RiP Mr. Jobs, and thank you

This was the home page on the apple.com site today –

Its title was “t_hero.”
And I concur. Steve Jobs was a hero, one of my heroes.

I bought my first Mac in 1993, I estimate. 18 years ago. It was a PowerBook 180, very fancy. There was an option for the 180C, which had colour, but I couldn’t imagine that colour would ever be useful on a computer so I saved the additional cost and was very happy with my 180. Though I actually made the store take me in the back and open it up – I thought it was a magic box. It was good to see the same components and hard drive company that I knew from PCs.

I’d been working with computers for a while by then – I owned a children’s educational shareware company and a company that taught children in pre-schools how to use computers and that shareware. All on PCs. I was fine with it then because I could build them and configure them and troubleshoot them (and yes, there always was trouble) and I eventually sold the computers loaded with the software to one of the schools I had under contract and focussed more seriously on my homeopathy business.

The PowerBook was for one special piece of software for that business, written by a crazy wonderful guy in California who wrote it only for Macs. Sadly, that guy passed away one year ago, I guess to pave the way for Steve’s arrival in the Cloud.

It was an amazing computer, and I adored it. I was hooked – these Mac things just worked, period, and never was I so productive as when I was working on a Mac.

I was working on a new beautiful black PowerBook Wallstreet G3, and talking on the phone with a patient when I somehow clicked onto the apple.com website and there, for the first time in history, was the new titanium PowerBook G4. It literally took my breath away, and I couldn’t speak. Not good when you’re in consultation with a patient, but I swear I’d never seen anything as beautiful in my life. I still feel that way with my MacBook Pro.

We’ve had clamshell iBooks and a few variants of the iMac and Minis and MacBooks and whatever else, but nothing has enthused me like my MacBook Pro. I have at times felt guilty that the only reason I might spring from bed on a particular day is because I have to do some intensive work on the computer, and I love love love it. It isn’t work – it hasn’t been work since Steven Decker encouraged us to get rid of all of the Windoze-based machines in our lives, clinic, college, office. We recommend the students in our college use Macs. And Rudi and I at this moment are sitting on the couch, me perpendicular to him, both of us on our MacBook Pros. On a good day we might use them from 5-6am (Rudi) until 11-12pm (me on the later end of things). Eighteen hours a day, without a problem, without needing to turn them off at night, re-boot them repeatedly by day… It has been pure pleasure.

And the man most directly responsible has left us. Steven said he had to go to the Cloud ahead of us and that he is in contact via the ethernet with his lieutenants. I trust that. But the overwhelming loss, the gap, the void… I look forward to seeing how it is filled. I know it will be, and so did Steve Jobs.

He said, in his speech at Stanford University in 2005 –

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 doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure 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 and 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 doctors 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 I’m 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 is 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 is 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. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

My gratefuls – That I have had the pleasure to work on Macs. That I have loved Steve Jobs’s keynote presentations where he debuts the new products and his wonderful, “One more thing.” That Steven nudged us to lose the Windoze machines. That I might be around when the new comes unless I am cleared away before that.

One note – friend Brigitte offers, as her comment, the graphic designed by 19-year-old Jonathan Mak Long, which I love:

~ by photokunstler on 7 October 2011.