On Love - David Brooks (Sun 14 Jun 2015)

All You Need is Love - Redfern (Tue 31 Mar 2015)

David Brooks on Love:

All of us love certain things: certain friends, certain subjects, certain dreams, certain professional goals. But you don’t really know the nature of your love until you’ve tested it with reality.

via David Brooks, Commencement Address by David Brooks.

On Connections - Jo Rowling - Harvard Commencement Speech (Thu 05 Jun 2008)

Jo and Tokyo Students [1] - Gold Palace / Kyoto (Sat 15 Sep 2012)
In her 2008 Harvard Commencement Speech (*), Jo Rowling (*) quotes an Anceint Greek Historian and Writer by the of Plutarch (*):

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

where she expands:

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives.

It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

[1] The students had just finished asking Joanne a number of questions for a school assignment testing their English. They were very nice to us and put smiles on our faces.

Live, Work, Create. - Ramercy / New York (Wed 17 Aug 2011)

Live, Work, Create. - Ramercy / New York (Wed 17 Aug 2011)
Knew I photographed this for a reason. It seems to say what might motivate me to post here. Also makes me think of creative people such as Steve Jobs who sadly passed away from pancreatic cancer yesterday.

Like many from his generation (he was about 5.5 yearrs older than me), I have lived through and watched the development, release and have used the products from the very beginning of personal computing.

I now type this on one of his innovations, an iPad sitting on a train on my daily commute - who would ever thought that all those years ago when I was still at school. Well, Steve did and through hard work he motivated a company which was fortunate enough to be the first to convert a dream into a reality for us - the masses.

His passing has touched many, including those who were not hugh fans of the Apple worshipping and hysteria that Steve was so good at creating at product releases and conferences.

It is always sad when someone passes away so young, but this was his destiny, just as Jenny had her own destiny and for all of us for that matter.

I feel some empathy towards Steve's Family and it is all in front of them, though I don't believe that Steve's passing was unexpected. Hopefully, they had their chances to say goodbye (*).

No matter what people thought of him, he was a great innovator, leader, businessman and he was never afraid of taking a risk or failure.

Lots of online tributes have popped all over the web.

Found a commencement speech (*) Steve made back in 2005 (*) at Stanford University. The last few paragraphs are very touching and worth remembering here for me ..

You can tell he has confronted his own mortality.

Maybe this is what I would like to remember from Steve’s Speech ..

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.

They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs, 14 Jun 2005, Stanford Commencement Speech.

Thanks Steve, your legacy has allowed me to ..

Live, Work, Create

This is Water / This is Water - David Foster Wallace (Sat 21 May 2005)

Transition - water - Jerrabomberra Creek / Canberra - Sat 12 Mar 2005 (picasa)
David Foster Wallace's (w) 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address (Sat 21 May 2005) begins with this "neat" parable ...

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

He eloborates in the midst of the long and inspiring Address ...

[..] The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about....The fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance. [..]

and conlcudes with ...

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water.

This is water.

The above photo is the photo that seemed to start my obsession of photographing water in earnest. No need to explain any more than this. Just thought this was a nice way to tie it all together, for me at least.

On Thinking - David Foster Wallace (21 May 2005)

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about

"teaching you how to think"

is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea:

"learning how to think"

really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace (w) - Transcript - 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address (21 May 2005)

Sculpture by the Sea - Bondi / Sydney - (18 Nov 2002)

Using the Past - Some Advice from Ken Burns, Vern Gambetta and LottieP

The following three quotes are about the past and future, and how we might relate them to each other (if that makes any sense). There is some good advice in all three quotes and I thought that I put them here for future reference, so that they will become part of my past :-). Here they are:

As you pursue your goals in life, that is to say your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.
Ken Burns - 2004 Commencement Yale Class Day Speech (as pdf)

Vern Gambetta wisely adds:

Be careful that you are not living in the past, learn from the past, use it as a reference point.

And finally, LottieP warns:

"nostalgia is the enemy of the future"

With the past in mind I thought I would dig into archive.org and drag out something from my past (it might explain the where eljeiffel came from). Here it is:

elj.com (Eiffel Liberty): Two Years On .. by Geoff Eldridge (04 Jul 1999)

Today is Indepedence Day in the USA which celebrates the 223rd birthday, being founded on 4 Jul 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This also represents a time of reflection for myself with elj.com (Eiffel Liberty).

It is two years ago since I registered elj.com. The name Eiffel Liberty was easy to come up with. It represented a vision and a hope for Eiffel that somehow it might be liberated from its miserable place in the language landscape (I thought how could such a great contribution, be so categorically and overwhelmingly dismissed by the programming community). Also, Emma Lazarus's words struck a chord with me, particularly

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Just as America provided opportunity for many from other lands, I thought Eiffel could provide the same kind of opportunities for the syntactically and semantically battered from the other language landscapes :-)

Also, the name Eiffel Liberty made what a I thought was a nice connection between two famous landmarks that Gustave Eiffel had contributed to, being the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty "Eiffel undertook the challenge of creating the steel structure because of the enormous challenge it afforded him".

The 4 Jul 1997 was to be the launch date for the Eiffel Liberty Journal. However, I came down with a very bad cold (too many late nights preparing for the initial launch) and I decided to publish the launch issue of the Eiffel Liberty Journal, not from my newly acquired elj.com but from my progsoc web pages (this would remain the case for another six months).

It was fun putting together the first issue as I received cooperation from all I contacted. These included:

• Bertrand Meyer who allowed to me publish some small extracts from OOSC2.



• John Potter (my Software Engineering Lecturer who introduced me to Eiffel in the spring of 1993) who specially wrote an article on
  Project Bruce: Translating from Eiffel to Java



• Victor Putz who wrote a great article titled Toymakers and tools: Why one game developer is switching to Eiffel. Victor is a game programmer by night and a helicopter pilot/instructor by day. I remember Victor making a special trip (about 30 km each way) to send me the article because of flooding in his area which made his normal internet access impossible. BTW, I have found that Victor shares and
  articulates (much better than I ever could) my own vision for Eiffel.

Also Bertrand Meyer's classic newsgroup posting from early May 97, Avoiding the second historic mistake (I remember Bertrand once referring to this as collective hypnosis :-) gave the opportunity to publish a few articles from the newsgroup thread that ensued - eg Jeffrey Stulin's If Eiffel is so great, why isn't it popular? and Thomas Beale's Eiffel: An Industry Experience.

I was delighted when Bjarne Stroustrup allowed me to publish Why C++ is not just an Object-Oriented Programming Language and Melier Page Jones allowed me to publish Object Orientation: Making the Transition

Two years on, elj.com has changed from a random journal to a daily random news update covering the Eiffel and related worlds. In many ways elj.com is really just a log of the links and resources I have stumbled across and that I might learn from (or even get a laugh from).

Eiffel certainly enjoys a wider exposure than it did back in 1997. I hope elj.com has helped in a small way. It is hard tell what impact elj.com has had as there is little feedback. However, occasionally I do get a note saying that elj.com helped someone get started with Eiffel, which seems to make it all worthwhile. I guess elj.com could have been much more effective but there is only so much time.

For a number of reasons I renamed Eiffel Liberty to elj.com Extraordinarily Large Jumble in Feb 99 (some of the reasoning behind this was that elj.com was and still is, an Extraordinarily Large Jumble of seemingly random links and more significantly there was little or no Eiffel news). Fortunately, there now appears to be more Eiffel news than I can handle/report manually and I am making efforts to address this through a more automated Eiffel news feed at elj-daily.

elj.com has amassed an incredible amount of links, quotes and resources relating to Eiffel and related worlds. The time has come for elj.com to be able to extract the information from this mass. A keyword/search facility is on the way.

I believe that for [open source] projects to thrive, information needs to readily at hand. I hope the new elj.com that you will see over the coming weeks/months (depends on how much time I get to work on this) will reflect the ability to provide this information efficiently and effectively.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support that Jenny has given me over the last few years. She has had to cope (in more ways than one) with more than anyone should reasonably have to tolerate.

Funny to read this after all these years. Shows how strongly I felt about the Eiffel programming language and method (and still do, but not just as visible). I even chose to start this blog with some posts on Eiffel - not the language, but it's inspiration, the Eiffel Tower and it's creator, Gustave Eiffel.

I had better stop here as I think I might be getting a bit nostalgic. Anyway, hoping all of this might help me find the inspiration to get a future project off the ground.