Technology pioneer and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, dies at the age of 56 with President Obama saying "the world has lost a visionary".

Stunned. Sad. RiP Steve Jobs.
 

I never worked for, let alone met Steve Jobs. Yet I feel part of the Apple family. After all, he was virtually the same age as my younger brother and we grew up in the same era.
Without Steve Jobs and Apple, I would never have been able to pursue my own passion – translating and editing fascinating texts about contemporary art and the environment – for as long as I have.
Without them, I would never have been able to do so from the comfort of my own home, which I relocated to the beautiful Oban area three-and-a-half years ago.
In many ways I owe Steve Jobs and Apple my career and a significant part of my life.
My heart goes out to Laurene Jobs and her family and I will always remember Steve Jobs with the deepest respect.

Thank you, Steve Jobs. 

BBC News has a wonderful tribute by Stephen Fry, recorded in August 2011, after Steve Jobs resigned due to ill health:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/14664694

 

Yesterday, 5 October 2011, Apple CEO Tim Cook today sent the following email to all Apple employees:

Team,


I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.


Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing
human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.


We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.


No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.


Tim

Central Scotland under lockdown due to snow and freezing temperature – which the Transport Minister calls "torrid"

7 December 2010 [Last updated at 10:30AM]

I don't expect this to be viewable for any length of time, so I'm taking the liberty of copying the "blurb" to a brief section of a radio interview that played on Radio 5 live earlier today:

The BBC comment reads:
'As drivers get stuck in freezing blizzard conditions across Scotland, a caller criticises the transport minister.

Ken, a lorry driver with 20 years' experience, blasts Stewart Stevenson for his handling of the travel chaos.
"Don't blame anybody else. You knew this weather was coming," Ken says. "You should have been prepared."
"I think someone will die tonight, and as the transport minister it'll be on your head."
Mr Stevenson tells Ken and the 5 live listeners: "It has been a torrid day.
"Today's not been our crowning glory," he admits. "We want to do better."'

Here on the west coast, while the temperature is well below zero °C, we are not suffering anything like these central Scotland conditions. I do hope that no-one will die in the freeze and that the situation will improve rather than get worse.

But we are yet again facing a very, very cold night so I wouldn't want to be stuck in a car on the motorway or anywhere else out there.

The Scottish transport ministry and a lot of council have shown the crassest ineptitude at dealing with a bit of ice and snow – most people here haven't even heard of snow tyres, let alone got them on the wheels of their cars!

But what gets me in this particular interview is the Scottish Minister's for Transport choice of word:
"It has been a torrid day."
I can only guess that he's very, very hot, i.e. torrid, under the collar and feeling the pressure, but torrid a day it has not been. And no, it's not a misprint – I heard him use the word very clearly in the sound bite. The minister does not say "horrid" or "horrible", nor "Baltic" or "arctic". Like a jackknifed lorry that has run into a ditch, he turns his world upside down. Oh dear.

Derailed train lifted off the rails near Cruachan Power Station on Loch Awe, Argyll, Scotland

 Hiya
You will have heard about the train derailment near Cruachan Power Station on Loch Awe, Argyll, last Sunday evening. Eight people had to be taken to local hospitals, luckily only with minor injuries. The derailed carriage at the head of the train was hanging down the steep slope, anchored by the rear carriage and some trees. Due to the location of the incident, above the outflow of the reservoir and overhanging the road platform built out above the loch, the road had to be closed to traffic. It took some time to reinforce it for the heavy crane.
Once again, we have experienced just how tenuous links can be to the "outside world": whole villages were cut off from their trains because replacement buses had to make the long detour via Ballachulish, Glen Coe and Rannoch Moor. It is only since yesterday that a mini-bus service has been put on between Oban and Taynuilt:
http://forargyll.com/2010/06/a85-closure-scotrail-to-run-oban-taynuilt-minibus-from-11th-june/

 
Yesterday, 11th June, the de-railed carriage was at last lifted off the rail. According to the Oban Times, "a one thousand ton crane" was used. It is hoped that the road will be reopened by Wednesday. When the trains will run again still remains to be seen.




and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8736322.stm

At last!

At long last, the US will have healthcare reforms to provide cover to 32m more Americans.

Speaking after the bill passed with 219 votes, US president Barack Obama said it showed "America's workers, and America's families and America's small businesses deserve the security of knowing that... neither illness nor accident should endanger the dreams they have worked a lifetime to achieve."

"It isn't radical reform, but it is major reform ... it moves us decisively in the right direction."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8579354.stm

Jerusalem artists go underground

Jerusalem artists go underground
BBC Website Report 3/11/09 BBC Arabic Service Reporter Ahmad Budeiri
Page last updated at 09:58 GMT, Tuesday, 3 November 2009

Jerusalem has played host to a two-day arts festival with a difference as part of Palestinian attempts to celebrate the city's year of being Capital of Arab Culture. The BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the city, Ahmad Budeiri, joined the audience.

A group of about 100 specially invited guests gathered at Jerusalem's Damascus Gate for the evening's programme to begin.

The area is heavily guarded by Israeli security forces, lying on a crucial junction between the city's Arab and Jewish areas. But though the police have already intervened to prevent several Capital of Arab Culture events this year, on this occasion they did not, or could not.

First we were divided up into several sub-groups and then led into the winding alleyways of the Old City.

I feel we have gone back in time, singing here rather than in a modern theatre or concert hall Vocalist Omar Abu Nejmeh

My party arrived at an old stone house with a small courtyard, where three musicians were waiting to entertain us with a mixture of traditional Palestinian songs and some 20th Century classics from the popular Arab repertoire.

The al-Quds (Jerusalem) Underground Project was under way.

"We have tried to perform at public venues in Jerusalem, but the Israeli authorities always denied permission," said drummer Ahmad Hdeib.

But he added they would never stop trying to "send our voice to the world" from the Old City.

Vocalist Omar Abu Nejmeh admitted it was not an easy choice to become a Palestinian artist living in Jerusalem, but this unique occasion was one of its compensations.

"I feel we have gone back in time, singing in such an old house, rather than a modern theatre or concert hall," he said.

The reason for these precautions is that many events marking the Arab League and Unesco-backed City of Arab Culture year are sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, and anything involving the PA in Jerusalem is banned by the Israeli authorities. The east of the city has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Most of the 2009 events have taken place outside the city, in nearby Ramallah or other Palestinian towns in the West Bank.

But there was little objection the Israeli authorities could raise to these performances, in six venues that were all private houses or businesses, arranged without PA involvement and mainly advertised by word of mouth.

Beneath the surface

But the Jerusalem Underground Festival is nevertheless a response to Israel's suppression of Capital of Arab Culture events, with venues kept secret from the police in case they disrupted the shows.

The surface is politics, history and religion, but under that there are people and reality Merlijn Twaalfhoven

With some of Old Jerusalem's alleyways not having amenities like streetlights, sometimes the audiences was led around in near total darkness with only the screens of their mobile phones lighting the way.

The project was the idea of Dutch composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven who worked for several months to arrange it.

"The idea is to look beneath the surface of Jerusalem since the surface is politics, history and religion, but under that there are people and reality, and we seek the truth about their lives and their daily routine," he said.After the first concert, our group was taken to another house to watch a short play about discord in family life.

The play had been scheduled to be staged at East Jerusalem's only theatre, but one of the actors told me after his performance that Israel's Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch was working to close the theatre down for carrying out "illegal activities".Further stops took us to a traditional bakery and someone's house that had been turned into a lending library, a much-needed resource because Palestinians do not have a municipal library of their own in Jerusalem.

****

For the original article, please go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8338316.stm

Peaceful majority and the Cost of War

Hiya

After a few posts in which I celebrated an almost hedonistic indulgence of wonderful food, here's something a bit weightier.

One of my favourite people has forwarded to me an essay about why the peaceful but silent majority doesn't matter when it comes to extremism and fanatic killers.

The essay is thought-provoking and most of what it claims is quite true. However, there are several problems with the text, starting with the author: a one-minute search of the Web tells me that the essay, actually written in 1997, is not by Emanuel Tanay but by Paul E. Marek.

Looking a little further, I found Marek's blog. He is actually a duo that presents itself as "A Father (Paul) and his Canadian Forces Son (Junker) blogging from the Right side of the aisle." While Marek & son don't paint the world in black and white, they certainly seem to have no time for a critical examination of the massive failings of our, i.e. Western, society.

And that's what bothers me a whole lot more than the false attribution of authorship in the forwarded message, which in itself is bad enough. The essay fails to mention the horrendous exploitation by western "explorers" and their backers of huge swathes of the rest of the world. Not a word is said about the obscene amount of money that our governments (especially the US and UK govts.) are throwing at the people they claim to "protect", not in the form of food, education, infrastructure, health care, but in the form of guns, bombs, destruction, death, rape, murder. Click here to watch the dollars being wasted on warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 --- the mind boggles!

It's not as though that was a recent phenomenon -- it's been going on at least since Christopher Columbus first set foot on what he thought were the shores of India in 1492.

The constructive, positive things that could have been done with this money! Misinformation, greed, vengefulness, lack of justice, lack of education, lack of prospects push young people into the paths of fanatical leaders -- it was true in Germany, it is true now. How about supporting peace work and teaching people how to resolve conflicts in a non-violent way?

There's a debate raging over here (UK/Scotland) about the cost of human lives. One of the latest news headlines is about ministerial aide Eric Joyce, who quit Gordon Brown's cabinet on Thursday in protest. The Brits are getting itchy to get out of Afghanistan because to date 212 British soldiers have lost their lives in combat there since 2001. That is 212 lives too many and my heart goes out to the families of these mostly young people. However, it pales in comparison to the loss of civilian lives in Afghanistan -- tellingly, no-one has been keeping a tally on that number.

Might I also remind everyone of the loss of lives to famines, disease, misguided or blatantly absent health policies, and, to bring in a killer of the first order in the western world, road accidents. For example, in 2008, 272 people were killed on Scotland's roads, 2,535 were recorded as seriously injured and 12,756 suffered "slight" injury (source: The Scottish Government website, accessed a few minutes ago).
Exploring the reasons why this number is so high would merit another hour or two of thinking and research.

Nuff said for now -- I bid you a very good night and a wonderful weekend -- wars and death and wanton destruction notwithstanding -- and look forward to your comments.

PEACE!