So I repainted the ol’ blog, after wondering for a while why I don’t write here more often. And the answer that fits best right now is that it’s been a year of a lot of firsts.
I started teaching full-time at the Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam early in 2011 (been doing it part-time since 2008), and the last year has been wonderful, interesting, sometimes tiring and mostly quite exciting all at the same time. With the new job came the start of a new college course (Bachelor of Education, doing fine, thanks) and a whole heap of usually great but sometimes quite leftfield experiences.
Let me be short and sweet: teaching is one of the greatest things to do with your cloathes on. Yes, sometimes it’s an uphill struggle but the payoff is amazing and most of the time it’s such a joy that I wonder why more people don’t do this.
So…where to next. Well, there’s still three years of work to do on the college degree, and a teacher’s work is never done, plus there’s my new company, Stacked Bits. So…keeping quite busy I guess.
But I *will* write here more often. Really. I promise.
The Maya people were wrong. This will be your year!
Enjoy.
Quite interesting. The world’s population is expected to hit seven billion in the next few weeks, and the BBC has an interesting site up to illustrate what an enormous number of people that is. Fun too, you can see what your approximate number you were in the long of people at your time or birth.
Check which one you are here.
As an official member of Generation X I found this post by Mat Honan quite brilliant: Generation X Doesn’t Want To hear It.
The news of Steve Jobs’ death last week was sad and, to some, sudden. It generated (and is still generating) a lot of buzz, a veritable outpouring of articles, blogs, columns, talks, speeches and books along the lines of “what a great man we’ve lost, what are we to do now?”
Let me be perfectly frank: I do agree that Jobs was a great innovator, and to some degree a visionary in the computer, on-line and entertainment business. I do not agree that he was the giant almost god-like superman that he is being portrayed as. In these cases it almost feels as if all writers and responders are one-upping each other in the superlatives used to describe the man.
Let’s not forget the at times abrasive personality and fuck you attitude displayed and the fact that he completely ignored the people and companies that helped Apple through the hard times once Apple had risen again. Yes, I am talking of Adobe, the one major company that kept publishing their products for Apple’s waning platform throughout the slow years, but was shafted by Jobs as soon as he thought himself bigger than anyone. What aggravated me was the fact that Jobs slagged off Adobe’s products and technology while his real reasons were purely commercial. Jobs was the King of Closed Ecosystem Publishing.
Anyway, Steve Jobs’ passing is sad, but not world-ending. So please stop writing the weepy drivel that has been pouring out of my RSS reader for the past week, and maybe spend some time remembering some other greats in our business. Dennis Ritchie died yesterday, and with his passing goes a man that has meant more for the computer industry but who has been doing his work in the background for years. Let’s not forget that Jobs’ OSX runs on a grandchild of Mr. Ritchie’s invention UNIX and is programmed using a version of Mr. Ritchie’s other invention C.
So grieve Jobs but honor Ritchie, publicly and loudly.