Travel and Positive Living

Quotes on Simple Living and Minimalism

2012-01-22T20:52:00.001+08:00

Here are 10 nice quotes on simple living and minimalism which I got from Ecosalon.

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You know you have reached perfection of design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away. -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. -Socrates

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like. -Will Rogers

If one had taken what is necessary to cover one’s needs and had left the rest to those who are in need, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, no one would be in need. -Saint Basil

There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little. -Jackie French Koller

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. –Confucious

You say, ‘If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied,’ you make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled. -Charles Spurgeon

The intention of voluntary simplicity is not to dogmatically live with less. It’s a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence. -Duane Elgin

If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. -The Dalai Lama

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. -Lao Tzu

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To see the article and for more quotes, here’s the link - http://ecosalon.com/30-best-quotes-on-living-small/.

What we should focus on

2012-01-22T18:29:00.001+08:00

I came across a short Q&A with Carl Richards, author of a book called “The Behavior Gap”, in the Happiness Project blog. Though I’ve never read the book, the blog describes the "behavior gap" as the distance between what we should do and what we actually do.

One section of the book tackles “The Things to Focus on”. And here’s a sketch I found very useful and easy-to-remember. The area where “things that matter” and “things we can control” overlap is where we need to focus on. Th sketch is a great reminder when we start worrying about things we can’t control. :)

My Rosary collection

2012-01-15T23:00:00.000+08:00

I remember a classic story about this person who was reserving a beautiful item for a special occasion. I couldn’t remember anymore what the item was but she was reserving it for some special occasion. Every year, she would take out the item from its beautiful box and tell herself that someday she’s going to use it. Years passed, the person grew old and died, and the item remain unused.

Since I read that story, I’ve embraced the practice never to wait for a special occasion to use something. Case in point, years ago, an ex-boss who’s a Singaporean gifted me with a Montblanc pen. Eversince I got it, I’ve been using it the same way I use a Panda or Zebra pen. Haha…

Anyway, just before the new year, I tried to do some spring cleaning and organization. One of the things I organized is my collection of rosaries and it was perfect timing since one of my New Year’s resolutions is to pray the rosary daily and consistently (ok, I have been inconsistent…cringe). What a shame too if some rosaries never get to be used for praying! Sharing with you my rosary collection:

Crystal rosary from Fatima, Portugal.

Olive Wood Rosary from Israel given by our chaplain.

Hematite Rosary from San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy (where the shrine of St. Pio is).

Amber Rosary from Czestochowa, Poland (where Blessed John Paul was a devotee).

Seed Rosary (not sure what kind of seeds) from the Trappist Monastery in Guimaras.

Silver Rosary from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (where Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married) given by a colleague.

Jobs’ Tears Rosary made by my mom.

Initially, I only know the name of these grass seeds in Pampanggo – they’re called kabigti or cabigti. They are seeds from a type of tall, wild grass (I think this kind of grass is endemic to Asia). As kids, we used these grass seeds as bullets for improvised wooden toy guns with rubber bands as trigger! Thanks to Google, I discovered the grass seeds’ English equivalent. I also learned that Mother Teresa's favorite rosary was made of Jobs’ Tears and she was buried with it.

Gotta go. Time to pray my daily rosary. :)

Are you a satisficer or maximizer when making decisions?

2012-01-12T23:03:00.000+08:00

I read about a concept called “decision quicksand” about a few weeks ago. It’s when you spend an inordinate amount of time and waste energy on decisions that are complicated but unimportant.

The article mentions a book called "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less" by Barry Schwartz which classifies decision makers into 2 categories namely, the satisficer and maximizer.

Satisficers make a decision once their criteria are met. Maximizers want to make the best possible decision – even if their criteria are met, they can’t make a decision until they have considered all other available options.

Studies suggest that satisficers tend to be more happy than maximizers because maximizers end up wasting energy and time researching and studying options, thus, the process becomes exhausting.

After giving it some thought, I could say that I'm generally a satisficer. I'm contented when my set criteria are met. I only become a maximizer when making major decisions in life... and ok, when I am buying gadgets! Haha... At least, I'm far from getting suck into a decision quicksand. Whew!

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

2012-01-10T00:59:00.002+08:00

This is my long overdue final installment on Amazon’s 2011 top bestseller, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
For easier reference, I categorized some of my favorite excerpts from the book.
On Jobs’ view on money:

I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.
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On Jobs’ famous reality distortion field:
Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as Jobs was tactical, marveled at how effective it could be. “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.” When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”
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On how he got people to do what seems impossible:
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”
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On hiring A+ players:
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.”
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On his unparalleled passion on craftmanship:
One of the most extreme—and telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said. “But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.” One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.” Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time.
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On how he wants to conduct product review process:
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
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On his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address (he was supposed to get help from the scriptwriter of “A Few Good Men”, Aaron Sorkin, but Sorkin never got around submitting anything to Jobs so Jobs ended up writing it himself – his first time to write a speech.):
“Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” The first was about dropping out of Reed College. “I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.” The second was about how getting fired from Apple turned out to be good for him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” The students were unusually attentive, despite a plane circling overhead with a banner that exhorted “recycle all e-waste,” and it was his third tale that enthralled them. It was about being diagnosed with cancer and the awareness it brought: Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool 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.
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On why he wanted his biography written (talking to the author, Isaacson):
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.” He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.”
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On market research:
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.
On the intersection of art & science:
Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science.
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On what has driven him:
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.
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On his view about death:
One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”
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I also liked Isaacson’s analysis about Jobs -
He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.
I tremendously enjoyed reading the book – knowing more about Jobs and the stories behind the Apple products we use. I’ll never look at Apple products the same way again.
I also enjoyed Isaacson’s writing so much so that I downloaded his biography of Albert Einstein right after I finished reading Steve Jobs. Now I just have to find the time to read it. :)

The Every Girl's Guide to Life

2012-01-06T23:28:00.005+08:00

In between reading business books and biographies, I have light reads. One of my recent light reads is Maria Menounos’ The Every Girl’s Guide to Life.

The book is a compilation of Menounos’ learnings and tips on various topics such as home, health & well-being, friendships, finance, travel and giving back to society.

Here are some snippets from the book - practical tips and inspiring realizations from Menounos:

When you’re young, hang out with old people. When you’re old, hang out with young people. When you’re in the middle, hang out with both. Have a diverse set of friends from all sorts of backgrounds. They will help you grow.
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Having fewer decorations means less to buy, which means less debt. There’s less to clean, less to get stained or broken, less to replace when styles change, and just less to worry about in general.
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I have a girlfriend who has produced successful films. The problem is that she spent most of her money on high-end shoes, bags, accessories, clothing, and vacations. Today, she rents an apartment and, looking back, wishes she had curbed her spending. If she had, she would own at least one house, if not more. If you haven’t already done so, forget the shoes and start saving your money for a down payment on a piece of property. Real estate is the best investment because it’s real! I don’t care if it’s a house, town house, condo, or one-room studio—just buy a piece of real estate that you can call your own. It’s much better than a closet filled with designer shoes.
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I’d rather you own a house than a closet full of Gucci bags, and I certainly don’t care if a “star” is wearing it, because that doesn’t influence me, either. By the way, most people don’t realize that stars have been mostly loaned those high-end designer items, including shoes, bags, and jewelry. It works out great for these companies because suddenly Jennifer Aniston is wearing it, and then Jennifer Smith from Ohio buys it instead of paying her rent. Be careful! I have so many friends who don’t have a penny in the bank but a closet that looks like they have their own NBC series.
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Life is better when you have things to look forward to and dream about… From renovations to jewelry to cars to purchases of all kinds, you don’t need to have it all now. Leave stuff in life to look forward to and call them future dreams.
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Hire for heart … train for skill. It’s often better to hire someone who may be inexperienced but wants to work hard and learn, rather than someone who has the experience and skills but doesn’t want to work hard and adapt.
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They say people are broken down into one of three parts at work: part of the problem, part of the landscape, or part of the solution. Be the one seeking to create solutions when problems arise. And never shoot down another person’s solution or idea unless you have a better one to offer.

Camera case for your iPhone

2012-01-05T23:03:00.001+08:00

My cassette tape iPhone case has been fooling a lot of my friends but here’s another deceiving iPhone case – one that makes your phone look like a retro camera.

The Gizmon iCA iphone case is a bit bulky but from what I read, it does have some functional features like the lens mount that will allow you to use optional lenses, it has a working shutter button, an optical viewfinder and a tripod mount.

Photo courtesy of Technabob.

Amazon’s Top 10 books in 2011

2012-01-05T21:40:00.001+08:00

Amazon.com recently released its 2011 bestseller books and surprise, surprise, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs came on top considering it was just launched in late October. Wow.

Sharing with you Amazon’s complete list:

“Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson
“Bossypants” by Tina Fey
“A Stolen Life” by Jaycee Dugard
“The Mill River Recluse” by Darcie Chan
“In the Garden of the Beasts” by Erik Larson
“A Dance with Dragons” by George R.R. Martin
“The Paris Wife” by Paula McLain
“The Litigators” by John Grisham
“The Abbey” by Chris Culver
“Inheritance (The Inheritance Cycle)” by Christopher Paolini

Writing New Year’s resolutions

2012-01-01T23:12:00.001+08:00

Nope, I haven’t done my list of resolutions yet. After years of writing New Year’s resolutions, I’ve learned that -

- You can do your resolutions any time of the year.

- It’s better to list down 3 to 5 things that you’ll realistically achieve instead of writing down a long list of items (which may just end up as wishes! Haha…)

- It takes 21 days to form a habit.

And when you think you’re not going anywhere with your resolutions, just remind yourself why you have them in the first place. :)

Happy New Year and have a great year ahead! :)

Lytro Camera

2011-12-30T00:15:00.000+08:00

The Lytro camera, which has tagged as one of the Best Inventions of 2011, looks like will change the way we take pictures.

Unlike regular cameras, the Lytro camera, as its official website says, captures the entire light field - which means all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space! And what does that mean for a photographer? It means that you'll be able to focus and re-focus anywhere in the picture after it has been taken! Wow! And check out the sample photo below - what looks like a very simple camera (I think its only button is the shutter button), is able to beautifully capture water in motion! Amazing!

Lytro is now accepting pre-orders (but delivery within the US only). The products start shipping in early 2012 and your credit card won't be charged until then.

Lytro has 3 colors available. The red unit sells for USD499, has 16gb memory and can save up to 750 pictures. The graphite and electric blue colors sell for USD399, have 8gb memory and can save up to 350 pictures. But before you pre-order, please note that you need a Mac to import and edit photos but you can leave your email address if you want to get notified when Lytro becomes available on Windows.

Can't wait for more product reviews when Lytro starts shipping. For now, I'm putting it tentatively on my 2012 gadget wish, er, watch list. :)

Photos have been taken from Lytro's official website https://www.lytro.com/. For more info, please also check Lytro's website.

My top 5 interesting Christmas gifts

2011-12-29T00:20:00.000+08:00

Sharing with you top 5 interesting items which I either got (for others or for myself) or received last Christmas:

1. Portable iPhone/iPad charger. When your iPhone or iPad's battery power runs out, you can easily plug this in in your device and it will charge your device up to 100%. I'm not sure where this specific model is available but for sure, you can find a similar one at the nearest CDR-King branch.

2. Blender Bottle. Blender because the bottle comes with a wire whisk. You can use it for mixing shakes, salad dressing, etc. It's BPA-free too. What I like most about it though is its wide spout - your hands fit inside so it's so easy to clean. Nice, bright colors too. :) Locally available at Dimensione.

3. Kor bottle. Another beautifully-designed, handy BPA-free bottle. Locally available at Cutting Edge, Greenbelt 5, Makati City.

4. Whistle Key Finder. Just whistle and the keychain will alarm so you can easily find your keys. Very useful except that I still have yet to learn how to whistle! Haha...

5. Tempur Pillow. I know it's pricey but then again, a good night sleep is priceless. There are several pillow designs and sizes depending on your sleeping position and body frame. For this item, I got one to give away (for my mom) and another one for myself. Since I started using it, I noticed that I have deeper sleep and wake up in longer intervals. In fact, there have been nights when I have slept straight until morning! Heaven.... Tempur has a branch at Greenbelt 5, Makati City (beside Fully Booked).

Ok, gotta go. Excited to sleep on my Tempur pillow. :)

Rule #1 in Stock Investing

2011-12-27T21:56:00.001+08:00

As I blogged before, I started getting into stocks last month. So far, I earned 5% from buying and selling a certain company’s shares which I held for a month. Just before Christmas, I bought another company’s shares after hearing some speculations about a pending acquisition, and to date, my gain is 4.94%. I hope the speculations are true though. Haha…

Anyway, for the lack of formal knowledge on stock analysis (I tried to attend a class years ago but dropped out after only 2 sessions because the graphs gave me a headache! Haha…), the only figures I checked for my recent purchases were a stock’s 52-week low and 52-week high and if the current price is close to the low, I bought. But again, since I've no formal knowledge, don’t believe me. This is just something I do so I could say I did some kind of analysis and it’s not mere speculation. Haha…

But since I also want to improve, I asked a friend who’s a finance person to recommend an easy-to-read book and she recommended Phil Town’s Rule#1 (The Simple Strategy for Getting Rich--in Only 15 Minutes a Week!) and I read it over the holidays.

In a nutshell, it shares a strategy which is supposedly practiced by Warren Buffet and teaches a performance evaluation method which the author claims you can do in 15 minutes once a week by inputting key metrics of the stocks you want to monitor in a special calculator. According to the book, “Rule #1 investors don’t do anything they aren’t certain about. No gray areas. It’s either clear and certain they understand the business, or it isn’t.”

My key takeaway from the book is its practical and easy-to-remember formula for stock investing encapsulated in 4Ms:

1. Meaning - Does the business have Meaning to you? To find out what’s meaningful for you, draw 3 circles on a sheet of paper and label them as follows:

Passion – list down the things you love to do or would do if you had the time or the money.

Talent – write everything you’re really good at, whether in a professional or recreational sense.

Money - write down everything that either makes you money or that you spend money on.

This exercise will help you pick companies you can invest in because you understand them more than any other category.

2. Moat - Does the business have a wide Moat? Is the business able to defend itself against attacks by competitors? This will allow you to predict the company’s long-term future.

3. Management - Does the business have great Management?

4. Margin of Safety - Does the business have a big Margin of Safety? Ideally, you’ve to buy cheap so you can sell it later without incurring any loss – even if it was wrong to have purchased the stocks in the first place. (So I guess my simple analysis of 52-week high and 52-week low somehow falls under this, though ideally, you’ve to check a stock’s performance in the last 5-10 years).

The 4M framework suits me although I don’t foresee myself doing the weekly analysis since I would just like to maintain my status as a casual player. The moment stock investing stops being fun, it’s time for me to stop – and that’s my rule #1. :)

Foodtrip: Cerveseria

2011-12-26T21:34:00.002+08:00

I’ve been to Cerveseria twice in the last week for holiday get-togethers with friends. It’s a cozy place for catching up especially the couch area behind the bookshelves.

Here are some of the dishes we tried:

Calamares Salad. I love this salad. I ordered it on my two visits.

Gambas. Lots of yummy garlic too.

Tapas. Perfect with wine or Sangria. Incidentally, Cerveseria offers Wine Buffet for Php600 per head, maximum of 3 hours. We haven’t tried it though since we don’t drink a lot. We just ordered Sangria by the pitcher and wine by the bottle.

Seafood Paella. Yum-yum.

Iberian Chicken. (You can ask the waiter to slice it for you.)

Cuchinillo. So crispy but I had to control myself from eating too much cholesterol. Haha..
And before you leave Cerveseria, look up and check out their wax-covered chandeliers.

Cerveseria is located in Greenbelt 3 (near Café Breton), Makati City. For reservations, you may call +632 7574791.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T17:15:00.001+08:00

Here’s a beautiful message from George Matthew Adams’ The Christmas Heart:

Let us remember that the Christmas heart is a giving heart, a wide open heart that thinks of others first. The birth of the baby Jesus stands as the most significant event in all history, because it has meant the pouring into a sick world the healing medicine of love which has transformed all manner of hearts for almost two thousand years... Underneath all the bulging bundles is this beating Christmas heart.

And here’s one moving story to inspire your spirit:

One stormy night many years ago, an elderly man and his wife entered the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. Trying to get out of the rain, the couple approached the front desk hoping to get some shelter for the night.

"Could you possibly give us a room here?" the husband asked. The clerk, a friendly man with a winning smile, looked at the couple and explained that there were three conventions in town. "All of our rooms are taken," the clerk said. "But I can't send a nice couple like you out into the rain at one o'clock in the morning.

Would you perhaps be willing to sleep in my room? It's not exactly a suite, but it will be good enough to make you folks comfortable for the night."

When the couple declined, the young man pressed on. "Don't worry about me; I'll make out just fine," the clerk told them. So the couple agreed. As he paid his bill the next morning, the elderly man said to the clerk, "You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best hotel in the United States. Maybe someday I'll build one for you."

The clerk looked at them and smiled. The three of them had a good laugh.

As they drove away, the elderly couple agreed that the helpful clerk was indeed exceptional, as finding people who are both friendly and helpful isn't easy.

Two years passed. The clerk had almost forgotten the incident when he received a letter from the old man. It recalled that stormy night and enclosed a round- trip ticket to New York, asking the young man to pay them a visit.

The old man met him in New York. He then pointed to a great new building there, a palace of reddish stone, with turrets and watchtowers thrusting up to the sky. "That," said the older man, "is the hotel I have just built for you to manage. "You must be joking," the young man said. "I can assure you I am not," said the older man, a sly smile playing around his mouth.

The older man's name was William Waldorf Astor, and the magnificent structure was the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The young clerk who became its first manager was George C. Boldt. This young clerk never foresaw the turn of events that would lead him to become the manager of one of the world's most glamorous hotels.

Have a wonderful Christmas!

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

2011-12-16T22:24:00.001+08:00

I finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson about 3 weeks ago. There are so many things to write about but I just don't have the time to organize my thoughts yet. But hopefully, I'll have some time over the holidays.

Anyway, one of the goosebump-triggering stories in the book involve Steve Jobs' dad and his long-lost sister, Mona Simpson. Steve and Mona finally met each other when Mona was 25 and they hit it off. Eventually, Mona was able to trace their father and invited Steve to go with her to meet him. Steve didn't want to have anything to do with their father anymore so he declined and just asked Mona not to mention about him to the father.

So Mona went to Sacramento alone to meet their father. During their conversation, at one point, their father mentioned to her that she had an older brother. Mona asked what happened to the brother. The dad just replied that the baby is gone and that they'll never see him again. Since Mona gave her word to Steve, she kept mum about Steve.

Later on, the dad started describing the previous restaurants he had run. He said that there had been nicer and fancier restaurants before the Sacramento restaurant they were then sitting in. He said that he wished she could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. “That was a wonderful place,” he said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs.” He also added, “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy, and a big tipper,” her father added.

When Mona told Steve about it, Steve remembered the Mediterranean restaurant and the Syrian owner. He even recalled meeting the Syrian owner and shaking hands with him! But neither of them knew they were father and son! And we thought such scenes only happen in movies. Unfortunately, unlike in movies, theirs never had a happy ending. Steve didn't have any interest in meeting the dad.

Anyway, a friend mentioned to me that Mona gave a very touching eulogy for Steve Jobs and also described Steve's last moments so I dug up the transcript. Here it goes:

***********

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs by Mona Simpson

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

****************

Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1988, she has held the Sadie Samuelson Levy Chair in Languages and Literature at Bard College. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16, 2011, at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

Foodtrip: Ukkokei, Persia Grill, Sweet Bella & Relish

2011-12-16T21:15:00.001+08:00

Here are some of my recent food discoveries:

Ukkokei Japanese Restaurant. I’ve been hearing that Ukkokei serves the best ramen. We went there about a month ago but it was closed for renovation. Recently, we dropped by again and luckily, they’ve reopened. :)

This is what I ordered - Butter Corn Miso Ramen. Yum-yum. I actually forgot what it was called so I had to look it up through Google and while reading some blogs, I discovered some interesting things about Ukkokei. Its ramen is not available for take-out, there’s a “no sharing” policy for ramen (even if their bowl servings are big) and the restaurant doesn’t serve dessert. Obviously, I didn’t consider sharing my bowl of ramen! Haha…

Ukkokei Japanese Restaurant is located at J822 A. Arnaiz Ave. (formerly Pasay Road) in Makati City.

*****

Persia Grill. I love Mediterranean food. It’s what I consider my comfort food (in addition to Vietnamese food). So we tried this restaurant called Persia Grill just across Greenbelt 5 one lunchtime.

I ordered Beef Biryani with Basmati Rice, one of their bestsellers. I love Basmati rice. Finished all of it. Clean plate (again). The dishwasher must have been very happy. Haha… I also ordered Baklava for dessert. Super yummy!

Persia Grill is located along Legaspi Street – across Greenbelt 5(near the corner of Dela Rosa St.). But I think it also has branches in other parts of Metro Manila.

*****

Sweet Bella. We spotted this dessert place after dining at L’Entrecote in Burgos Circle.

We got two of its bestsellers - Sweet Bella’s Pearl Cake which is Pink Guava Mousse with Guimaras Mango (the one in the photo) and Chocolata. Both yummy! Who would ever think of making a cake out of guava? The macarons are also good. Got the lemon macarons.

Sweet Bella is located at Burgos Circle, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City.

******

Relish. I’ve been here a couple of times already and it’s usually full. There was one evening when we walked in but couldn’t get a table, so make sure you make reservations if you plan to dine at Relish.

Its Artichoke Dip (with Tostitos) is one of the best dips I’ve ever tasted. I wonder if they sell it by the bottle. Maybe I should ask next time.

Decadent Mac and Cheese. It’s the richest, cheesiest and as its name says, the most sinful macaroni! Yum-yum!

Relish is located at the G/F Ponte Salcedo Bldg., Valero St., Salcedo Village, Makati City. To make reservations, you may call (02) 519-3543.

My latest paintings

2011-12-15T23:39:00.002+08:00

I've been busy going to get-togethers, Christmas shopping (still not done yet!) and painting! A cousin ordered a painting which she'll give as a Christmas gift so I had to finish it soon. Instead of doing one big painting, I did a series of 4 paintings so the recipient can either arrange them vertically, horizontally or in fours. I intended to take photos of the different stages of work-in progress so I can see how the work evolved but unfortunately, I forgot. But here's one work-in progress photo after 4 or 5 layers of paint.

And here are the final artworks - still untitled though. I used the same color scheme for all 4 paintings but each has a different texture. All are acrylic on canvass, size 12"x12".

Just realized, for the whole year of 2011, this series is the only one I painted. I hope I'll have more time to paint next year. :)

Point & Shoot vs DSLR Cameras

2011-12-06T23:04:00.000+08:00

Here's a nice quote from an award-winning photojournalist:

"A point-and-shoot in your hands is worth more than the perfect DSLR in your bag." -Seamus Murphy

I couldn't agree more. I love point-and-shoot cameras since you could easily bring one in your bag everyday and they can even fit inside your pocket. These days, a good camera phone can even replace a point-and-shoot. So if you're thinking of getting a DSLR, better invest first in a good point-and-shoot because you'll be using that more often than a DSLR.

As an old adage goes "the best camera is the one you have with you at the time" which probably inspired the book "The Best Camera is that one that's with You", a compilation of photographs taken with an iPhone by Chase Jarvis. If I may tweak this a little bit more, I would say that the best camera investment is the camera that you'll use MOST of the time. :)

Duman Festival

2011-12-04T13:46:00.001+08:00

The annual Duman Festival in my parents’ hometown, Sta. Rita, Pampanga, was held yesterday. It is held every first Saturday of December. We didn’t realize it was on its tenth year already until my cousins and I saw one of the festival streamers.

Duman is a type of sticky rice that is endemic to Sta. Rita, Pampanga, which can only be harvested around November when the air is cool. It is said that for every hectare, a farmer can only produce a maximum of 30 cavans of duman (versus 300 cavans if a farmer were to produce regular rice). That’s why the duman’s price is really steep – Php2,500 per pati (not sure what is its kilogram equivalent but my mom said 1 pati is more than a kilo but less than 2 kilos). Duman is best eaten with hot chocolate made from real cacao and carabao’s milk. Super yummy! It’s something I look forward to for breakfast in Pampanga during December.

During the Duman Festival, there are several food stalls selling Pampanggo dishes and delicacies. Here are some:

Adobong Balut. I order this every year. Yum-yum. I didn’t spot Adobong Tugak (Frogs) though this year. I had that too last year. :)

Pork Humba.

Biringhe (savory sticky rice cooked with coconut milk and chicken, topped with boiled quail eggs and raisins).

Haleyang Ube (purple yam). Other options for dessert – bibingka, suman, puto bumbong, pastillas made from carabao’s milk, turrones de casuy, etc. Ok, I had several for dessert. This year, I especially liked the flavored suman with macapuno (glazed coconut meat) and mais (corn).

The highlight of Duman Festival is a cultural and musical show from the talented Arti Sta. Rita group. They give a great show every year and it’s for free. :)

Foodtrip: Romulo Café

2011-12-04T11:35:00.001+08:00

My friends and I recently tried the newly-opened Romulo Café along Jupiter St. It’s a restaurant put up by one of the grandchildren of ex-Philippine President Carlos P. Romulo. The place has stylish interiors and is decorated with black & white photos of the late president with dignitaries. Gives you a little glimpse of Philippine history.

Here are some of the dishes we tried on our first foodtrip to Romulo Café:

Cool as Cucumber - Fresh Lime, Cucumber and Mint leaves. So refreshing!

Pomelo Salad with Kesong Puti.

Sinigang na Salmon sa Miso.

Tuyo Rice. Not salty – just right.

Boneless Crispy Binagoongan. But we had the bagoong (fish paste) served separately since one of my friends was allergic to bagoong.

Flying Tilapia.

Suman sa latik (the dark thing at the bottom of the shot glass is the latik).

Everything was yummy! I’ve heard that the Kare-Kare and the Tocino del Cielo are also good. Something to look forward to next time.

Romulo Café is located at 148 Jupiter Street, Bel-air
Makati City. For reservations, you may call 822-0286. It’s open
from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 to 11 p.m. daily.

Just upgraded to a MacBook Pro

2011-12-02T22:05:00.001+08:00

Just recently traded-in my old Macbook for a MacBook Pro. The A Shop along Ayala Ave. corner Rufino St. accepts trade-in. Yipeee!

Loving everything about it. Bigger memory, faster processing and more applications to explore. So far, the only hitch I encountered was that the first time I plugged in using a Smart Bro dongle, it couldn't get signal even if the light was green. I googled for "No Smart Bro signal in MacBook Pro" and luckily I stumbled upon several discussions. The solution which worked for me was booting up the Mac while pressing 3 + 2. I really don't understand its significance but it's something like it allows you to boot 32-bit kernel if your unit is 64-bit kernel. After you boot pressing 3+2, and you plug in your Smart Bro dongle, the signal bar should appear shortly.

Just in case you want to inquire about the trade-in program, you may call the A Shop at +6328128682. I also noticed that A Shop's prices are lower than Power Mac Center's in Greenbelt (and they give 5% discount for cash purchases). Worth checking out if you're planning to buy Apple products. :) The A Shop Store is located at the Ground Floor of Security Land Building, 6797 Ayala Ave. cor Rufino St., Makati City. It is open only on weekdays though from 830am-630pm.

Text-to-speech feature of Kindle

2011-12-02T20:39:00.000+08:00

All the books I've bought on my kindle are e-books. But recently, while on a long trip, I tried its text-to-speech feature. To activate and deactivate the feature, you just have to press the shift key + SYM. The quality isn't at par with audiobooks where you could feel the emotion of the narrator but good enough for listening. It's one great feature to have especially when your driving and stuck in traffic.:)

Pop Art Accessories for the iPhone

2011-11-28T21:32:00.001+08:00

I don’t normally buy phone accessories but here are 2 accessories which I couldn’t resist buying.

A cassette tape iPhone case. So cute. Spotted it in a Christmas bazaar in Rockwell a few weekends ago. It’s available in white, brown and pink for Php250. And guess what? It came with the traditional transparent plastic cassette tape case. A case within a case. Haha… The only setback is it doesn’t have an opening for the charger port so you have to remove the case when you charge or sync, but the case comes off easily so it’s not really a big deal.

Native Union Moshi Moshi Retro Handset Pop Phone. It’s the coolest handset ever. I tried the demo unit and made a call to a friend to check the quality of the reception and it’s so crisp and clear. Better than regular mobile phone headsets.

It’s available in several colors – navy blue, aqua blue, lime green, pink, yellow, etc. but I still think nothing beats the classic black and red handsets. I got the red one. :)

Locally, the Moshi Moshi Retro Handset Pop Phone is available in Dimensione for Php1,875. A bit steep but worth it for me because I usually get a headache from prolonged mobile phone calls.

The handset is also compatible with the iPad and laptops if you want a handset when you use Skype or VOIP applications.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid #6: Cabin Fever

2011-11-25T21:16:00.003+08:00

The latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book just got released this month. I finished reading it in one sitting and I loved it. For me, this is the second best book (next to the red book, the original Diary of a Wimpy Kid).

The timing is perfect – Thanksgiving to Christmas. And there are a lot of snippets which would remind you about your own childhood ways during Christmas.

For example as kids, didn’t we try to be more well-behaved towards Christmas hoping that our naughty acts from the previous months will be overwritten and forgotten, of course, with the end goal of getting a nice gift from Santa?! Haha… But after Christmas, when you compare gifts with friends and cousins, chances are, you discover that there’s someone naughtier who actually got a nicer gift than you! Tsk…tsk…

Or when gifts start piling up under the Christmas Tree and you couldn’t hold off your excitement, you wait for the right timing when you can all be by yourself so you can carefully peel off the tape from your gifts and see what’s inside. :)

Below is a funny excerpt from the book reflecting a sentiment of Greg Heffley about people whose birthdays fall near Christmas:

I’m just glad that my birthday’s a few months away from Christmas so I get separate gifts for BOTH. I feel bad for people who have their birthday right around the holidays, because it gets lumped together with Christmas and they end up getting cheated out of a gift.
It’s not fair, but I guess it’s been happening for thousands of years.

Haha…sounds funny but valid. I sometimes hear the same sentiment even from adults.

Lastly, what’s nice about Cabin Fever is it also illustrates our childhood fears. Like as kids, when we did something bad, we worry that it might pass off as a crime and the police might actually arrest us if they find out about it. Our imagination runs wild. Every little bad thing during our childhood does get magnified as if it were the end of the world. Get a copy of Cabin Fever to find out Heffley’s episode on this. Hilarious. :)

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

2011-11-22T23:46:00.000+08:00

I’m a big fan of Steve Jobs. When Icon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, came out in 2005, I got a copy – even if it was an unauthorized biography.

Last week, I downloaded the kindle edition of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson – the authorized biography. It’s USD11.99 for the kindle version vs USD35 for the hard cover. (But I noticed today that Amazon.com marked down the hard covers to USD17.88. Nice.)

Anyway, as a background, the author, Isaacson, is a former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time Magazine. He has also written biographies of Eintein, Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger. Whoa...

How did the book come about?  It was Jobs who asked Isaacson to write his biography. He persistently asked Isaacson since 2004 but Isaacson kept on deflecting  his suggestion until Jobs’ wife called Isaacson in 2009 to tell him that if he were going to write the biography, he has to do it now because Jobs was sick.

Jobs gave Isaacson full control over the book and waived his right to see it in advance. His only involvement was choosing the cover art. (Very consistently Jobs til the end.)

Anyway, I’ve just read about a fifth of the book and it’s hard to put it down.  Here are some interesting tidbits which I don’t remember reading from iCon (btw, I love Steve Wozniak too):

- Jobs and Wozniak created a thing called Blue Box which enables you to call long distance and overseas calls for free. They used if for fun and pranks. The most daring was when they called the Vatican and Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope!

- One time, Jobs needed to raise funds to buy a car.  He and Wozniak looked at help-wanted postings in a school bulletin board and discovered that the Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking college students who could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. For $3 an hour, Jobs, Wozniak, and Jobs’ gf wore costumes to play Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit!

- When Jobs proposed to Wozniak that they put up their own company and sell Wozniak’s new computer design, Wozniak felt that he had to offer it first to HP (his employer).   He demonstrated the new computer model to his managers in 1976 and though the senior executive at the meeting was impressed, and seemed torn, he said it was not something HP could develop. (Too bad for HP!)

- When Jobs and Wozniak formed the Apple partnership, they were actually 3, the third was a guy named Wayne. They split the ownership 45-45-10. But 11 days after they signed the partnership papers, Wayne got cold feet and withdrew since it was a partnership (not a corporation) and they will be personally liable to creditors should the business go bad.   Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010, it would have been worth approximately $2.6 billion! Instead, in 2010, he was living alone in a small home in Nevada, where he played penny slot machines and lived off his social security check. But what’s admirable about Wayne is he had no regrets. He said “I made the best decision for me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride.”

More interesting snippets next time.:)