Fall in the Noy

The last grapes of the season are the sweetest. This vine I found climbing up a tree outside Lisa's house in a nearby village when all seven of us Peace Corps volunteers in the region got together last weekend.

Click on the pictures to see larger versions.

After almost two months of school, we're now enjoying a week off. I thought it would be good to fill in some gaps in what we've shown of our life here and update with more pictures than before. So let's jump back two months in time to "first bell," the opening ceremony of the school year.

The mayor (suit), the school director (white shirt), teachers (in the distance), parents (in the foreground), all hail the first-graders! The kids won't look this good again for a year.

Kids with mothers.

Kids, no mothers. Fifth grade. Still in their "first bell" clothes.

Boys of the fourth grade, five days into the school year.

In late September, Susan I went to the village of Dsegh to meet with a few other volunteers.

Susan in the ruins of Surb Grigor, an old church that collapsed in the Spitak earthquake.

Greg, Amy, Susan, Mary and Martha at Surb Grigor.

Amy, me, Greg and Martha doing what comes naturally when Peace Corps volunteers gather.

Scenic Alaverdi, the heart of the Debed Canyon. Copper mining and processing.

Every fall, my whole school goes on a hike up in the hills above town, into these fields. There's a lonely farmhouse up there, but other than that it's just the cows and us - and the shepherd in this picture, driving his sheep and goats further up.

Hanging with Mher, Artyom and the rest of the ninth grade during our school's excursion day. They can be difficult, but they're also wonderful and I love them.

Artyom borrowed my camera and this is the result.

Some of my school's teachers on Teachers' Day.

Some of Noyemberyan: our building is the third from the left, but we live on the other side. Beyond the hills lies Azerbaijan and somewhere in the distance, visible only on clearer days than this, are some Georgian and Russian peaks of the Caucasus Range.

Two women praying at Haghartzin, which Lonely Planet calls "one of Armenia's masterpieces of medieval architecture."

Thord at Haghartzin. A good friend since 1966.

Makaravank: the oldest building is from the tenth century, but the main church was built in 1205.

Makaravank: Armenian Rococo?

The village of Gosh in early October. We - Susan, Thord, Marci and I - visited Goshavank, the monastery where Armenian law was first codified.

Mother Armenia outside Ijevan.

Somewhere near the village of Dsegh.

Susan and I with Marci and Thord at Haghpat, much of which was built in the 11th century.

So I went on a little hike up the local hill a couple of weeks ago, and as I was leaving the last houses behind, these kids, including a couple of my third-graders, spotted me and decided to find out where I was going. I couldn't have asked for better company.

Danelle in Lisa's so-called kitchen one Sunday ago, when Lisa had invited us all to a wonderful little party.

Mexican food: Lisa in the distance, a blurry Barb, Trent on a mission, Susan reaching for some tomato.

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My life with Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Two caveats. First, this blog post has next to nothing to do with Armenia, unless you count Avie Tevanian's peripheral involvement. Avie - the guy who created OS X - is of Armenian descent. Second, this blog post is not about Steve Jobs. It's about me, Fred, and the role Jobs played in my life. I believe that the greatest tribute I can give to Steve Jobs is showing how my life, like the lives of countless others, has been permeated by what he created.

I do want to mention one thing about Steve's overall influence. People today think of Jobs largely in terms of the iPad, the iPhone and maybe the iPod, but these weren't really his historically most significant technological achievements. In 1976 and 1977, Jobs and Wozniak (who probably deserves most of the credit) created the first marketable table-top computers in his parents' garage, the Apple I and the Apple II. The machines were the first to provide a video interface, a keyboard for input, onboard read-only memory (ROM, which enabled it to load programs from an external source) and other user-friendly improvements. In effect, Steve and Steve created the first truly personal computers, years before the IBM PC. The iProducts are more than extensions of those early machines and Steve has had a part in creating countless other products, from the first laser printer to Toy Story, but no forward leap has been as great as that of the Apple I and Apple II.

But when I saw my first Apple II in 1978, it didn't hold any great attraction for me.

Steve Jobs was born only a few months before me, and as Apple Computer turned into a giant success, I couldn't help compare my non-life with his. I was a recent college dropout and my life was going nowhere, while my brother hippies in Cupertino were conquering the realms of business and technology and were well on their way to multi-billionairehood and immortality. Fellow dropout Bill Gates, meanwhile… well, who cares?

Did you see that first Mac commercial in 1984, with the 1984 theme where the woman smashes the image of Big Brother? Ever since then, I've liked watching Superbowl commercials. Yep, Steve Jobs changed my life.

And I started using Macs.

Then came the dark years when Jobs was ousted, started NeXT and bought Pixar, Windows 95 was ascendant and Apple was considered doomed. Irrelevant. As good as gone. Corporate America wanted Compaq, Dell and white boxes, and consumers followed. I remained a Mac fan and Mac buyer, eagerly awaiting every glimmer of hope from MacRumors.com and Guy Kawasaki that the collapse of the Wintel monopoly was imminent. Remaining one of the faithful at a time when Apple-bashing was as common in the media as Apple veneration is today was made easier because I lived in San Francisco (the city has many creative professionals and already lived in the shadow of Silicon Valley), but it still wasn't easy. Apple got no respect. Nor was Next a realistic option for me. As for Pixar, I did buy some software it created for manipulating type, and eventually I went to see some of their movies. That made me happy for Steve: he deserved some success after being so rudely rejected by his first child.

It was clear that Apple Computer was not whole without Steve Jobs, and when he was brought back and eventually became CEO in 1997, it seemed like things at Apple were falling into place. I happened to be selling a business I'd had for ten years and spent $1,000 of the windfall on some Apple stock, which then cost a little over $5 (adjusted for subsequent splits). I wanted to put my money where my mouth had been for a whole lot of years. Just a few minutes later the stock tanked again. So much for me being a smart investor with astute market timing.

I could not, by the way, have sold that business if it hadn't been for my Mac. It helped me create original new products (postcards), keep books that conformed with professional accounting standards, and draw up the financial statements that I needed to show prospective buyers.

Owning Apple stock did, however, allow me to go to a shareholder meeting at the headquarters on Infinity Loop in Cupertino. I remember Jobs as being focused on business - not the rebel of yore whose idealism and temper got him to pursue pie-in-the-sky projects and waste everyone's energy on useless drama. I could have walked up to him - this was before he became a big star again - but I truly had nothing to tell him. I saw the showman in him come out in full force only at a keynote speech at a MacWorld expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco ca 1999, and back then Steve's 'reality distortion field' was strong: maybe not as subtle and effective as it became later on, just full of raw power. Even the journalists cheered announcements of new features. I don't know exactly how he generated that distortion, but I know it had something to do with not shying away from using strong words: "the best ever," "fantastic," "insanely great," "a computer for the rest of us." From anyone else, it would all have sounded as hyperbole.

Those Think Different years really were great. Susan and I had been married not long before and had bought a house (at an affordable price, I may add). I got a godson, Charlie. Having returned to college, I found I was capable of doing school after all, and eventually I graduated - but only after a lot of late-night essay writing on my Mac, of course. Those were also dot-com boom days, so Apple's stock had its ups and downs, but on the whole it did OK. I got my first 'real' job and found my career - at the tender age of 45. Somewhere along the road I stopped comparing myself with Steve Jobs.

Then came the iPod, which woke up the world to what Steve Jobs was doing; the rest of this history is fresh enough. In 2005, he gave a speech at Stanford University that with some superficial changes I would have been happy to have given when I was the student speaker at my commencement: "Stay hungry, stay foolish," he concluded, quoting the Whole Earth Catalog. Apple's stock climbed and climbed again: no one foresaw that in 1997. I bought Susan and me iPhones the day after they hit the market in June 2007. Today we're Peace Corps volunteers with MacBooks.

Few people who never knew me have had as much direct influence in my life as Steve Jobs: Bill Wilson, Bob Smith, George Orwell, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera are the only ones who come to mind.

So here’s to the crazy one. The misfit. The rebel. The troublemaker. The round peg in the square hole.

The one who saw things differently. He was not fond of rules. And he had no respect for the status quo. You could quote him, disagree with him, glorify or vilify him.

About the only thing you couldn’t do was ignore him. Because he changed things. He invented. He imagined. He healed. He explored. He created. He inspired. He pushed the human race forward.

Maybe he had to be crazy.

How else could he have created works of art from chips and code?

I am grateful that you were around during my life, Steve.

Rest in peace, crazy one.