I am no computer geek, or whiz. I think iPhone is an ingenuis invention. I marvel at the competition Macintosh posed at Windows although I am no Apple user. Overall, I think my life would not change much, apart from my obsession with net-surfing on the iPhone, without Jobs.
The first time I came to know Steve Jobs was probably a few months ago when I read on Share, a Malaysia-based facebook link, about his three stories on how they turn his life about: how his drop-out from Reed College created milestones at different points of his life, how he was sacked from Apple and eventually returned to and reinvented Apple, and how he was that close to death.
Strangely, most of the essence of those stories were lost on me. Instead, I remembered the part where he sort of digressed to talk about how he decided to return to ask his girlfriend-to-be-turned-wife for a date instead of attending an important event because he asked himself what he would do if his life were to end that very night.
I just thought that this man had some great quotes, and he was someone who got perspectives of life right - the essence of life is death, that we should live every day as if our life would end that very night. It is not easy. It is too easy to take life for granted. Even though I knew this line since my teenage years - thanks to the wisdom of Pastor Kong, I still don't live by it most of the time.
This morning, I was browsing through The New Paper and under a condensation of Steve Jobs' belief speech, there was a grey section of '10 Unusual Things About Jobs'.
In it, it mentioned that Jobs came from a Muslim parentage, denied parentage on his first child, resulting in the single mother raising the kid on welfare cheques, didn't give money to charity, lied to his co-founder Wozniak by giving him 7 percent of the paycheck instead of the agreed 50 percent.
Why don't they just call him a scrooge? For the billions that he was worth, he didn't even ever make a comment on his thoughts about charity - probably because the less fortunate never even crossed his mind.
Why don't they label him a bastard? For a man to claim sterility to disown a child he fathered, what kind of a man is that?
Why don't they say it like it is and say he was a cheat? Cheating your co-founder is unforgiveable.
Even his being a pescetarian (vegetarian who eats fish) seems pretentious to me, unless it was out of health reasons.
Instead, they were labelled under 'UNUSUAL'.
Of course, who am I to criticise a GREAT man like Jobs? I am practically, virtually a nobody and here I am, pointing out all his imperfections when he is indeed just a human being.
For all the Facebook posts and online mourning of the loss of a great man, I just thought that his was a typical case of good works magnified and 'unusual' deeds go unnoticed.
But I thought the new Apple icon with a incorporation of Jobs' silhuoette is very cool. The 19-year-old designer boy is Jonathan Mak, a Hong Konger.
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