Jobs tribute: Here’s to the crazy ones

Great Business Opportunity for JakPak: Seattle won’t let protestors use tents or sleeping bags so inventors donate their own product for the effort

Waterproof jacket, sleeping bag, tent from JakPak
[Via JakPak]

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JakPak just donated about $6000 of jackets to OccupySeattle in the Westlake Center plaza this morning. They will be bringing in more this afternoon.

And they are letting people donate JakPaks for the effort and get a $50 discount in the process.

The Seattle Police department arrested about 20 people last night because they were illegally camping out on the square – living in tents or sleeping bags. They can stay in the square overnight, just not in any yents to protect against the rain.

A small company in Seattle gets the brilliant idea of donating their product – a jacket that converts into all body, all weather protection – to this cause, getting some publicity and earning the notice of many of the people who might purchase such a jacket.

A jacket that converts into all weather protection. It ‘solves’ the problem of not  having tents and sleeping bags to withstand the cold, wet weather so the people can occupy the square.

It meets the request of the police not to have tents or sleeping bags. Will they now outlaw jackets?

Nice to see an entrepreneur find an opportunity to not only market their product but also serve the community that they want to buy the product. A real win-win for the company and for their potential customers.

I’d never heard of them but now several thousand people on Twitter know about them and I expect this will only increase as time goes on. Heck, places like San Francisco or other Occupy events around the country might be interested in.

It is an adaptive response and it will be interesting to see what the SPD’s response will be.

Listing all the things Steve Jobs did not do

Steve Jobs didn’t
[Via asymco]

• Steve Jobs did not create products. He created an organization that predictably and reliably created emotionally resonant products.
• Steve Jobs did not make movies. He made a company that predictably and reliably made blockbusters.
• Steve Jobs did not wrest market share from competitors. He created new markets that attracted and sustained competitors.
• Steve Jobs did not design anything. He gave others the freedom to think about what jobs products are hired to do.
• Steve Jobs did not re-engineer processes. He brought engineering processes to works of creativity and the creative process to engineering.
• Steve Jobs did not develop new management theories. He showed by example that innovation can be managed.
• Steve Jobs was not a visionary. He put the dots together and saw where they led.
• Steve Jobs was not a futurist. He just built the future one piece at a time.
• Steve Jobs did not distort reality. He spoke what he believed would become reality at a time when those beliefs seemed far fetched.
• Steve Jobs was not charismatic. He spoke from the heart compelling others to follow him.
• Steve Jobs was not a gifted orator. He spoke plainly.
• Steve Jobs was not a magician. He practiced, a lot.

He had taste.
He was curious.
He was patient.
He was foolish.
He was hungry.

These things many others can do. Maybe you can.

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I don’t usually quote entire posts but I want tis to be seen whenever I need to see it. Steve Jobs was special in a way that all of us could be.

We just have to think different.

I cried on the way home last night

I miss Steve already. I was worried when I watched the replay of their Tuesday event and they showed an empty seat in the front row with “Reserved” on it.

Much of my life has centered around the computer revolution. And most of my adult life has centered around the Macintosh.

I was in Southern California and attended the PERCOMP convention held in Long Beach in 1978. I still have literature from the event, maybe most notable for the launch of the Exidy Sorcerer.

I really loved that computer because it was one of the first to require little programming experience to use. Programs were stored on ROM chips inside 8-track cartridges. You simply poped in one to run a program rather than hand write one yourself or load it in from cassette tape. It meant that the computer’s RAM did not need to hold the program itself, providing a very useful distinction.

I never got an Exidy. I was not sure about the support it would get and I was right,with Exidy fairly rapidly exiting the arena.

The first real computer I had was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4. I was sharing an apartment with my brother in Houston, as I went to graduate school at Rice University and he went to the University of Houston. As he was studying computer science and was using the same CPU that powered the 99/4a for his class, I was able to convince my parents that it would be useful for him because he could use it for programming. That was late 1979.

My brother dropped the computer science classes and I was disappointed in the lack of real programability of the TI computer, but it did have those cartridges which I still loved. But the Radio Shack announced the TRS-80 Color Computer and I was smitten. The CoCO was the first computer I pre-ordered, putting in a purchase when it was announced in July 1980. The time until it arrived just seemed to long but this computer, with its cartridges was my joy.

I played games on it, I programmed it to play Bach and Mozart. I connected to Bulletin Boards and Compuserve via an acoustic coupler – my first online experiences. The days of 150 baud, with the hope for 300. The CoCo was my first love, one I will always remember.

But it was not my lifelong love.

I was the first one in the Biochemistry department at Rice University to write my thesis using a computer rather than secretaries. I used the lab’s TRS-80 to compose the thesis and a daisy wheel printer to print it out. I started that in late 1983.

In 1984, my computer life changed.

I had been aware of the Apple II for a long time. It just seemed to be too expensive for what I wanted to do at home. Heck, it was too expensive for our lab, which is why we had the TRS-80. But 1984 changed all that.

We all know about The Ad. There had really not been anything like it before and it really created the blockbuster ad form we now see every Superbowl. But in early 1984, the computer department at Rice had a live demo from Apple of the new Macintosh.

I think I was the only non-computer scientist present.

That was a seminal point in my life – because I was amazed in a way I had never been by high tech before. A truly graphical interface. Instead of having to use arcane coding on a command line interface to control the formatting of words – as I was having to do for my thesis – you could make the changes right on the screen.

The Apple Representative used MacPaint to draw some shapes and fill them in. That was kind of cool but then he used the lasso to cut out a piece of the shape and … MOVED it!

There was an audible gasp by the assembled computer scientists and me. We all knew how computers dealt with video memory and the ability to so smoothly move a piece of a figure with the mouse in real time  for such a small computer was astounding.

We knew we were in the presence of something amazing. So I ordered the Macintosh, a carrying case, the dot matrix printer and just about anything else Apple sold with it.

I still have them all.The floppy drive finally gave out on the Mac a few years ago.

The Mac thought like I did. They always have.

I eventually have bought just about every form factor the Mac came in – the LCII, the Performa, a Quadra, a PowerMacintosh G3, a PowerMac G5, several Mac Pros, one of each of the iMacs, Powerbook G3, several Macbooks and Macbook Pros and now even a MacBook Air. I have never lacked for access to the computer I love.

Because it thinks like me. With a PC or most other products, I have to adapt my thinking to them, especially when dealing with problems.

Never with the Macs or any Apple-designed product I’ve ever used.

I spent a lot of time telling everyone else about how wonderful the Mac ws. My mother has used a Mac for almost as long as I have. Heck, she has emailed Steve Jobs and gotten replies.

I fought to keep Macs at the company I worked at as the IT department tried to move us to PCs.

I’ve expanded my love to other things like iPods – I again have at least one with every form factor, continuing to use an iPod Classic to hold ALL my music , iPhones – the whole family has them and the iPad.

The creative talent of Steve Jobs, and more importantly, the incredible geniuses he surrounded himself with, has sustained me in so much of my life over the last 27 years. They made products that think like I did.

Steve really put a ding in the Universe but I am so sorry he is gone.

My grandmother died of pancreatic cancer. She was gone within a month of diagnosis. We got to have Steve for such a long time and many of us knew this day was coming.

I still miss him.