With the death and canonization of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the Jobs biography as a kind of sacred text for managers, the ranks of bosses who see Bad Steve's nastier traits as something to imitate is liable to swell.

Of the many, many documented things Jobs did while bringing Apple to where it is today, are there really managers out there picking the worst parts of his personality and deciding that's what to emulate? Or for that matter using Isaacson's bio as a "sacred text"? I haven't seen or heard of this management trend, but I haven't been around a lot of managers lately.

It's been pointed out that most of Apple's historic turnaround, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, happened while Jobs was sick. So I guess managers who want to emulate him should try to get cancer. You know, like those jazz musicians who thought if they shot heroin they'd play like Charlie Parker.

Speaking of drugs, Jobs supposedly said that Bill Gates would have been better off if he'd tried LSD in his youth. Why aren't managers following that advice? Or are they?

It's certainly possible there is a correlation between unpleasant personality traits and people who rise to the top in business. Let's just say such a correlation is not entirely implausible. That does not mean that by going out of your way to hurt people's feelings you will become a more successful manager or executive.

Here's Guy Kawasaki on the things he learned from Steve Jobs:

Notice that "be a jerk" is not on the list, which Guy has also written up in various places including Google+.

By the way, Guy gave an excellent version of this talk at MacTech Conference. MacTech will be making it available for free — soon, I hope.

When I was a small child Uncle Al taught me to climb stairs foot-over-foot instead of stopping with both feet on each step. This was at the old house in Ossining.

One day he showed me how the three angles of any triangle add up to 180 degrees, by cutting corners from a piece of paper. Without being pushy, he always encouraged me to learn.

When I was in high school he got me a summer job programming the Apple II. If you know me, you know how that turned out.

We celebrated Uncle Al's 88th birthday in October with a gathering at his favorite restaurant in Chinatown.

Whenever I see something on the Web about Chinese food or history, my first reflex is to email it to Uncle Al. It will take a while for that reflex to fade. I will miss Uncle Al's infectious laugh and the running gag between us where he'd tease me about my endless appetite. I will always admire the devotion with which he cared for Aunt Kay in her final years.

I invite family and friends to share remembrances in the comments section below. If you'd like to share a photo you can email it to me at aglee@earthlink.net, and I will add it to this post along with any comment you would like to add.

There has been excellent food for thought on all sides.

I never intended to make anyone feel excluded or belittled. What I hoped was to entertain and inform.

For the moment at least, that is all I have to say.

The title of my talk is "The Ten Dirty Words and How to Use Them".

Friday Oct 28 (tomorrow) is the last day to get the pre-registration rate, so if you're on the fence about going, decide soon!

Come say hi if you see me there!

NSString *label = [self someBooleanTest]
                  ? [self methodWithASortOfLongishName]
                  : [self anotherMethodWithALongishName];

Unfortunately Xcode (at least Xcode 3) autoindents this code like this:

NSString *label = [self someBooleanTest]
? [self methodWithASortOfLongishName]
: [self anotherMethodWithALongishName];

As a workaround, I use the fact that Xcode likes to align things under parentheses and other opening delimiters:

NSString *label = ([self someBooleanTest]
                   ? [self methodWithASortOfLongishName]
                   : [self anotherMethodWithALongishName]);

This can help with other compound expressions as well:

BOOL rectContainsPoint = ((point.x > NSMinX(rect))
                          && (point.x < NSMaxX(rect))
                          && (point.y > NSMinY(rect))
                          && (point.y < NSMaxY(rect)));

Side note: The reason I parenthesized the subexpressions of the boolean expression above is so I can easily select a subexpression by double-clicking on a parenthesis. This makes it easier to eyeball for correctness. I don't always do this — I probably wouldn't have done it with this particular code — but when I do it's more for this reason than for protecting myself from an operator-precedence mistake.

I have other indentation quibbles that I don't have workarounds for. I'll submit Radars for them when I get around to checking that they're still present in Xcode 4.

UPDATE: Parentheses can also help with autoindenting of blocks:

volumeCalculator = (^(float width, float height, float depth)
                    {
                        return width * height * depth;
                    });

Without the parentheses, the above would look like this, which makes less sense to me:

volumeCalculator = ^(float width, float height, float depth)
{
    return width * height * depth;
};

Did my friend mean:

• Edison Chen?
• Tony Leung?
• Andy Lau?
• Or Eric Tsang?

Please note that what follows is not meant to defend or praise Steve Jobs, or to attack Richard Stallman, or to imply Dave Winer is a bad person. It's directed purely at Winer's poor logic.

Winer wishes to defend his claim that Stallman was being "both appropriate and respectful" toward Steve Jobs. He assures us that he knows what "respect" means:

If you read my web writing going back to the beginning, you'll see the concept of Respect in a lot of the pieces. I really worked this one through.

First, appeal to authority is weakest when one uses oneself as the authority. Just make your case and let readers judge for themselves how well you worked it through. Second, he immediately follows by telling us:

Respect means you respond to who the person really is, or what the object really is, not what you imagine it is.

That is not at all what respect means. The quality Winer describes is freedom from illusion. You can imagine incorrect things about a person and direct your respect at that misguided impression. It's still respect. I suspect what Winer means to talk about is freedom from pretense, because he argues that

when Stallman says that Jobs made computers that put users in a tightly controlled box ("jail made cool"), he is being respectful. It's very true!

No. Stallman is being honest. He sincerely means what he says. However, he says it in the form of a backhanded compliment. To defend the "compliment" part as respectful while ignoring the "backhanded" part is a gross sin of omission.

Now for Winer's other word, "appropriate":

([Stallman] also sees a man who died, and responded to that too. It helps you feel the humanity of Stallman, he has this much in common with Jobs, he too will die.) Stallman is telling you about Stallman through Steve's life. Perfect. Totally appropriate (the other word) because that's exactly what we all do, whether we admit it or not.

Setting aside the absurdity of this reading of Stallman's words as some sort of poignant reminder that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin — setting that aside — factual correctness does not make a statement appropriate any more than it makes it respectful. Stallman does address the sad fact of death, and I think it is fair to remind people of this. But he does not do so in an appropriate way.

The key part of respect is consideration for the dignity and feelings of other people. The key part of appropriateness is consideration of social norms. These qualities are related to honesty and factual correctness but to confuse them as being the same is at best badly mistaken.

There's a joke that goes: "I'm not saying so-and-so's mother was a whore; I'm just pointing out she had money and I never saw her at night." I defy Winer to imagine this factual statement applied to any deceased person and find it respectful or appropriate in any sense other than admiration for the mother's entrepreneurial spirit.

I understand a little now how sad people were when John Lennon was killed. Of course in this case there isn't the shock factor — we've known for a long time that Steve's days were numbered. But it still comes as a blow to lose an icon that so much of my life has revolved around.

Steve made many, many marks on history. Now we will mourn for a while. And then we will carry on, because of the mark he made on us.

I do eventually decide to live with what I've got. I see old posts all the time that I'd love to rewrite, but I leave them alone.

I wonder if there is or should be a WordPress plug-in that allows readers to see old versions of a post.

Two things. First, why does the title of the article put "Worse Than a Ghost Town" in quotes? The phrase is the author's own words from the article itself. He's not reporting something somebody else said. [That should be "First, I am a bonehead." Chris corrected me in the comments.]

Second, I agree with Guy Kawasaki:

I feel like it's a resort that the tourists haven't trashed yet.

I have a big backlog of stuff in my Google+ stream that I wish I had time to catch up on. Granted, a lot of it is from Guy himself, but there's plenty of good stuff from other people too.

That said:

• I wouldn't mind seeing more of my friends on Google+, as opposed to people I know only by reputation.
• Although posting on Google+ is pleasurable in the same way as writing a blog post, I don't see it ever replacing my own blog.
• They really, really have to allow me to edit the excerpt they add when I post a link. It matters a lot to me to be able to pick an excerpt that enhances any point I am trying to make and that will make people want to click the link.

A commenter on Reimold's article points out:

Face book is a social network, but G+ is also an Interest network.

Guy makes a similar point but uses the word "passions". Not my favorite word, but I agree. When I say I want to see more of my friends on Google+, I mean my fellow Cocoa geeks and judo enthusiasts. There's a whole other category of social interaction I prefer to do on Facebook.