Archive for 四月, 2008
這個小女孩太扯了
Connie Talbot 於英國的節目 Britain's Got Talent (相當於台灣的超級星光大道) 中演唱。
Britain's Got Talent Final
btw, she's just a six-year old little girl.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
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.
RSS & Google Reader 介紹
台灣只要有在寫Blog的人，應該會有很大的一個比例一開始都是在無名。
那個時候的無名還很好，而且更重要的是它有像老鼠會一樣的功能，也就是好友功能，每個人的Blog都可以再連到一堆人的Blog，也讓大家都生根在無名。不過自從它越來越爛之後，一些人就開始搬家了，可能搬到Pixnet(這個好像最多)、天空、樂多、Wordpress、Blogger等等。但是總合來講，我覺得無名的使用者還是很多，因為大家的Blog人際線都還是繫在那邊，大家還是習慣從那邊去看別人的網誌，所以只要一搬家，Blog的人際線很容易就斷了。
也許有人會在搬家前，先留一篇搬家啟事，通知大家自已的新家在哪，一開始可能大家還會去連過去看，但是久了常常就因為麻煩或是懶惰，連過去的次數就變少很多了。
不過呢，現在有一種科技很方便，叫做RSS，大家可以到Wiki看看這個是什麼，簡單而言，他就是可以把網站內容標準化的一個規格，不過網站做的多漂亮或是多醜，輪出的東西都會是一樣的。但是只有RSS的話，其實並沒有人看得懂，我們還需要一個RSS Reader，一個可以方便閱讀他的東西。只要你在RSS Reader裡面，訂閱了某某網站或是Blog的RSS，你就可以不用連過去到該網站，即可閱讀或Update該網站的新資訊，像我這個Blog的RSS就是http://feeds.feedburner.com/itseric。
但是最重要的一點，RSS Reader通常都可以自動通知你，哪些網站有新的資訊出來了。
我覺得這個東西比無名的好友還好用，以前沒有RSS的時候，大家應該都是一個一個Blog去看有沒有新文章，相當浪費時間，但是有了RSS之後，只要一訂閱，就不用再去擔心我是不是沒有Update大家最新的資訊，因為只要一有新文章，RSS Reader就會跟你說，某某網站有新文章，什麼時候發佈的，內容是什麼，全部都可以在RSS Reader裡面看到。當然你也可以選擇透過RSS Reader連回原網站看，用什麼方式來瀏覽由你自已決定。
RSS Reader大略又可以分為兩種，一種是要安裝在電腦裡的程式，一種是建置在網路上的服務，前者的話，包括Firefox的Sage、Mac平台上的NewsFire，後者的話像是Google Reader、Bloglines。我一開始是用Firefox的Sage來閱讀RSS，但是這種安裝在電腦裡面的程式有一種缺點，就是只要一離開你的電腦，就無法再使用了，除非你要在別人的電腦上重新安裝重新設定，所以我後來就投向網路平台的Bloglines。那個時候Bloglines算是一個相當早的RSS服務平台，自2003年就開始運作，而Google直到2005年才推出他們自家的RSS Reader，也就是Google Reader，雖然比較晚推出，一開始的功能也相當陽春，絕對比不上Bloglines，但是Google Reader後來Update越來越好，再加上與Google平台的連結性，我後來就轉往使用Google Reader。
Google Reader帶給我相當多的方便，尤其是為我節省了許多時間，再加上已經不使用無名的我，常常需要從Google Reader這裡Update大家的新資訊(因為還是很多人在無名)，我就不用花多餘的時間去逛無名了。我也相當推薦大家使用Google Reader來訂閱大家的RSS。
如果要使用Google Reader的話，會很難嗎？其實一點都不會。不過要使用此項服務，至少要有Google的帳號，如果沒有的話可以先去申請Google的Gmail，申請完之後就可以使用Google的各項服務了，其中當然包括Google Reader。
在左邊有一個「新增訂閱項目」，按下去之後貼上RSS的網址，新增，就訂閱完畢了，你也可以輸入網站的網址，Google Reader會自行去Seach網站的RSS，但是最精準的方式還是輸入RSS的網址了。
另外如果你是使用Firefox的話，在有提供RSS的網站時，網址列旁邊會有一個類似
的圖示，按下去之後就可以選擇你要使用什麼來訂閱該RSS，其中有一項就是Google Reader，因此也可以透過這樣的方式在Google Reader訂閱RSS。
另外訂閱完成之後，如果你有使用iGoogle的話，可以新增Google Reader的Widget，然後把Google Reader設為首頁，這樣的話只要一開瀏覽器就會知道自已的Google Reader裡面有沒有新文章。當然另外也有一種方式來得知有沒有新文章，就是安裝一種有提醒功能的軟體，像是Google Reader Notifier for Windows、Reader Notifier(for Mac)、或是Firefox的Google Reader Notifier套件，都可以即時通知你現在Google Reader有沒有新文章。
還沒有Google Reader的人快去試試看吧！相信會讓你的數位生活更為方便！
