Thank you Steve for being a part of my life, even if only through the products you have created. See you on the other side.

I found the concluding paragraph (slightly rewritten below) to be inspiring, and so relevant with regards to attempts at changing my career path. Some of the people at my previous job whom I thought were friends were actually interested in just making themselves look good at your expense. Looking back, I found that many of the conversations I had with them were  themselves trying to look and sound good, to push their prejudices, and not really concerned with nor listening to what you were saying to them. I’m glad to have put some emotional and physical distance from them.

“You have to have stamina – otherwise you give up – you get turned.  You listen to people tell you things where, if you follow their advice, you won’t do it. What you are listening to are those people’s ideas about what they can do, not your ideas about what you can do.”

 

Personal best!

The problem with the iPad version is that only high scores below 300,000 are saved, so I had to take the above screenshot just to see five tanks to the right of my name.

Prius at 77777

One of the better cars I’ve owned. Doesn’t drive like a BMW, but it’s less likely to leave me stranded on the side of the road…

“By the end of the Harding administration, the Republican party was firmly committed to single-interest government. ‘Never before, here or anywhere else’, beamed the Wall Street Journal, ‘has a government been so completely fused with business.’ If, as Republican orators promised, this alliance succeeded in maintaining prosperity, the wisdom of single-interest politics would be proven. If it failed, a sharp reaction against single-interest politics would be inevitable.”

“Americans in the 1920′s, at least on the surface, were less sinridden and more self-indulgent than they had ever been before…. Abandoning the notion of saving income or goods or capital over time, the country insisted on immediate consumption, a demand which became institutionalized in the installment plan.”

“Dazzled by the prosperity of the time and by the endless stream of new gadgets, the American people raised businesess in the 1920′s into a national religion and paid respectful homage to the businessman as the prophet of heaven on earth.”

“Mangement had siphoned off gains in productivity in high profits, while the farmer got far less, and the worker, though better off, received wage increases disproportionately small when compared to (corporate) profits. As a result the purchasing power of workers and farmers were not great enough to sustain prosperity. For a time, this was partly obscured by the fact that consumers bought goods on installment at a rate faster than their income was expanding, but it was inevitable that a time would come when they would have to reduce purchases, and the cutback in buying would sap the whole economy.”

“Big business in America is producing what the Socialists held up as their goal; food, shelter, and clothing for all. You will see it during the Hoover administration” – Lincoln Steffens, 1928

“Political fundamentalism was an attempt to deny real division in American society by imposing a partiotic cult and coercing a sense of oneness. Every effort toward social change was condemned as un-American. This resistance to change and this insistence on conformity intertwined with the desire of rural churchmen to turn back modernism in religion and compel morality by statute.”

“The prosperity of the 1920′s produced the contagious feeling that everyone was meant to get rich. The decade witnessed a series of specualtive orgies, from ‘get-rick-quick’ schemes to the Florida real estate boom, climaxes in 1928 and 1929 by the Great Bull Market.”

“Throughout the history of the Klan runs a sordid thread of corruption. Many of the Klan leaders joined the organization primarily for personal profit; many who preached righteousness were morally corrupt …. The Stephenson episode revealed everything that was seamy about the Klan — the disloyalty of its leaders, the financial corruption, the political subversion, the moral hypocrisy, the sadism.”

It was fun attending and seeing old friends, some who haven’t been to the show in 5 or more years. There is enough inertia for a 2012 show, but attendance may slowly drop unless more exhibitors show up or more interesting events are scheduled.