Taken at Port de Barcelona

Taken at Royal Albert Hall

Steve Jobs has died. Clearly I didn’t know him personally, but I feel saddened. And it’s not “me” to feel that way for public figures when they pass away, but he was an amazing visionary and, in a way, an inspiration.

Back in 2005, at a commencement address at Stanford University, he shared the philosophy that drove him:

“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”

Truly inspiring words.

Taken at Scarlett Gallery

 

Occasionally in the course of one’s life, there arrives an overriding feeling of helpless futility as the crushing realisation dawns that all our childhood dreams were noting but naïve, unachievable reveries. The hopes, spurred by the innocent  optimism of youth, that life would play its natural, joyful course, filled with smiles and the smells of summer are at once destroyed and one plummets to a deep dank hole of existential despair. These moments happen rarely in one’s life - thankfully a product of the mind’s internal defence, that prevents us from understanding the true helplessness of the human condition. However, these moments can be triggered with no warning: the loss of loved ones, large scale humanitarian tragedy, and project set ups like this one. Four hours in Excel and the setup interface and I am left wondering “where did it all go wrong and will it ever go right again?”

{unknown author}

Taken at Jubilee Gardens

Lately the home button of my iPhone 4 hasn’t worked perfectly. Sometimes it didn’t work at the first try and I had to push it again, harder, to make it work. A bit of a nuisance especially for double-click actions such as accessing iPod controls with the phone locked, or seeing which apps are running. All in all just a nuisance, nothing to lose sleep for though.

However, I went to the Apple Store and one of the guys recommends to restore the software, because what looked like a hardware issue may have well been a software one. So did I. But the software restore didn’t fix the problem. So today I made an appointment at the Genius Bar and after work I went there to see if they could do anything to ease my slight annoyance.

Well, the software was ok and therefore I believe it’s been judged a hardware issue covered under warranty, so to my utter incredulity I ended up getting a replacement for my phone because of that minutia! In just over 15 minutes I entered the shop, spoke to a very competent and kind chap, got a new phone for free, asked a couple of extra things and off I went. Now, if that’s not the best customer care (I’d nearly say customer “over care”) I don’t know what else it could be.

And while I was waiting for my new phone I was contemplating the size and finishings of the Covent Garden store. Boy, that must cost a fortune to run and maintain. But that’s perfectly in line with the top quality (and sense of coolness) you get when you buy an Apple product. Oh yeah, I haven’t been much of a fan boy lately (and I easily coped with a Dell running Windows 7 as my new work setup), but now I’m again a happy, grinning, loyal Apple fan boy. You gotta love this company and their ethos.

I may watch the epic Pirates of Silicon Valley yet again to celebrate that. Or perhaps not, too late.