512 Pixels

A good name for a site with 53 Twitter followers and no name on the colophon page.

John Branston, senior editor at The Memphis Flyer, on Steve Jobs:

As Eason and officials at Methodist Hospital have maintained all along, Isaacson says that Jobs did not “jump the line” to get a transplant. He did, however, register in both California and Tennessee to improve his chances. The donor was a car-accident victim in his mid–20s. As the Flyer reported, Apple attorney George Riley, a former Memphian, made the connection and helped Jobs settle into the house he bought on Morningside Place.

[…]

Jobs’ wife took responsibility for getting him a liver transplant and monitored his position in the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease system (MELD). While the book insists that Jobs did not buy his way to the top of the list, the “60 Minutes” segment has Isaacson recounting how Jobs drove a Mercedes sports car with no license plate and “felt like the normal rules just didn’t apply to him.”

On the liver transplant, at least, this authorized biography may not be the last word.

Implying that Jobs paid his way into a new liver is a pretty shitty thing to do. Writing it this poorly is even worse.

I really expected more of the Flyer.

This video is amazing.

That’s Pinboard creator Maciej Ceglowski in a Time Magazine piece on both services.

Check out the full video of the Steve Jobs special on CBS’ website.

Benj Edwards at Macword:

The destiny of Apple changed drastically 10 years ago with the release of a deceptively simple digital music player.

The iMac may have saved Apple in 1999, but the iPod is why consumers fell in love the the company.

Thomas Watkins for the AP:

The elaborate mission to recover a moon rock led NASA agents to one of the most down-to-earth places: a Denny’s restaurant in Riverside County.

But at the end of the sting operation, agents were left holding a speck of lunar dust smaller than a grain of rice and a 74-year-old suspect who was terrified by armed officials.

[…]

The target, Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.

The whole story is just plain terrible.

Tim Cook’s company-wide address isn’t a speech given by a CEO — it’s a conversation from an old friend. Touching.

Well, at least in the “documents and data” arena.

I’m sure the iWork apps on the Mac will eventually have iCloud built-in like their iOS cousins do. Until then, Dropbox is still the way to go for many, including myself.

Since buying my Kindle, I have to admit that I’ve done a lot more reading. Here’s what’s been on my e-ink display this month:

• The Right Stuff by Thomas Wolfe looks at the build-up to NASA’s Mercury project, through the eyes of the original seven astronauts. It’s an excellent, excellent read for any nerd.
• Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox chronicles the Apollo space program. While the book dives fairly deep in to the politics inside and outside of NASA in the 1960s, it’s not at all boring. The names that history has forgotten live on in this book.
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl retells the author’s time spent in Auschwitz and other concentration camps during World War II. It discusses the psychiatric toll that living without a reason to live takes on someone. I’ve been reading the paperback off and on for months, and have yet to finish it. It is intense.

Editor’s Note: As always, links from 512 Pixels to Amazon are done as affiliate links. Kindle purchases aren’t eligible for Amazon’s affiliate program, so I’ve linked to the paperback versions above.

Why, hello there.

This is disgusting.

While the Occupy Wall Street guys have a point¹, the fact that half of Congress’ members are millionaires is a bigger problem, in my opinion. I’m not sure how these people can accurately represent the middle class, let alone the nation’s poorest members.