garytouet

So, Steve Jobs is dead.

Why does it bother me? Yes, why do I feel sad? I never met him after all.

I never met him, but I grew years after years a huge respect for him. It started when I first heard of Apple in 2004, I just had bought my beloved blue iPod Mini. I guess it got me hooked. The rest has just been me growing interest in Apple and in its co-founder.

I spent hours of my life using Apple products and it carries on. Every bit of information about Steve that I found, I read, watched or listened to it. On the front page of a newspaper, I always chose to read the article about him instead of the huge one about the catastrophic financial crisis or whatever.

On top of that, I enjoyed each Apple event. Feeling the excitement while watching the stream or following people’s live updates was thrilling. Even though they were over, I downloaded and watched every keynote in the past 4 years just for the sake of it.

But that is not all, I wanted Apple to be part of my future and I was sure this would happen. I believed that I would meet him once. This is one of the things I learned from him: do what you believe in. So I was doing what I thought would lead me to him. My only mistake was thinking that I had the time to. Today I know that this will never happen.

All of this made Steve Jobs become close to me and this is why I care today and why I am sad.

Steve, you are a huge influence.

Goodbye.

Fuck.

He was a great man. Huge source of inspiration. An example for me. He left us way too soon. All my thoughts go to his family, colleagues and friends.

Rest in peace, Steve.

Apple is so far ahead of the competition.

Among all the different rumors about tomorrow’s Apple Keynote, the only one that excites my curiosity is a 3G connection given to the iPod Touch.

I hardly use my phone every month. I always have spare credit. Therefore an iPhone and a plan with voice and SMS do not really matter to me.

But, I must say that a little data plan would make me do the jump. Having all the power of the iPhone (internet + apps), without the less interesting stuff (calls + SMS) would delight me.

Wait and see.

Stags have never be cooler than at 0:23.

Request a CD with all your personal data from Facebook to finally have the most customized coaster you’ve always wished for.

We are excited to announce four new products: the all-new Kindle for only $79, two new touch Kindles – Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G – for $99 and $149, and a new class of Kindle – Kindle Fire – a beautiful full color Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games, web browsing and more, for only $199.

My impatience comes to an end. Amazon finally announced its Kindle Fire. The new lineup is quite confusing, but it is very cheap.

The Kindle Touch is really appealing to me: simple design, touchscreen, awesome e-ink technology, small price.

However, I do not consider the new Kindle Fire for the moment. It is another device with a glowing screen, which my eyes struggle to bear after many hours unfortunately. If I had one, I would use my tablet to read most of the times, probably not books but loads of articles for sure. I would like to do so, but with the peace-of-mind and non-aggressive light given by the book so the Kindle Touch seems to be a better choice.

MG Siegler from Techcrunch writes:

On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles, which will still be very much alive and for sale. And while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will show off the Fire on stage, it won’t be ready to ship until the second week of November, we’ve learned.

Impatient to see what Amazon will come up with.

This is hilarious.

Greg Kumparak writes for Techcrunch:

Netflix made a rather fundamental mistake in launching their new spin-off brand, Qwikster: they didn’t make sure they had the name locked down on all of the big social networks before making the announcement. […] After over a month of silence, Jason’s @Qwikster account sprang back to life just a few hours ago and, likely to Netflix’s horror, has been more active today than it ever was before. Jason keeps touching on the idea of selling the account between poetic bursts like “I’m about to go play soccer n I got stug by a fucken bee” and “I just got scared I went into the shower turned on the water n then stuff started falling I was lik omg wtf lol”

Netflix was probably expecting it could claim the name as the account was inactive, but they should have done it before actually announcing Qwikster…

However, this may get much funnier in a couple of days:

Someone should probably tell Jason that selling Twitter handles is strictly against Twitter’s Terms Of Service, and attempts to do so can quickly result in the banhammer being dropped. Then Qwikster gets their name, free of charge.

Nice.

About Google+, Dan Reimold writes:

I created a profile I must now have floating in cyberspace in at least a dozen slightly different iterations. And I have been on the service here and there, mostly just to see what's what. But as much as I want to really dive into Google+, I admit I am fighting an internal enough-is-enough battle.

If you ask me, I have got enough with Facebook and Twitter. These two capture already too much of my attention for me to bother with a third one.

Interesting article about Professor Dads studies, a parenting expert from New South Wales. According to him, callous or unemotional kids are not able to see the love in their mother’s eyes. This may cause them to be keener to harm other people or to cause disaster.

This obviously leads directly to the psychopath topic:

Studies of adult psychopaths have noted their lack of focus on the eyes of others, and it's associated with two other markers: an inability to recognise fear and a lack of empathy.

However, Professor Dads stresses that:

Dadds is at pains to emphasise that ''psychopathy'' does not mean ''serial killer'' but callous disregard for the feelings of others - they could, as psychologist Robert Hare says in his book Sharks in Suits, find their place as easily in the corporate world as in the criminal.

Who knows how many found their way in the corporate world.

I often close tabs by inadvertence and wish I did not hit ⌘+W so quickly. Fortunately, as you would undo anything in any text editor, ⌘+Z works in Safari and re-open the tab you just closed. Even the buffered state of videos will be restored now with Lion.

Pretty handy and one of the reason why Safari has my preference.

Good leaders make you feel comfortable, confident and give you credit. It is a pleasure to work hard for them in return for some gratitude.

I’m lucky enough to know one of them.

(via Daring Fireball)

Designers don’t smile.

(via @bdc)

Shazam already had a very good service. For those who are not familiar with it, Shazam’s mobile apps solve a recurrent problem. It finally gives us a simple way to find out the name of the sick tune we are listening to and this anywhere. Just scan with your mobile while the song is playing or when you’re friend is singing and find out the name of the track, artist and album.

So Shazam has a brilliant app. It works well. It is technologically advanced, easy-to-use and useful. However, apart from switching from free-to-download to paid apps and advertising in their apps, the team did not have a strong way to make money.

Now they have. They have come up with a smart way to use their technology to appeal to brands and to customers. When watching a videoclip, use Shazam to scan and find out more about the artist’s discography, his concerts, to buy tracks or goodies. The team finally can take advantage of the awesome potential of their apps and when you see how companies or agencies are trying to push real-life hyperlinks such as QR codes to their audience, you see that Shazam now has a gold mine in their hands. Big companies are already lining up to integrate Shazam into their ads.

Good move!

Today Steve Jobs has resigned. We knew it would happen. I knew it as well. It was common sense, so predictable, but never I would have thought this would happen today.

His resignation was inevitable, but it was virtual to me. Steve Jobs had been in charge for so many years that having him as Apple’s CEO felt natural to me. It was the way it was and that was it.

I really like the person. I have been interested in his life and in his success for several years now. He is undoubtedly the CEO I know the most of and the one I am the most amazed by. He is also the one I feel the closest to every day. I love using the products his company makes and he is for many of us a huge inspiration.

I read many articles about this moment. As always, I imagined it would be completely different than how it happened. I was expecting something big and serious, but it surely would not have been the best for Apple’s stock price. I was prepared for a big keynote-like announcement planned weeks before. The day this would happen would be huge and it would be an earthquake. I would fear the death of Apple.

However it did not happen like that at all. I did not feel any sort of switch. Nothing has gone wrong and I am still confident in Apple’s future. This is great news for the company. People have carefully prepared this moment in silence to have the less effect on Apple’s shares and people’s confidence. It has been effective for me.

To conclude, I would like to focus on the fact that Steve Jobs’ resignation means after all that he felt it was the time for him to leave. I would like to keep in mind that beyond Apple’s future, this is mostly one man’s health that is in stake. For this, I wish him all the best and thank him for what he has done.

I really like to listen to graduation speeches. You can feel that something strong is happening. Both the audience and the speaker make this so special. The graduates compose our future leaders, the people who are going to drive our world in the future years. And the speaker is often a well-known figure of the current leading-force of the world. The fact that a member of the current successful generation gives a speech to the future generations is full of sense and makes it so special.

Most of the times, it deals with success and how to achieve it. Every sentence has been prepared and therefore every bit makes sense. This one by J.K. Rowling is a great piece to read or to listen to. I highly recommend it for two reasons:

• Failure is key to J.K. Rowling and I am glad she did not exploit it as the start of its romantic fairy tale. However, she addresses a thoughtful message. Failure is nowhere pleasant as some could try to make you think, but failure inevitably trains you to become successful.
• Rowling cleverly addressed a strong message to the future powerful people of the world.

  Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. (…) The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

On top of that, Rowling uses humor to gives us a bit of envy and joy. For these reasons, her address joins directly my top list of inspirational speeches, still led by Steve Jobs’ Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish address at Stanford (2005).

I’m glad Harvard gives everybody an access to this interesting material, by the way.

Relationships with people are hard to understand, but it seems that building them or establishing contacts is easier for some people than it is for others.

I thought about it recently and I came up with the following.

It is easy to draw a line between two categories of people. The outgoing ones and the reserved ones. I agree things are not black or white, but it is simpler to explain my point.

The difference between the two categories comes from a simple idea, I think. The outgoing ones have a positive affect for everyone by default. They like everyone if you prefer. They then wait until they know the person more to dislike him. I think this is the origin of their ability to chat and to be friendly with everyone.
On the contrary, reserved people have a rather negative or at least neutral affect for people by default. They then wait to know the person to change their affect from neutral to positive. It is therefore harder for them to be outgoing. They will be friendly after a while once their affect has changed whereas the outgoing ones will be friendly at the very beginning.

I agree it maybe answers the questions too simplistically, because other factors such as confidence may have an influence too. However, it points out a rather big difference which is far from being senseless, in my opinion.

If you’ve ever been in Australia and in particular in Sydney you will know exactly what I refer to, if not you’ll understand it pretty quickly.

I’ll make it simple. Going to the cinema in Australia is far from being the popular entrainment I have been used to in France.

What was my surprise when I thought I could go on a Sunday night to watch HP7 at the cinema for a couple of dollars. To be honest, everything is quite expensive in Sydney and I was ready to spend a bit more. I was thinking I could treat myself with a movie this Sunday (we could discuss the fact that going to the cinema should not be a treat but a popular entertainment, but that’s another topic). But imagine my face when I saw that it would cost me $18 to see a film.

€13.6 to see a film, can you believe this? Nothing fancy: plain 2D, no candies, a seat and air-con though.

Following this disappointing experience, the Sydney Morning Herald came up with an interesting article. I encourage you to read it (click the title of this article), but I’ll only quote a few sentences:

(…) the Choice study said that if an Australian family of four visited a multiplex-style cinema they would be $67 poorer after paying $18 each for adult tickets and $15.50 for concessions. A family across the ditch in New Zealand would pay only $33 and a family in the US at a similar cinema would pay $38.40. Throw in a few nibblies and there is not much change out of $100.

Unbelievable, right?

John Lasseter runs Pixar, the famous animation studio. He is at the origins of the world’s first computer animated film: Toy Story.

Every minute of this video is worth watching if you wonder how Pixar works and how many Hawaiian shirts Lasseter owns.