Goodbye, Steve

It’s sad, isn’t it?  England crashing out of the Rugby World Cup, I mean.  Trust the ruddy French.  They’ve been playing dreadfully and we’ve been doing OK.  Then, as soon as they come up against us – bingo.  They play like things inspired and we continue to play OK.  So that’s the end of early morning sessions round the TV, with dogs unfed, cats look quizzically at their bowls and the goldfish and guppies in their respective tanks goggling hopefully though the glass while the Gordon-Smiths go “Ooo” and “Argh!” and “Pass it! Don’t kick it!” at fifteen men on the other side of the television screen in New Zealand.

Yes, of course we’ll watch the other games – and come on Wales, you’re the only home side left now – but some of the sparkle has gone out of Saturday mornings.  Still, the dogs, cats and fish should be happy.

I wasn’t happy to hear the news about Steve Jobs.  He did something really special, by making the design part of the product.  I first came across a mention of a mysterious thing called an MP3 player in a Michael Crichton book - Prey I think it was – and my next encounter with an MP3 player was when the young Helen asked for one for Christmas.  It’s amazing how this stuff creeps up on you, isn’t it?  Suddenly everyone had an MP3 player and I was asked to marvel at a tiny device that could store gadzillions of tracks, more music than you could ever possibly listen to, and CD’s were now outmoded etc, etc and the fact that you couldn’t actually pick out a particular song was sort of lost in the gosh-wowness of there being thousands of songs or tracks on a hand-held device.

But, with Steve Jobs’ ipod you could pick out a particular track.  The ipod looks lovely, feels great in your hand and works in the way all beautifully designed products do, by simply working simply.  It’s dead easy to use and lets you listen to music without being a geek or computer nerd. In the many tributes to him, it was said that he went over designs again and again before, eventually, they were right.  This is so similar to editing a book that it rang a real chord with me.  The first effort, the first idea is vital, but after that comes so much extra work to fine-tune it and make it the best that you possibly can.  This is where the real labour of love stuff comes in, to make what you’re working on much more than passable but better than it needs to be.  (Perhaps England's rugby players could take note.) We’ll be playing music on the ipod tonight while we have our Sunday night bottle of wine game of Scrabble and I’ll raise a glass to Steve Jobs’ memory.  Nice one, Steve.