Something you should also read: Poverty Facts and Stats.

I modified and tried to change as many elements as possible. The core code is as is I have done very little to it. I have added more textures and given it a darker feel. This is to reflect the shorter days we will experience. The core change to Yink is attributed to two reasons, 1. is the shift in the direction of Yink (as always : ) 2. is a gift I received which was a beautiful journal type book I received which I haven’t as yet used (silly I know). As for the Autumn Winter edition I hope to change the skin with the season, so its always fresh and new.

I explain a little more than I usually do as I was looking back at my old skins and thinking, ‘oh I don’t have a picture of such and such a skin which I did a while ago’. Which is sad as there has been many skins to this blog. I still had the last two skins saved so I created images of them to keep as a record here, so from oldest to newest:

The Love4U skin, by far my most favourite skin. The large image at the front was changed every month.

Beautify is my last skin before Artist Journal. The day of the week was written in Japenese and French.

Artist Journal my current skin. The style of this was done in a way which later flash sites began to use with real textures and objects before video made it big in flash. It does have some borrowed elements from Beautify. Thanks to Flo for reminding me its good enough isn’t actually good enough!

I still have other parts of the blog to neaten up and finish as is always the case, enjoy : )

Worst part about it was these shirts can be customised to the customers needs. Quite a few of these shirts had been sent to be altered and then shipped out to the customer. Its only when they arrived back saying not what we ordered did we figure out that picture on the website is completely wrong.

What happened next is what interested me. The guys who work on the website even though they knew about this issue over a week ago, couldn’t ‘do anything to fix it’ in a reasonable amount of time. So I was asked to put a block on these shirts via our system. For me it was a case of 30 mins of work. I could have updated the site myself in 5 mins if I had the access.

I went to inform some of the staff in the department. An older lady who has been with the company for many many years nearing her retirement, she had been swapping the shirts for the correct ones.

I said no you guys can’t just swap the shirts, as the orders are coming in for blue shirts.
“No, the customer ordered white shirts.” She said to me.
I corrected her, “No the customer thinks they are ordering white shirts but they are in fact ordering blue shirts”.

I explained that changing the shirts from the actual ordered ruins the stock levels and also its not traceable what actually happened, the system won’t be showing we sent out white shirts but blue shirts. Which is the correct line.

“I just think that’s ludicrous, when we have plenty of white shirts we can send them.” She retaliated.

I explained a little that head office need accountability of each line of shirt so they know how well they are selling and how much profit they are making from it. Also if someone is sending out something else instead of what the system is saying it will throw their profit figures out for styles of shirts.

And then I took a moment as it struck me that if you’re not sending the item the customer wants, you’re not getting any money. Which makes profits per style completely pointless. Its then it struck me how inflexible and stupid the setup and system actually is.

Anyway I put a block on the shirts so they automatically get removed from the website. I have seen them in the past take months to correct very simple issues. However if I had a say, the web team would be the first to go, replacing her with this old lady who actually understands more how systems should be run.

Anyway he had an organizational chart which was covered up. So he started to mention how because of the boss leaving and a new one starting we’re restructuring. It meant that he would answer direct to the new lady boss. The he uncovered more of the chart and it showed my name, but I had a promoted title of supervisor which I don’t currently have.

He congratulated me, I was super ecstatic as it was very kewl news as its been quite a long time coming.

Today I had an ol’ colleague with me and she mentioned an ol’ boss who had lost two of his staff. He struggles to keep his staff as he is a bit too overbearing. And he had been a boss to both of us before. So we wrote an email to a girl who works with him. Obviously it said a few things it shouldn’t have. So we wrote it, changed a few minor things before sending it off.

I got a automated reply back straight away saying the girl is on holiday and its gone to the ol’ boss. Oh fcuk!

A few mins later he sent a very straight email letting us know she wasn’t in and he had got the mail. From the tone of the email it was apparent he was super pissed.

I need to start being much more careful! ;x

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

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.

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 its 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.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Obviously I believe all what I wrote until I actually get one. Then it will be screw you guys, I have a phone that oWn3z which is better than thou. So I can look kewl like this guy in the picture Steve Jobless. Too busy to have a shave cos I’d be checking out all the kewl features of the iPhone, the sexy screen transitions the way the apps load and how I can browse the web and google maps. But more importantly how I can instantly be kewler than you just because I have one of these.

What’s funnier is I saw a girl on youtube using her new 3G iPhone calling up Apple stores around the US asking if they have an iPhone from her iPhone. Just to be put on hold and being told by every store that sorry we either have none, or we have some but judging by the size of the queue we won’t have any spare. All this whilst filming herself. Just to rub it in. To show she has an iPhone and you don’t and none of the stores have any either incase you was thinking of running out and getting one.

I have something which is more eye opening than this. Kewl guy Elton aka http://www.walkingleaf.co.uk has a freaking iPhone. He, as to this date not blogged about it, not made a video of himself pretending to talk into it. Maybe I’m missing the point isn’t the point of getting an iPhone that you at least blog, facebook and youtube yourself with it. Even the jobless guy up there is posing with his.

Its the sort of case whereby you could be in a watch shop and someone mentions ‘time’. It doesn’t matter to you that that they are watches freaking everywhere even a clock next to your face. All time is now irrelevant. You slide out your leather pouch, slide out the iPhone, do the slidey thing on the phone to unlock it, then press the time button, which pops up a clock showing the real time. Then proceed to say the time out loud, whilst smiling and showing the phone to everyone around so loudly and bold so people can say, ‘wow you have an iPhone!’.

"Yes b!tches, I do!".

Thats what having an iPhone is all about trust me! I now these things. I’ve seen it happen.

Wow M$ weren’t joking when they created Windows Live Writer. I read a few people raving about it. Basically its a tool which allows you to write a blog post using a desktop application. The advantage is you can write posts and save them and publish them when you want. It supports the usual images, hyperlinks, videos etc.

The install felt a little longer than it should, but it has a wizard which pulls off a very neat feature. After entering your blog address and user/pass it downloads your theme. Obviously my theme is a custom one and when it takes you into its interface your post is formatted in exactly the way as it would as a published post.

I’m quite impressed! one word of warning though, when its installing make sure you only tick the writer option as it will try to install some other stuff which you may not need.

UPDATE: OK so I got burned by M$ I tried installing WLW on my new pc and it came up with some B$ about updating windows update agent to 5.8.02469. The first thing I do after carrying out a new install is make sure it has the latest service pack which is SP3 now. Then switch off windows update. I tend to work on service packs, I find the PC tends to last longer. Anyway if you get burned by this issue. The file to install is this one go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=91237. Install this, you don’t need to install anything else and then switch off automatic updates. Next you can install writer. I have to admit this has made me a little wary. The guys who made writer have done a good job, they’re just working for the wrong company : )

For the past year really, which is the time I changed my job I’ve been stuck in a little rat race. The rat race as most are familiar with is battling through the morning traffic, trying to make it on time to work. Then try to get noticed for your contribution/effort, for more money/raise better resources/team or working on something more exciting. Then returning trying to skip through traffic like someone who is wearing their new shoes walking along a path which has been, how can I say nicely, pampered by a dogs left overs. Obviously often we step incorrectly and suffer the consequences thankfully they’re only a little delay and not messy.

Truth is whilst we are trying to make our way to and from work, what we are really doing is helping someone else live better. Maybe not from the fumes of our car but by the fuel we put into it.
Esso £5.5bn ($10.89bn May 2008)
Shell £13.9bn ($27.6bn Jan 2008)
That bn mark next to the money is called billion, have you any idea how many zeros that is ?
Its 9 yes nine zeros more. But everyone needs to eat don’t they? except the third world country and well we could use less food we don’t want to get a full stomach now do we.

I actually bought a smaller car, the pleasure of paying so much to go to and from work isn’t the best after taste for the wallet out there.

My morning travel can be up to an hour sometimes a little more. So like always I partly upgraded the sound in the car just so I can listen to funky beats whilst I look out to the beautiful landscape in the morning. I was asked to show the speakers last time, this time I took a pic before I closed the door up. I actually used the ones from the last car, I didn’t sell them with it.

Not a very sexy image but that’s how the inside of my car doors look like.
And the music I listen to you ask?