Jobs the Movie (No, it's not about US unemployment)

The video above is the trailer for the upcoming movie about Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Crew with a large cast (here and here) out of Apple history (Jack Dudman, Mike Markkula, Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Andy Hertzfeld, Gil Amelio, Bill Atkinson, Chris Espinosa, Jeff Raskin, etc.). If you've read Steve Jobs (the book), I think you'll find the movie very interesting, especially after seeing the trailer.

I have written posts about Steve Jobs (here) and hope to do more in the future. And, I can't wait to see the movie.

That's Incredible, Steve!

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs. I had never seen the early Pixar animated films that were done when Jobs took over the company after being fired from Apple. We have been ordering DVDs through Netflix and last night we saw The Incredibles (2004) the sixth film produced by Pixar Animation Studies. Here's my review.

My interest in animation comes from my interest in the computer programs and systems (the RenderMan language and the Reyes rendering architecture, in this case) that were used to create the movie. I'll go into more detail in later posts, but the Incredibles advanced over early animations because there was an all-human cast that required new technology to animate detailed human anatomy, clothing, hair and skin. Skin is a particular problem since it is translucent and required the development of a new technique called subsurface scattering.

The plot of the movie involves the trials of a superhero family who have been essentially put into a witness protection program to hide their powers. The video above (which I think is an out-take since I don't remember it from the movie) shows some of the powers of baby Jack-Jack who is left with a teenage baby sitter (being interviewed by Agent Rick Dicker, who reminded me a little of Richard Nixon in the clip above) while the rest of the family is off fighting the movie's villain, Syndrome. In the end, Jack-Jack does the job for them and the clip above shows some of the powers he used.

The movie starts out a little slowly but is very, very funny. My wife and I both loved it. That's Incredible, Steve!

It Wasn't Made in Uzbekistan

The orignal iPod commercial with Steve Jobs doing the voice over, Propeller Heads "Take California"!

When you took an iPod out of the box it was so beautiful that it seemed to glow, and it made all other music players look as if they had been designed and manufactured in Uzbekistan, Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 393.

I like the original commercial a lot, but there were also the set of iconic commercials, for example:



All this ($75 million first year budget) to revolutionize the music industry! Rip. Mix. Burn.

TECH NOTE: The original iPod used a tiny 1.8" Toshiba hard drive that held five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs). Toshiba was not sure what to do with their innovation but Jon Rubinstein at Apple did. The hard drive was soon to be replaced by flash memory (the current MacBook Pros with the high-resolution retinal display come only with flash memory, no hard drive--good bye hard drive crashes and over-heating)!

A Moment of Silence for Steve Jobs

...lest we forget the startup sounds of the Mac SE.

Steve Jobs: Love and Death

In his 2005 Stanford Commencement address (video above and transcript here), Steve Jobs said that "You've got to find what you love" and "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."

Since 1969, I have worked on every type of computer platform (Supercomputers, mainframes, minicomputers, graphics workstations, IBM PCs, Macintosh, etc.). I must say that the only platform that was fun to work on (rather than just hard work) was Macintosh. What an extraordinary compliment and achievement in a world where everything was supposed to be cool.

A friend of mine who was a graphic artist sent me the following note today:

Reading about Steve Jobs' death tonight I recalled my introduction to Apple, and to the Mac, in your office, circa 1988 - if memory serves, you had set a Mac up for me to play with. After 30 minutes I was dazzled, and I have been ever since. I just wish I'd bought stock. In our household we have 2 laptops, 3 desktops (2 inactive but they're still sitting around) 2 iPhones and several iPods. Just today at work I downloaded an ebook to my Touch. It was so easy.

I'm still in love with the stock (here), the computer, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and future products yet to be invented. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011, RIP.