Former Apple employee, Mike Evangelist (a fitting last name indeed), started a blog to organize his upcoming book on Steve Jobs of Apple Computer. One of the more interesting reads is an entry on demystifying the public perception of Steve Jobs.
Facinating insights for us Steve Jobs fans.
I finally came around to do a quick grep of all the log files since I put up Steve Jobs speech at Stanford. The total tally came only 3,000 shy of 50,000 downloads. Impressive.
Last time I checked, I am still the first site that shows up on Google with a downloadable speech.
Let the inspiration spread.
Just out of curiosity, I pulled the access log from the server to see how many people subscribed to RSS feed to my blog. I was surprised at the result — a whopping 1,400 RSS feeds were served just in the past 4 days alone. I could probably write a shell script to weed out the duplicates to see how many of those feeds are from unique visitors, but I think I am content with just that. I remember pulling the same log and found only 2 feeds a couple of months back.
I hope my thoughts, ideas and day-to-day news are entertaining.
On related news, the Steve Jobs Stanford speech download is still popular. It seems like the downloads have been growing quite rapidly. There are almost 1,000 downloads in the past 4 days. I should do a tally and update the “total downloads” figure on that site. Besides, the page is totally ready for a make-over. Maybe I’ll do that when my homework from SCAD isn’t quite as crazy in a few weeks.
And we thought this day would never come. It’s on DVD!! What were the distributors thinking to even put out a VHS version?
Murdza, our wait is over… The Gospel is spreading…
It was worth the wait, damn it!
Friends and family, you know what to do when the next great American tradition of gift-giving season is around…
There are a few things I can’t stop wondering about Steve Jobs…
1. What kind of car he drives…
2. What kind of cell phone he uses…
3. What kind of PDA he plays with…
4. What kind of mouse he used (before the “Mighty Mouse” )…
Well, today I finally found a site that gave me an insight to SJ Obsession #1. According to an ex-employee, he drives a Mercedes MB SL65, BMW Z8 and some sort of Volvo wagon. And none of his cars has license plates; posts on the site claims that since his license plates kept getting stolen, local law enforcement agencies struck a deal with him…. Nuts.
I am also happy to report that I also got my SJ Obsession #4 resolved. Just driving by his house would be like taking a peek at God’s house… Murdza, I will send you a picture of it if I don’t die snapping a shot of it first… Steve has rights too… So I don’t think I’d be publishing a picture of his house on the Internet for all to see.
Recent rumors of him jumping into the CA governor race is just silly. But I wouldn’t mind helping with his political campaigns if he did run. Seeing how he revived, reinvented Apple and made it relevant again, California sure could use a governor that can pull its current state of financial and educational slump out of the gutter.
At first there was an Internet, then came web pages. Then they evolve to blogs and eventually vlogs. Parallel to that, MP3 songs were blooming, then came iPod. Now the two equally important technologies can be merged to become one. Introducing vodcasting for the masses (by way of iTunes). In the near future, there won’t be much we can’t do with iTunes and our iPod. Unless, of course, Steve Jobs’ world domination plan is stopped before it bears any fruit.
Today I received a surprise present from another enthusiast of Steve Job’s Stanford speech. It’s the back cover of the last issue of the “Whole Earth” magazine Steve Jobs referred to in his speech.
WOW!
I will revamp the speech audio download site soon to include the full size picture of the cover along with other helpful details.
The text is a bit hard to read. It says “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” A special thank you is extended to Dave Williams for sending me this picture.
I was reading an article about biodegradable diapers and bumped into this site: Treehugger. And from there, I saw this eco-friendly online store: Vivavi, and this eco-friendly design school, Ecosa Institute.
There seems to be an increasing number of environmentally conscious population in the United States, especially here in California. When I was back in New York, terms like “organic”, “environmental” and “vegetarian” are associated with Yuppies from the Upper Westside of the town.
In the Bay Area, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are pretty busy places. Steve Jobs is known to frequent Whole Foods since it’s only blocks from Apple’s main campus.
This reminds me of the notion of a “sustainable” business with minimal footprints mentioned by Ray Anderson (his info here and here) in the DVD The Corporation. If CEOs of Fortune 500 companies can think the way he does, the world would be a far better place. It’s rare to see a business with some conscience. Most others do it because of pressure from their customers or regulatory constrains (ahem-GE-ahem). But whatever it takes, it’s a popular thing to do now. So everyone’s doing it.
Since I started talking about diapers, here’s a company a former kozmo.com employee founded in NYC to deliver diapers (and some other stuff) — MaxDelivery.
An article (How Big Can Apple Get?) ran on Fortune Magazine’s Technology section details Steve Jobs’ strategy on what made Apple great… again.
The same issue also ran an article called Our DNA Hasn’t Changed.
It never seizes to amaze me the amount of consumer research Apple does and does it correctly. Many companies pour millions of dollars researching consumer behavior and still get it wrong (ahem, Micro-ahem-soft). Apple made its fair share of mistakes. But it always bounces back and gets stronger.
DrunkenBlog posted a video of Steve Jobs demoing NeXT.
Click to download the video (50MB)
To be frank, NeXT was butt ugly. But some of its technologies and innovations were quite impressive its day. DrunkenBlog posted another article about striking similarities in some of the apps under OSX and NeXT. I guess when being good just wasn’t enough, you just gotta ride on the cool kid to bring out the edge.
Has anyone noticed what was wrong with the video? Somehow Steve just didn’t quite look himself in that grown-up-wannabe attire. Maybe that was why NeXT didn’t do too well — he tried too hard being someone he wasn’t. He’s meant to be a rebel.
Video courtesy of OpenStep.se.
I had planned on going to this commencement this morning. Then I discovered my camcorder’s CCD chip has gone bad and is unable to record (apparently a wide spread problem); I decided it’s not worth my while to go if I can’t record the God of Computer himself (having to deal with traffic, the sun and the crowd). With a bit of luck, I found out that his speech was going to be broadcasted live through Stanford’s very own KZSU 90.1FM. And of course, the station is listed in iTunes under “Radio –> Public”. Bless iTunes.
So I recorded his speech using RadioRecorder.
Download the clip in:
Best sound quality: AAC - 16.8MB for iTunes in MPEG4 encoding
Good sound quality: MP3 - 17.0MB for you poor souls without iTunes
If you appreciate the effort I took to have recorded the audio, polished it, converted it into AAC and MP3 formats and actually made them available to the public, please consider a donation to help offset the cost of the bandwidth I know the audio downloads will sure exceed. Thanks.
Here’s an article about the commencement itself if you are interested.
To further help spread the clip, I also created a page dedicated to the speech so that visitors don’t have to go through my blog unnecessarily.
Enjoy!
UPDATE: It appears that Stanford has released the video version of the speech on its iTunes music store (for free). You can access it through your iTunes application (if you are still not using iTunes, it’s about time to start using it!). Get the speech in video here.
If you don’t see it initially, dig around. It’s there (Stanford -> Heard on Campus -> Visiting Lecturers and Speeches). Al Gore spoke there once. I wonder where THAT speech is… hmm…
