New at PJM: The Man Who Sold The Future

I have a new column at Pajamas Media today, about the life and words of Steve Jobs. A preview:

Universities are always awash with bright (and, let’s be honest, not-so-bright) kids who claim they want to “change the world.”  Vanishingly few of them have the abilities to do anything of the sort, and still fewer have the innate drive and relentless, adamantine will to see their personal visions through to reality. Almost none actually succeed at changing even their own immediate surroundings, much less the world.

Steve Jobs was one of the infinitesimally tiny group to see that youthful ideal through. In the space of 35 years, Jobs, the on-and-off-and-on-again founder and leader of Apple, changed the way the world works, plays, communicates, listens to music, and watches movies — to say nothing of changing movies themselves, in his “spare time” job as CEO of Pixar.

Grasping the totality of Jobs’ life and accomplishments defies any short account. When Jobs started working in the tech field, as a teenaged summer hire at Hewlett-Packard (he got the job by cold-calling William Hewett, scrounging for hobby-project parts), personal computers weren’t even a blip on the horizon and the internet existed only as a crude, text-based network between defense bases and universities. Telephones were black, rotary, and run by a monolithic monopoly. Video games didn’t exist (Jobs was hired by the nascent Atari a few years later; he proceeded to design the seminal game “Breakout”), music came from vinyl records, and animation was something done laboriously by hand on endless sheets of plastic.

Not long after, Jobs founded Apple, and became the driving force in creating the personal computer, helping build out the massive industries supporting that technology and also fundamentally changing virtually every other industry on the planet. That alone would constitute one of the more impressive legacies in human history, but Jobs didn’t stop there, even after being ousted from Apple in a 1985 corporate coup.

 Here's the rest.

FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

M.G. Siegler at TechCrunch has the scoop on the long-rumored Amazon Tablet, which they say will be announced tomorrow:

On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles, which will still be very much alive and for sale. And while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will show off the Fire on stage, it won’t be ready to ship until the second week of November, we’ve learned.

Everything we’ve previously reported on the hardware remains the same. It will be a 7-inch backlit display tablet that looks similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook. Gdgt’s Ryan Block was able to dig up a bit more about the connection. Apparently, the Kindle Fire looks like a PlayBook because it was designed and built by the same original design manufacturer (ODM), Quanta. Even though Amazon has their own team dedicated to Kindle design and development, Lab 126, they wanted to get the Fire out there in time for this holiday season so they outsourced most of it as a shortcut.

Block’s sources seem very wary of this shortcut move. But having played with a DVT model myself, I can assure you that it’s better than the PlayBook because the software is better and, more importantly, the content available is much better. Amazon has built their own custom version of Android (that looks nothing like Android) and it utilizes their own Android Appstore. While that store doesn’t offer all the apps found in Google’s Android Market, Amazon has been rounding up the big app makers to get them on board for the Fire launch, I’m told.

Is it the long-sought (by anti-Apple enthusiasts) iPad Killer? Heck if I know, but Amazon did do a bang-up job on previous Kindles, and they're the only company in the world with the content muscle to hang right in there with the iTunes Store.

And just try and tell me this isn't the perfect background screen for one of these suckers:

Hurricane Memories (1 - Eloise)

I've spent most of my life in "hurricane country," near the Florida Gulf Coast. When I was seven years old, Hurricane Eloise blasted up through the Gulf, laying waste to much of Panama City Beach and scarcely losing any steam before she wrecked most of my hometown, Enterprise, Alabama.

For a small child, watching Eloise was like having the greatest disaster movie ever made playing outside your window. My sister and I sat on her bed, watching one pine tree after another snap over and fall in our backyard. One of our bulldogs cowered in her doghouse, unwilling to cross the yard to come inside--until a gust picked up the doghouse and carried it a few yards across the ground. She set a new bulldog land-speed record getting to our back door after that.

When a tornado passed over our house, taking down our TV antenna but fortunately doing no other damage, our mom grabbed us up and huddled against the house's brick chimney. Even amidst the deafening freight train noise as it went by, I was too young to be anything other than excited. It was years before I realized how close we'd all come to being killed in that moment.

Inside the eye, at the heart of the hurricane, we all went outside to look around. The rain and winds had stopped, and most of the trees around our house had already been knocked down. Even the bulldogs came out to snuffle around in the eerie calm. The approaching back end of the eye-wall looked like the interior of a stone castle keep, dark gray, cyclopean, towering, advancing relentlessly to bring on the second round of destruction.

After the storm, we kids were convinced that Enterprise had been converted into the biggest playground in the world. Trees knocked over like dominos became massive jungle gyms, and there was seemingly no end to all the interesting things to explore amidst all the damage. Our dads got to go chop stuff up with chainsaws instead of going to work, and school, of course, was out for more than a week.

Steve Green, Call Your Office

Now here's a media scandal for the summer "silly season": The Weekly Standard runs an umpteen-word cover story on vodka... but doesn't bother to interview the internationally-renowned VodkaPundit.

Victorino Matus, you got some 'splainin' to do...

Boomhauer Reviews "Cowboys & Aliens"

"Dang ol' movie got James Bond man, got Indiana Jones, it's a dang ol' Western with spacemen and goin' waddaya call, BOOM! and carryin' on, man.

"Dang ol' thumbs up, man."

Behold, The Return Of... Cornholio

Get More: Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV Shows

... and there was much rejoicing.

Barry Was Told There Would Be No Math

Charles Krauthammer, via NRO:

I did the math on this. If you collect the corporate jet tax every year for the next 5,000 years, you will cover one year of the debt that Obama has run up. One year.

To put it another way, if you started collecting that tax at the time of John the Baptist and you collected it every year — first in shekels and now in dollars — you wouldn’t be halfway to covering one year of the amount of debt that Obama has run up.

As for the other one, he mentions again and again, the oil depreciation tax break — if you collect that one for 700 years, you won’t cover a year of Obama deficits.

And then here’s my favorite. I worked it out in the car on the way here. If you collect the corporate jets and the oil tax together — get all the bad guys and the fat cats at once — and you collect it for 100 years, it covers the amount of debt Obama added… in February!

And he pretends that he’s the serious adult at the table.