AGAIN, YOU CAN DO IT!

(Top image from here)

YOU CAN DO IT!

WORLD'S LARGEST AND SMALLEST

I was kind of on the prowl for inspirational stuff on the Web yesterday when I stumbled upon these decidedly creative works of art on YouTube. The first is Gulp, a stop-motion short film "depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch." Created by Sumo Science at Aardman, this short was entirely shot using a Nokia N8. It also prides itself as having "the world's largest stop-motion animation set, with the largest scene stretching over 11,000 square feet."

It did not surprise me that the video has so far garnered more than one million hits, but I believe it greatly deserves more than that. Kudos to everyone at Sumo Science for painstakingly producing such amazing work!



And speaking of "amazing," I'm absolutely confident that you too -- therefore chiming with its over two million viewers on YouTube -- will see it evident in Dot, also by Sumo Science. If Gulp has "the largest," then Dot has "the smallest stop-motion animation character." It features a 9mm girl named Dot "as she struggles through a microscopic world." And just like Gulp, this film was shot using a Nokia N8 and with the aid of so-called CellScope technology to capture the minuscule details.

Dot amusingly has this video game feel to it. It's like you control Dot as she escapes "the encroaching wave of destruction," leading her through the path made up of tiny objects such as buttons, coins, pens, pins, nuts and bolts, and finally making her take on what is going after her by turning it into a cozy blanket.



And so I must say that Gulp and Dot are truly entertaining. Are they Nokia commercials, you ask? Oh, I totally forgot about that!

SO WHAT IF PIGS ARE MY FAVORITE?!

LOL.

HAIKU NO. 7

GRIDLOCK
Turn left or turn right?
Perhaps just stay here, I might.
Or must take a flight.

SO...WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Just found this one while rummaging my digital draft bin. This photo was taken a few weeks back. Sorry for the so-so output; I've been using my ever-handy Nokia C3 for taking pictures and I know next to nothing about tweaking pictures with Photoshop or sort. Hi hi. But seriously, I feel kind of disappointed with myself because it was only that moment that I finally had the guts to snap this man and the "interesting" graffiti on his "mobile home," even though it had been an in-your-face sight on the street leading to my former workplace. Sana hindi ako ganito katamad!

FEELING THE JOY ONE FOLD AT A TIME

First off, I wanna thank my best chum Joja for telling me about origami-instructions.com, which apparently is the coolest site for origami enthusiasts. What makes it awesome -- aside from having a good deal of instructions on "how to make many kinds of neat and ingenious items" -- is the way it presents these instructions. They are easy to follow because the folding process is shown with an actual paper and not just diagrams, which are usually seen in origami books. It also invites readers to submit photos of their origamis created based on those featured in the site. And so after making some, I decided to submit the photo of my orange origami owl. Though it was not chosen, a thank-you email was still sent to me. Nice! Big thanks to you too, Andy!

RULE NO. 1

NUTELLA! NUTELLA!

Just like hollering "Eureka! Eureka! (I've found it! I've found it)" ha ha. Thanks to our balikbayan neighbor for generously giving us some mini Nutellas as "pasalubong," I finally know now what Nutella is. Please don't diss me; I know I may seem ignorant here. Truth be told, I actually thought of it as something of a "sosyal" brand (you know, only the well-heeled have access to it) as I would often read about it being used as an ingredient in making delicious-looking pastry products on blogs or just being drooled over by a friend on Facebook. I did not bother to make a Google search though. I should have been long enlightened that it is not a chocolate spread (though it really looks and tastes like one) in that, as Wiki says, it does not meet the required amount of cocoa to be tagged as one. Well, whatever! Chocolate spread or hazelnut spread, a spoonful of Nutella won't definitely miss bringing one to bliss. Mmmm...yum yum!

R.I.P. STEVE JOBS AND THANK YOU

I have always looked up to Steve Jobs, the "greatest computing technology maverick" in my book. That is why I felt like I lost another of my "Ernie Baron" and "Tiya Dely" when I initially learned from Yahoo! a few hours ago that Jobs, after fighting his disease for quite some time, succumbed to cancer today. I'm so sad. He was only 56.

It was probably three years ago when I, through Pinoywap (a mobile interactive community), happened on this commencement speech delivered by Jobs at Stanford University in June 2005. I remember being moved and inspired after reading it; it's definitely one of the best addresses one could ever know of. I even had his speech's farewell message "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" posted as my Friendster shout-out for a long time.

So I'm sharing the said speech with you guys. I got this transcript from this site this time. It's quite long, but it's really really worth reading.


I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

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 san 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, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.


Same to you, Steve Jobs!

(Image from apple.com)

I HOPE THIS ONE IS GOODBYE... FOR GOOD

ISANG BUKAS NA LIHAM PARA KAY A

Hindi ko alam kung ilang beses ko nang sinabi sa sarili ko na hinding-hindi na kita iiyakan, na pipilitin kong burahin ang mga alaala mo sa isip ko at ang feelings ko para sa'yo dito sa puso ko. Pero hanggang ngayon, kahit na napaniwala ko na ang sarili kong okay na 'ko, lagi pa ring nangingilid ang luha ko kapag naaalala kita.

Nakakalungkot. Masakit pa rin pala. Para akong tanga noh, aarte-arte nang ganito. Umaarte para sa wala. Ganito talaga siguro kapag suppressed love ang meron ka, lalo na kung nakalaan 'to para sa isang kaibigan.

Makakalaya lang talaga siguro ako kung masasabi ko sa'yong higit sa espesyal ang pagtingin ko sa'yo at nasasaktan ako sa hindi mo pagpansin sa akin, sa paglayo mo at pagtalikod na hindi ko batid kung bakit. Na kahit ako mismo ang mag-reach out, hinding-hindi rin tayo magtatagpo, dahil isang buong ikot ng mundo na ang layo natin sa isa't isa.

Sana minsan umihip ang hangin at ibulong sa'yo ang pangalan ko nang sa gayon ay maalala mo man lang ako. Alam kong mali ang umasa; di tama ang isipin kong nasa iisang bangka lang tayo. Pero ang kahit na panandaliang atensyon mo para sakin ay lagi nang Pasko. Haay, nakakaawa ako.

Tadhana na lang marahil ang tuluyang makapagpapatigil ng sakit 'kong 'to. At sana tadhana rin ang magpaabot ng sulat na 'to sa'yo, nasaan ka man. Isang request lang ang meron ako -- 'wag na 'wag ka na sanang lalapit sakaling tuluyan na akong nakalayo.

UNINSPIRED

Hello there! You look at them when you say hello there. Oops, just trying to be funny, ha ha . Sheesh, what a way to start this entry after a two-week absence! I was not able to blog mainly because too many topics to write about were slugging it out inside my brain, and it was all for naught. I actually have three or four entries to post here but I'm not quite sure when to get round to it; they're still unfinished though. I admit I'm not good at accomplishing some things in one go, and writing is one of them. I tend to be distracted and it is always a no mean feat for me to be able to finish a simple movie review in just a couple of hours. I still have to read more and write more; the former I very much enjoy, but with the latter I sometimes get uninspired. Waah! I hate this feeling! I've made a promise to myself to better my writing but what am I doing?

I also feel bad for being unenthusiastic about certain things lately. I have already called off my plan to "go home" and to make it all the more dramatic, I have also temporarily deactivated my Facebook account to "take my leave of more distractions," CityVille and Sims Social, that is. But thinking about it now, Facebook in itself is a great distraction. Sorry Facebook addicts, that's just my two cents' worth.

Okay, I really feel sleepy now. But before I go and before my thoughts get muddled, I'm leaving this important question for effect: Where are you, my muse? You're lost, aren't you? Follow my voice. Follow my voice.