Steve Jobs simple but amazing 2005 Stanford commencement speech touched on issues that are very much alive today: getting fired, being poor, pursuing innovation, inventing the Mac, Windows, the Whole Earth Catalogue as the first Google, and his dictum, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. And discovering he had cancer and being told he had only months to live.

Transcript here.

Of special importance to me is his telling the story of learning calligraphy at Reed College (from the great Lloyd Reynalds, who I also studied under), and applying the art of calligraphy to the first Mac, which then “was copied by Windows.” From Jobs commencement speech:

“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 sans-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, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

I wrote about calligraphy and Reed a while ago in a note on the internal Campfire Hub:

When I was in college at Reed (back before they invented the electric light bulb) there was an electrifying art history professor, Lloyd Reynolds. His class covered the history of art, education, what he called “significant gesture” in great art, Zen Buddhism — it was the first introduction I had to many of these subjects. The class was always mobbed and nearly impossible to get into, despite the fact that Reynolds was an incredible curmudgeon who would regularly attack his students as idiots.

The reason I bring this up is Reynolds was a world class calligrapher who insisted all his students buy an Osmoroid pen and learn Italic Cursive. For him intellectual work had to be intimately associated with craft and work.

For forty years (1948 on) Reynolds had every student at Reed writing in Italic cursive and talking about the drawings of William Blake. His lectures are still vivid in my memory. And among the digital luminaries he inspired are Steve Jobs, Howard Rheingold (Wired, etc.), Peter Norton (Norton Utilities), Sumner Stone (who for Adobe and then his own company developed many of the digital typefaces we use today), etc. Here are a couple quotes from a longer piece about Reynolds:

“The hands think,” said Reynolds. “The nervous system is continuous, so how can we say that the hands don’t think? Often the conscious mind merely interferes with the hand. Students learning to write reach a certain proficiency, and their eyes, like a police matron, take all the freedom away from the rhythmical movement. I tell them not to watch grimly because the eye is a cold judge that frustrates spontaneity. Let your hand move!

“To think that art has two parts, one intellectual and the other servile . . . no. It’s a false dichotomy, absolutely false. Universities from the Renaissance on have put criticism above work, above action. They claim that there is the thinking or philosophical man and the man of action—that the two cannot be in one person. This is one of the worst heresies in Western civilization. It accounts for much of the mess that we’re in, in colleges and universities, where if a work is rational and analytical, it’s respectable.”

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Calligraphy, Cancer, computers, google, Lloyd Reynolds, New Media, Peter Norton, Reed College, Stanford, Steve Jobs, Sumner Stone, Technology, Type, Whole Earth Catalogue, William Blake, Windows

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That above is what is called a “Beta” fish. It’s incredibly rare. I think they’re native only to Jersey City but, on incredibly rare occasions, are exported to surrounding areas. I haven’t checked my facts but this seems about right. We have a wildlife culture that is very unique here on the west side of the Hudson. EAT IT, New York.

I had one of these incredibly rare and majestic animals until last night. His name was “Mega Pixel.” Although he was likely nothing more than a mass of flesh, bones, natural reflexes and a theoretical 2-second memory, I dug the little guy. Being a vegetarian for moral reasons, I genuinely valued his little life.

Over the past week, Mega Pixel had stopped eating. I cleaned his bowl. No change. I added water conditioner. Ditto. The little guy would swim up to the surface of the water, look at me, stick the tip of his face out of the water and open his mouth, creating the tiniest of splash sounds. He just wouldn’t eat his damn food. Just kind of look at it. He was clearly trying to communicate something to me. Something that a) I had no hope of understanding yet b) raised serious doubts in my mind about this whole 2-second memory bullshit.

Finally, Mega Pixel stopped moving all that much. For the past few days, he kind of just hung out at the top of the bowl, lightly moving his fins about. It was incredibly sad but not as sad as when I got home last night and saw him facing the ground. Vertically hanging in the middle of the bowl, performing that same, sad fin flap.

Deciding that a slow vertical death was no way for Mega Pixel to spend his last hours, I decided to euthanize him via the traditional method. Sadly, I learned after the fact that a freezer or blunt strike would have been the more humane way to do it. However, I at least take solace in the fact that the process of his death was hastened. Hopefully it was all for the best.

Now I’m left with a couple questions that, perhaps, you all could chime in on. First, was it “right” for me to kill the fish instead of letting it die “naturally?” Second, what should I do with this empy retail space? What being should occupy this now dormant space? Chime in comments-style and I’ll procure said being and then all y’all can help me name it.

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UPDATE: As if cued, here is the article covering our country’s current newspaper obsession from, of course, Gawker.

I don’t think I’ve gone a couple days without some article popping up in my reader trumpeting the inevitable doom that awaits the printed word (I’m looking at you, Gawker.) For the most part, they’re all pretty spot-on. Newspapers and magazines are becoming more and more outdated by time-of-print and comparably unwieldy when all that information can be viewed so much more conveniently on our computers or pocket robots of choice. We all know this.

However, today was a meteoric example of why the printed word, specifically the newspaper, still matters. A newspaper is a physical artifact or record of the given day. Normally, that doesn’t mean all that much. Sometimes, it means quite a bit.

This morning, on my way into the ‘fire, I checked in at least 20 or so newsstands, bodegas, markets and even a Barnes & Noble in an attempt to buy a copy of The New York Times. Last night was perhaps one of the most significant moments in history that I will live through and, .com-newsery-be-damned, I wanted a physical memento of the event. From my failure at obtaining one and the images you see here, a representation of everywhere I went, I was clearly not alone.

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The polls have opened and I have returned from them. Got to be honest in saying that I fell victim to the hysteria of expecting insane lines. I even made a point of having a couple episodes of Mad Men on my iphone so I’d have something to pass the time with. However, as I got to the polls, I ran into the exact opposite. For my voting booth, there was only one person in front of me so I was in and out in about three minutes. Seamless, even.

The above the and below photos are from Jersey City’s “E” Ward in District 11. As you’ll see from my sample ballot, someone might want to tell New Jersey that “E” isn’t a number…

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