This icon is too horsey

This icon is too horsey

There used to be a weekly meeting with Steve Jobs to go over user interfaces and workflows for macOS. He would get together with the higher ups as well as members of the Human Interface team. Sometimes first level managers would be there or individual engineers might be there to run a demo or answer questions. They were held in a room called Diplomacy on the Infinite Loop campus and typically ran for many hours.

After this meeting, there would be a “debriefing” where one or more of the attendees of that meeting would report to the underlings. Sometimes that included people like me.

That’s the backstory to what’s actually a very short anecdote. What was fun about these debriefings is that they were like a game of telephone.

  1. Steve might say something in the weekly meeting
  2. Someone would jot down what they think he said
  3. The notes might get
… READ THE REST
Nose hair trimmer for the apocalypse

Nose hair trimmer for the apocalypse

Just because it doesn’t have a keyboard, display, touchscreen, or run software doesn’t mean it’s not technology.

Like me, you have probably assembled a stash of items for the coming apocalypse. But in our modern age, everything needs batteries and that just won’t do. So in case you’re missing a nose hair trimmer in your emergency suitcase, here’s one for you.

It’s called the Groom Mate Platinum XLand has the following features:

  • The manufacturer only makes nose hair trimmers. Really.
  • It’s called Platinum XL there is no Gold or Silver and no sizes other than XL. I guess they feel like everyone has big noses.
  • It requires no batteries. Apocalypse points!
  • It’s an excellent conversation piece if you set it pretty much anywhere.
  • It trims nose hairs effectively if you follow the instructions of Amazon reviewer Scott McDonald: “Insert. QUICKLY Twist-Twist-Twist-Twist. Remove” 
  • It rips nose hairs out by the
… READ THE REST
My first experience with a computer

My first experience with a computer

My school district offered interesting summer courses ranging from pottery to magic to computer programming. I never took pottery but I took the other two.

The summer before kindergarten I signed up for the computer programming class. Everyone was within a few years of my age so it wasn’t like I was some crazy prodigy or something.

Turns out we only had one computer (a mainframe), a keypunch, a punchcard reader, and a printer. I didn’t know what to expect so it all seemed pretty cool to me.

We learned BASIC and set to work on writing a short program. I decided I wanted to ask the computer for the size of a baseball field and have it print out the answer. I showed my program to the teacher and he told me I needed to add a line of code to print out the answer.

I was deflated. The … READ THE REST

Project Papercut

Project Papercut

You may be familiar with the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” or variations on that. You may not know that it has a gruesome origin.

Lingchi (Chinese: 凌遲), translated variously as the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, and also known as death by a thousand cuts, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly 900 CE until it was banned in 1905

Lingchi—Wikipedia

The modern version is sometimes called “death by a thousand papercuts” and does not result in actual death but perhaps the death of a product or company.

I couldn’t find agreement on what the phrase means in modern times, so here’s my version.

Let’s say you have a product and you are putting out new versions every year. Issues get reported and are prioritized. For obvious reasons, the most serious issues are more likely to … READ THE REST

I am Beaker!

I am Beaker!

While this is one of my favorite Apple stories, it’s probably one of those “you had to be there” kind of things. Anyways, here goes.

Our senior VP at the time this happened was Bertrand Serlet. His hair could be quite spikey and windswept. Combined with the fact that he was tall and thin led to the inevitable comparison to Beaker from The Muppets.

  • Bertrand. Oh wait, no. Beaker.
  • Bertrand.

At Apple we had a server where everyone had a “user picture” stored. When you received an email from someone, it would look for a picture on that server and if it was there, it would display it in the upper right corner of the email. Very cool.

One of the people who had access to this server decided to play a practical joke and replace Bertrand’s picture, which indicated that he may have been a member of Duran Duran. … READ THE REST

Steve Jobs as a cockatiel

Steve Jobs as a cockatiel

I’m sure I’m not the only one that has wondered what Steve Jobs would have looked if he had been a cockatiel. I was recently looking at my favorite sticker pack, called Coco Bird Emoji Stickers. I found this emoji.

Steve Jobs the cockatiel about to unveil the iPhone 4

I shared this emoji with friends and they all agreed that if he were a cockatiel, he would probably look like this. My good friend Kris Shamloo (probably a made up name) doctored the emoji using his iPad Pro and Apple Pencil (product plug).

Steve Jobs announcing Mac OS X Jagwire.

I realized the original emoji was naked and blind so this updated version was much nicer.

Hopefully at least 3 or 4 people have now had their curiosities satisfied and everyone else has been scared away from this site forever.

Update

Steve Jobs cockatiel (aka Steve Jobsatiel) now … READ THE REST

Shareholders vs employees

Shareholders vs employees

Many large companies with excess cash do share buybacks or offer a dividend. Both of these are intended to benefit shareholders. However, the waters are muddied in that some employees are also shareholders.

Let’s look at the numbers for Apple.

Cook said that Apple had returned $27.5 billion to shareholders last quarter

Apple […] also approved a 77 cent dividend per share.

Apple stock spikes after reporting strong guidance and earnings beat—CNBC—April 30, 2019

As of September 29, 2018 , the Company had approximately 132,000 full-time equivalent employees.

Apple Form 10K—SEC—September 29, 2018

I’ll extrapolate a little since I couldn’t find complete numbers.

  1. $27.5 billion x 4 quarters = $110 billion in yearly share repurchase
  2. 77 cents x 4.72 billion shares x 4 quarters = $14.5 billion annual dividend
  3. $110 billion + $14.5 billion = $124.5 billion given to shareholders yearly

Divide that by the number of employees. Check my … READ THE REST

Slow down and improve your health and job

Slow down and improve your health and job

I spent a lot of my career fighting for a good work/life balance for myself and encouraging it in others. I’m not sure if it had much of an impact but it was a fight worth fighting. And there’s research to back up the fact that working too many hours is detrimental to productivity and health.

The reason we have eight-hour work days at all was because companies found that cutting employees’ hours had the reverse effect they expected: it upped their productivity.

The Compelling Case for Working a Lot Less—BBC

One meta-analysis found that long working hours increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 40% – almost as much as smoking (50%). Another found that people who worked long hours had a significantly higher risk of stroke, while people who worked more than 11 hours a day were almost 2.5 times more likely to have a major depressive

… READ THE REST
Why I left Apple

Why I left Apple

I always thought it would be fun to get fired from Apple. I thought it would make a good story! Maybe I could do increasingly outrageous things and eventually get fired.

The truth is less interesting though. I’ve been on leave for awhile and Apple finally said my time was up. So, in the end, I did get terminate (aka fired). But it’s such a boring story. I always wanted to go out either on a high note or a very dramatic note, so I am disappointed.

For most of my career, Apple has been the only organization I’ve been a part of where I fit in completely. I have a team photo from Aperture on my wall and I still get emotional looking at it. There are many other teams I worked on that I feel the same way about. Everything wasn’t always roses, but much of the time … READ THE REST

How did I end up at Apple?

How did I end up at Apple?

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people while I’ve been at Apple. Unlike most new recruits, Apple was not a company I ever dreamed about working for.

I never wanted to work for a big company. Period. For me, a big company was one withmore than 200 people. I found even companies that size were riddled with bureaucracy. You’d never talk to any of the senior leaders except during a Q&A at a company-wide event. I couldn’t fathom working at a company with more than 5,000 people.

Even if Apple were small, I had given up on them back in the mid 1990s. The last straw was my nearly $7,000 purchase of a PowerBook 5300— the worst computer I’ve ever owned. I later sold it for $500 just for the display. Apple’s system software quality was also at an all time low. For six months, I tried to switch to Windows but … READ THE REST