Where to begin?

I have never owned an Apple product. That being said, I recognise that Steve Jobs was a visionary who changed my world, and I was very sorry to hear that he had died at the relatively young age of 56. The first computers I learned in school on were Apple IIcs and TRS-80s (the latter came from Radio Shack).

Over the years, as he revolutionised the tech industry with products whose features everyone tried to imitate, he made being a tech geek actually seem cool, a far cry from when I was programming on an Atari in high school.

He did so with a characteristic sense of humour. You can see that in this timeline produced by CNN:



World reacts to the death of Steve Jobs

Then there's the lovely tribute to him using a very simple redesign of the Apple logo.

So thank you, to the man who brought us Pixar movies and portable tech, who put an entire music library in our pockets and made our phones smart. RIP.

PS Just so things don't get too grim, I found this on a tribute to Jobs. It's the first Pixar film, the one that is the reason for the hopping lamp logo. It's deceptively simple in design, like many Apple products (with a lot of work on the back end to make it so).

One of the best 'It Gets Better' videos I've seen

this is from the employees of Pixar...



If you're not gay, please watch as well. Maybe you'll understand your friends, your sibling, the kid at school, or the person on the street that much better.

Via ACLU of Kentucky.

A sad tale but a heartwarming one as well, of what big business can do with a heart

Pixar fulfills dying girl’s wish to see ‘Up’: 10-year-old with cancer couldn’t go to theater, studio brought DVD to house

By the time 'Up' hit the theatres, Colby Curtin was rapidly losing her battle with cancer and was too sick to go to the cinema. So the studio came to her, sending an employee with a DVD, stuffed characters, and memorabilia, for a private screening at home. She died later that night.

Her mother said one of the memorabilia left by the Pixar employee was an 'adventure book' based on a scrapbook that, in the movie, is kept by the [late] wife of the main character [who floats his house away with balloons to take the trip he never managed to make when she was alive].

'I’ll have to fill those adventures in for her,' Lisa Curtin said of her daughter.

At least it gave them some comfort, and a little girl precious moments of happiness. The best thing of all is that the news didn't come from Pixar; they haven't even commented. It wasn't some self-promoting gimmick, it was a real gesture towards a family stricken by the impending death of a young girl.

That's class.