Good Stuff

Just wanted to share some Good Stuff I've run across in the past day.

Jason pointed me to this video of Steve Jobs addressing Stanford graduates. Frankly I'm surprised they were brave enough to let Steve Jobs talk to students - he speaks his mind, and he's rich enough to tell the truth and not give a damn. This is actually the first time I ever saw him speak. Having seen the video, I think, ah, now I understand why people get so fanatical about him.

You can find a lot of good stories about the early Steve Jobs, and the rest of the original Mac crew on folklore.org. There are over a hundred stories on the site, all very good, detailing the trials and tribulations surrounding the release of the first Macintosh computer. From the site's own description of itself:

"Folklore.org is a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling. It captures and presents sets of related stories that describe interesting events from multiple perspectives, allowing groups of people to recount their shared history in the form of interlinked anecdotes."

Also in the good stuff category, I just popped open a can of Guinness draught. It's delicious! Had quite a head on it too. I'm a big fan of their Extra Stout, but I hadn't tried their draught yet. Draught is similar to Extra Stout, but a lot smoother and maybe more "user friendly".

(For the unenlightened, Guinness is a beer from Ireland that's so strong it has the black color and approximate viscosity of used motor oil. This isn't your wimpy light beer.)

I'm a glass-bottle beer drinker. Not sure how I feel about Guinness in a can, but poured into a drinking glass it tastes good. I like how the side of the can boldly says "beer", you know, just in case you forgot after you got home from the store. There's also a mysterious plastic ball floating in the can, which is, according to the label, the "Guinness Floating Widget". WTF?

I spent part of the day browsing Why's blog about Ruby. Why is the author of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, which, along with an interactive online Ruby tutorial, is the reason I became interested in Ruby. Thanks to Why, Ruby must be the first programming language to have a significant book about it written in the style of badly translated Asia instruction manuals. Why is so random, you almost can't judge whether his writing is good or bad; he just kicks things up (or sideways) to a new level (of insanity). But I enjoy it just for the originality. His habit of posting code examples drawn with colored pencils cracks me up every time.