morning hours for four of the seven days of the week. But there i was, unshaven, unkempt and uninterested (mum previously had to drag me to VicRoads to make me get my L's a year after most of my mates had).

I don't think I have changed much, perhaps as a reflection of my uni days versus my working life you can see the slightly dazed look being replaced by a somewhat frustrated glare. The black hoodie is replaced by a black work jumper; my wardrobe isn't that extensive in colour or style (this way I can just chuck on any helter skelter combination).
But the glasses are the same, the facial hair is un-manscaped; I still have eyebrows, and maintain the usual, eyes then nose then mouth order of facial features
I will always admire the passionate Austrian Pastafarian who fought for his right to wear his religious headgear in his license photo; in this case it was embodied in the form of a colander (that was of course, after he had passed a doctor's certificate that he was "psychologically fit" to drive).
This license expires in 2014; I will be 30 years old, and my son 8 (my wife a spritely 28). If by the power of the gods I have kept this blog alive, I will keep you updated.

On Anapodotons

My previous post on the phrase “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” got me thinking; when does a saying get so engrained in popular society that we are able to cut off the ‘punchline’ and still get our point across?
You see it all the time; we shorten “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” to a simple “When in Rome..”. I think this one makes sense, as generally it is a prelude to an act preformed as the ‘Romans’ (whoever they might be in this case) would do it.
You’re holding on to a cooked and skewered insect in a Chinese market, and before you pluck up the courage to pop it in your mouth and munch on the tasty exoskeleton, you give the somewhat tentative remark “When in Rome”, then pop it in. Crunch!
It makes sense; if only for dramatic effect.
It can create confusion however, as if we don’t know the origins of the saying, we can’t always apply it correctly; hence the difficulties of a certain Mr Ron Burgundy.
A quick foray into Wikipedia informs me that, as is always the case, there is a name for this kind of thing:

anapodoton [noun] (uncountable)

1. (uncountable, rhetoric) The rhetorical device in which a main clause is implied by a subordinate clause, without mention.

Other examples include: if looks could kill [I’d be a dead man]; if pigs had wings [they could fly]; if the hat fits [wear it]; if the mountain won't come to Muhammad [the mountain shall come to Muhammad]; if the shoe fits [wear it]; when the cat's away [the mice will play]; and where there is a will [there’s a way].

Sometimes we even omit the first part of a saying, like how the often confused saying “If that’s what they think, they have another think coming” is shortened to simply “they have another think coming”. Though more often than not, people think the saying is actually “another thing coming”, because they haven’t learnt it through a shortening of the original saying, but rather some cultural form of Chinese whispers.

It makes me wonder: are there any other sayings out there ripe for anapodotonisation?

Remembering Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has died.

Unfortunately I don’t feel at all qualified to write any form of eulogy on the great man, and I wouldn’t want to give it a try, only to find the resultant piece lacking the gravitas that the man is worthy of.

Instead I would like to share a famous speech he made about some lessons he learned in his life, and how he views things in general. It really is a great read, full of wonderful advice, and I think it gives a great picture of the man.

[Note: I saved this text years back, so I can’t remember the source, but it is out there, circa 2005 I think]

Enjoy!

==================================

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

 - Steve Jobs