Quote of the year:
Ten years ago, Britney rang in her 20s by wearing a python to do “I’m A Slave 4 U,” a song about seething party-girl desperation that compares her vagina to a kitty cat; she rings in her 30s with “How I Roll,” a song about seething party-girl desperation that compares her vagina to a kitty cat. If you don’t think that’s artistic integrity, there’s something wrong with you.
Happy 30th birthday Britney Spears: Here’s to 10 more years of pop awesomeness
Danish daily Berlingske posted their top 10 Danish albums of 2011.
They didn’t include Spotify links so I thought I would collect them here:
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” my dad told me once, quoting John Lennon I think. And boy have I been making plans.
A couple of months ago I left my full-time job at Wemind to begin a new career as a freelancer. I did it because I wanted to expand my horizons, try new things, and get inspired by working with new people.
Life as a freelancer was hectic and fun, it was pretty much everything I had hoped for. I met some really interesting people and I got some great challenges. It was busy, too. I had to turn down a few cool projects with people I really wanted to work with because I simply didn’t have enough time to do it all. Pretty great. I thought this was what I really wanted to do.
But being a freelancer also has its limitations, at least the way I did it. I had quite a few smaller projects for several different clients. That’s all good and well but it meant that when the opportunity to begin some really big projects presented itself, I had trouble fitting them into my tight schedule. And that’s exactly what happened. Doing freelance work for Zupa Recommended, I felt like I wanted to focus on the projects there instead of trying to make sense of my overflowing calendar.
So I’ve accepted a job offer as UX & Social Media Consultant at Zupa Recommended.
It’s with some sadness that I leave Wemind behind. (I have been working there 20 hours per week since I started as a freelancer.) I still think Wemind is a great company with a bright future. They will probably be looking for someone to do some UX work in the near future. If they do, I’ll be the first to recommend Wemind as a great place to work.
But at the same time I’m also really excited to begin my new life at Zupa Recommended. I believe that the work I do with social media can be much more effective with the power of a great advertising agency behind it. And I believe that the work an advertising agency does can be greatly improved by a deep understanding of social media. Zupa Recommended has a great list of clients and the expertise to do outstanding projects. I can’t wait to become a part of that.
This is awesome: The Weeknd remixes Lady Gaga.
(Source: disconaivete)
Tyler, The Creator jams “Fish” with BADBADNOTGOOD.
“I never did that shit, I always wanted to do that but I don’t know any musicians. Fuck yeah we’re having a moment!”
People keep writing beautiful, inspiring, heart-warming things about Steve Jobs after his passing. Here are some more links.
Matt Drance compares Steve to Edison, Ford, and Disney:
An era has ended, and we now sit to reflect on our good fortune for having lived in a time when a true giant walked the Earth. I had certainly contemplated his passing many times, but now that it has happened, I am struggling to grasp the concept that Steven Paul Jobs is gone and not coming back.
Tim Berners-Lee writes about using Steve’s tools to invent the World Wide Web, i.e. the Internet as we know it today:
Programming the WorldWideWeb client was remarkably easy on the NeXT. There was already a software module, the Text Object, which was an editable multifont editor. I just had to subclass it to make a hypertext object, and add the internet code. Designing the app’s menus was trivial — just drag and drop with InterfaceBuilder. The code framework of the app was generated automatically. That is a platform: something which allows you to build things which without it would have been possible, but a lot of work.
John Siracusa talks about how Steve Jobs inspired him:
The Macintosh was the first thing in my life that I recognized as being wholly new. Everything I’d seen thus far in my nine years had seemed like it already existed prior to my birth—perhaps like it had always existed. But here was something different, something amazing, and this magazine explained how it had been created by this small group of people.
The implications bloomed in my mind. We aren’t stuck with the things we have now. We can make new things, better things. And it doesn’t take many people to do it.
Michael Sippey spent two minutes onstage at the Worldwide Developer Conference in 2008, presenting the TypePad iPhone app to demonstrate what was possible with the iPhone SDK:
On the Wednesday afternoon before the Monday keynote we were to present in the theater on Apple’s campus to Steve, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller; they’d have the final word on whether we’d make it to the big stage at Moscone. The wait outside the theater was torture, the walk down the aisle was nerve wracking, and the two minute demo we gave went by in a blur. I’m pretty sure I rushed it.
But Steve smiled. He said he liked it, that we had done a great job. And then gave us advice.
Jason Snell reflects on Steve Jobs’ life:
If you made a movie of Steve Jobs’s life (not that one), nobody would believe it. Think of how many amazing creations have come from a Steve Jobs-managed company. The Apple II, the world’s first mass-produced personal computer. The Macintosh, the basis for almost every single personal computer interface on the planet today. Pixar, one of the most successful movie studios of all time. The iPod and iTunes, which transformed the music industry and changed how we listen to music. The iPhone, which upended the stagnant cellphone industry and created the concept of a modern smartphone. And the iPad, which defines a category and pays off the original Mac’s promise of being a “computer for the rest of us.”
Dave Pell writes another insightful essay about the tools Steve built:
I made this on a Mac.
That statement is pretty common these days. But there was a time I would have never imagined creating something on a computer. Sure, I had some friends type up one of my essays or a college application on their parents’ Compaq computer, the glowing green letters clicking across a deep black square. They typed. My words came out of the printer. But it wasn’t creation. It was typing. The actual creation couldn’t be done on such an uninspiring, lifeless machine.
Last, but definitely not least: The hosts at 5by5 remember Steve Jobs.
As the news of Steve Jobs’ death has permeated through the web, lots of people have been writing their memories and goodbyes. I’ve collected some of them here, in random order and without much commentary.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes:
But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 991s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels. […]
Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent.
Lots of people have been posting Jobs’ famous Stanford University commencement speech from 2005. Clint Ecker remembers reading the speech:
When I first read that commencement speech, it knocked me on my ass. I was living in Ohio, working at a job I didn’t find particularly motivating or interesting. I tried to take the essence of that speech to heart and today I’m working for the President of the United States of America, trying in earnest to do what I can to make my country a better place for at least the next four years, if not the next 40.
Steven Frank writes about growing up with (and next to) Apple, and about the tools Steve has created:
I joked to my wife, “what we just did with that video was straight out of an Apple commercial.” That’s the funny thing about Apple commercials, though. They’re not sci-fi pipe dreams selling you a promise of a future that might be. They really built that stuff, and you can do it right now. Steve understood that a computer by itself wasn’t much more exciting than a hammer. Wouldn’t it be great, to borrow his phrase, if that hammer could help you build something world-class without you needing decades of carpentry experience?
Frank Chimero urges us to asses our own lives in the memory of Steve’s:
Today seems to be a suitable day for us all to step back and assess the influence and legacy of the work that we do. Jobs always said he wanted to put a ding in the universe. We don’t have to be quite so ambitious in scale, but it does seem prudent to consider the effect of our work in this larger concept of time. How will our efforts affect people now, and how will the way they change people extend into the future? The sadness you have (if you feel it) is not from a come-back story ending, or the changing of guard at a company, or from a connection to a device you carry with you daily. That sadness is for the loss of a man who unabashedly devoted his life to making things that helped others live well.
Here’s Tim Cook’s email to all Apple employees:
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
Brian Lam regrets being an asshole to Steve:
I was on sabbatical when Jason got his hands on the iPhone prototype.
An hour after the story went live, the phone rang and the number was from Apple HQ. I figured it was someone from the PR team. It was not.
“Hi, this is Steve. I really want my phone back.”
Chris O’Brien discusses why we feel Steve Jobs’ passing so deeply:
He knew us and understood us, it seems, better than we understood ourselves. There may be no better indicator of his grasp of people than the runaway success of his last great product, the iPad. Skeptics could see no reason people would want or need one. Jobs knew better. He oversaw the creation of something graceful and delightful and stunningly simple.
Walt Mossberg remembers the Steve he knew:
After his liver transplant, while he was recuperating at home in Palo Alto, California, Steve invited me over to catch up on industry events that had transpired during his illness. It turned into a three-hour visit, punctuated by a walk to a nearby park that he insisted we take, despite my nervousness about his frail condition.
He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless Reporter Lets Steve Jobs Die on the Sidewalk.”
But he laughed, and refused, and, after a pause, kept heading for the park. We sat on a bench there, talking about life, our families, and our respective illnesses (I had had a heart attack some years earlier). He lectured me about staying healthy. And then we walked back.
Some more links:
Dear Steve,
Thank you for inspiring me. Thank you for building the tools that have enabled me to do my life’s work so far. You didn’t do it alone but you had a vision of how you thought things should be, and you had the courage to go through with it.
You put a human face on technology. Before you, computers were something for geeks, suits and labcoats. Today, the PC is truly personal and the iPhone and iPad show us the way to a digital future which only seemed possible in science fiction.
You inspired me personally. You showed me that we should never settle for mediocre. That we should always challenge the status quo. It’s something I’ve tried my best to live by and which I hope I’ll never forget. I’m crying today.
Here’s a nice little interview with Eric Ries who whote The Lean Startup (Amazon link). Ries’ methodology has helped me a lot lately when it comes to thinking about starting new businesses.
The interview is in two parts, I’ve embedded part 2. Part one is here.
Here are three new (at least to me) mashup albums to sweeten your weekend:
