‘I want to put a dent in the universe.’

These words best describe the tenacity and vision of Stevie Jobs; the man who turned a drab technology
company into a pop-culture phenomenon.

I never personally interacted with Stevie (rrreally, you might ask as you roll your eyes), and yet I do it —
we all do it —every day when picking up an iPod or working on a macbook. These devices aren’t dumb
terminals. Each one has a story, both in creation and execution.

So while he may not be with us anymore, he has still managed to leave a lasting impression in our
minds, our hands, and our ears. Let us get to know our friend a little better.

1. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he once said. “So they don’t
have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions.” Billy Gates, he suggested,
would be “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.

2. “I don’t wear the right kind of pants to run this company,” he told a small gathering of Apple
employees before he left in1985, according to a member of the original Macintosh development team.
He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.

3. When asked what market research went into the iPad, he replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job
to know what they want.”

4. He was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of
a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes before approving the third, and began shipping it in June
2007.

5. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was
assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett spoke with the
boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.

6. In 1971, he collaborated with Steve Wozniak on designing, building, and selling blue boxes: devices
that were widely used for making free – and illegal – phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the
effort.

7. In 1980, he lured John Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive,
Sculley was impressed by Stevie’s pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared
water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

8. In September 1985, after leaving Apple, he started NeXT Inc, with the intention of building a
workstation computer for the higher education market. Although NeXT never became a significant
computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT
machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research center CERN
in 1990.

9. If he had a motto, it may have come from “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which he said had deeply

influenced him as a young man. The book, he said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2005,
ends with the admonition “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

10. Stevie was a stickler for design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at
Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Jobs was adamant that the keyboard not
include “up,” “down,” “right,” and “left” keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer
screens.

11. His pursuit of aesthetics sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in
the 1980s and again from 1998 to2005, recalls how Stevie wanted to make even the inside of computers
attractive. On the original Macintosh PC, Crow says Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of
Apple’s early rainbow logo. Crow says he persuaded Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.

12. Within months of taking control at Apple once again in May 1998, Stevie flexed his power on Apple’s
Cupertino, Calif., campus. He replaced four of the five top executives with former NeXT underlings. He
issued emails forbidding employees to bring pets to the office or to smoke, even in parking lots. He
threatened to fire anyone caught leaking company documents.

13. Stevie was typically hands-on in the creation of the iPhone. People familiar with the matter say
the former CEO was the one who made a decision to change the screen of the iPhone from plastic to
glass after he unveiled the product at the Macworld trade show in 2007. The iPhone team scrambled
to procure glass that would meet his standards, so the devices could be manufactured in time for the
launch.

14. Those who knew Stevie say one reason why he was able to keep innovating was because he didn’t
dwell on past accomplishments and demanded that employees do the same. Hitoshi Hokamura, a
former Apple employee, recalls how an old Apple I that was displayed by the company cafeteria quietly
disappeared after Jobs returned in the late 1990s.

15. He insisted that the first Macintosh should have no internal cooling fan, so that it would be silent – putting user needs above engineering convenience. He called an engineer at Google one weekend with an urgent request: the colour of one letter of Google’s on-screen logo on the iPhone was not quite the right shade of yellow. He often wrote or rewrote the text of Apple’s advertisements himself.

16. Stevie was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion field”, such
were his powers of persuasion.

17. When Jobs and Wozniak were designing the first Macintosh computer, he remembered the
calligraphy lessons he had taken after dropping out of college in 1972. He decided to incorporate the
fonts he had learned into the Mac. “It was the first computer with beautiful typography,” said Jobs.
Windows would later use these fonts as models.

18. A significant thing about Stevie’s public performance and interviews was his use of the
pronoun “We”. Almost every time Jobs spoke, he never said “I”, and said “We” instead. During an
interview at D5, Walt Mossberg curiously asked him, “Who’s ‘we’?” Jobs replied, “Well, ME!”

19. Stevie had been a dedicated vegan ever since his teenage years. At the age of 19, in Reed College, he
explored strange diets which, according to him, would let him get rid of all mucus and hence the need to
shower.

20. A title of one of the press articles written about Stevie’s difficult character was “The Trouble
with Steve Jobs.”According to Robert Sutton, Stanford management science professor and author of
best-seller “The No Asshole Rule,” “The degree to which people in Silicon Valley are afraid of Jobs is
unbelievable. He made people feel terrible; he made people cry.”

21. Stevie studied Zen Buddhism in his youth. He used to say that he wanted to become a monk in a
monastery in Japan instead of starting Apple. But his guru Kobun Chino Otogowa later made him think
otherwise.

22. Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of News Corp.’s Fox Filmed Entertainment, recalls an incident. “He
came into a meeting one day and said, ‘Hey, you want to see something cool?’ And he reached into
his jacket and pulled out the first prototype of the iPhone,” Gianopulos said.”It was like someone had
shown you the first rocket ship.”

One could go on. But one shall not. For one is free.

One could, however, direct you to http://www.indiareads.com/book/steve-jobs-exclusive-biography :
where you may buy or rent (for a frraction of the price) Stevie’s exclusive biography written by Walter
Issacson; Harvard Graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and long time Stevie confidante.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1969 and originally called the Booker-McConnell Prize after the Booker-McConnell Company that was sponsoring the event then. In 1971, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became – as it is today – a prize for the best novel of the year of publication.

When administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002, the title sponsor became the investment company Man Group, which opted to retain “Booker” as part of the official title of the prize.

Any full-length novel published in Britain and written in English by a resident of a British Commonwealth country or the Republic of Ireland, is eligible for the prize.

Julian Barnes won the Booker this year, for ‘The Sense of an Ending’ (the title has been lifted from a work of literary theory by the critic Frank Kermode). At 163 pages, Barnes’s 11^th book has been called a novella for its size and simplicity. (Undoubtedly short, but not the shortest to ever win the prize – that record belongs to Penelope Fitzgerald’s ‘Offshore’, which won in 1979 and is shorter by a few hundred words.)

Barnes, 65, had been shortlisted for the prize three times previously; in 1984 with ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’, when he lost out to Anita Brookner; in 1998 with ‘England, England’, losing to Ian McEwan; and with ‘Arthur & George’ in 2005, when he lost to John Banville.

Afterwards, Barnes admitted to feeling relieved at having finally won. “I didn’t want to go to my grave and get a Beryl,” he said referring to Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted five times, never won, and received a posthumous Best of Beryl Booker prize.

Barnes once called the prize “posh bingo” and he said he had not changed his view – it simply depended on who the judges were and what they liked. “The Booker prize has a tendency to drive people a bit mad,” he said, not least writers with “hope and lust and greed and expectation” so the best way to stay sane, he said, was by treating it as a lottery until you win “when you realise that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom”. Asked what he would spend the £50,000 prize money on he said a new watch strap was first on his list. “I could buy a whole new watch.”

It took the judges (Former head of MI5 Dame Stella Rimington, MP Chris Mullin, author Susan Hill, the Daily Telegraph’s head of books Gaby Wood and the former Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona) just 31 minutes to decide on the winner, after what Rimington called “an interesting debate.” They had been divided 3-2 at the beginning of the judging meeting, but were all agreed by the end.

Every Booker selection brings an annual hand-wringing over the state of the award. This year too, publishers and critics worried aloud that the prize had lost its literary merit in favour of commercial viability and readability. The Booker judges were criticized for their shortlist and for their public comments that they were looking for “readable” and “enjoyable” books, rather than those that would be bought and then placed on a shelf only to be admired. Some critics responded with a rival contest called “The Literature Prize”, and are currently looking for funding.

Barnes was unmoved. The argument made a false distinction between readable fiction and good fiction, he said. As for his novel being a mere 150 pages or so long: “A number of readers have told me that as soon as they got to page 150, they went to the beginning and started again so I now regard it as a 300-page novel.”

If there is a single theme running throughout Julian Barnes’s work, from his 1985 masterpiece, “Flaubert’s Parrot,” to “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” (1989), “Love, Etc.,” and recent collections like “Pulse” (2011), it’s the elusiveness of truth, the subjectivity of memory, and the relativity of all knowledge. While earlier books examined our limited ability to comprehend other people and other eras, ‘The Sense of an Ending’ looks at the ways in which people distort or tailor the past in an effort to mythologize their own lives.

Published by Random House imprint Jonathan Cape, the book follows the character of Tony, a man who seems ordinary until he realizes his memories of a long-ago tragedy are unreliable. The Guardian in a review called it “a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret.”

Sample these excerpts from the book;
“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age,” Tony says, “when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“In the meantime, we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos….”

“If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley; Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. This is only a slight caricature.”

Incidentally, in the days leading up to the ceremony, bookmakers in Britain had decisively chosen Mr. Barnes, at a 6/4 favourite, as the likely winner.
And FYI: He also made a guest appearance in “Bridget Jones’ Diary”.

The other books on the shortlist included “Snowdrops,” by A. D. Miller, a debut crime novel of greed, murder and morality in Moscow; “Pigeon English,” by Stephen Kelman, a novel that examines issues of urban poverty and violence from the perspective of a charming, inquisitive child in a London housing project; and “Jamrach’s Menagerie” by Carol Birch, an atmospheric historical novel that follows two boys on a sea expedition to the Dutch East Indies.

Also shortlisted were two books by Canadian authors: “The Sisters Brothers,” by Patrick deWitt, a comic novel set in the gold-rush era of the American West; and “Half-Blood Blues,” by Esi Edugyan, a book that explores the black experience in Nazi Germany.

Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500.