Bong! . . . :-) . . . Welcome to Macintosh!
Ever wonder how it feels to be in the presence of insanely great
people? To sense a feeling of magic and awe that reverberates
through the ages? To know without a doubt that you're about to
embark on a wonderful journey into the minds of many truly admired
individuals?
This seems like the only fitting introduction to the people of
whom I speak, individuals who need no introduction.
The first
interview is with a guy who's no doubt well known in the Mac
community. For all Compact Mac
fans, Macquarium outta be
ringing a bell right about now. A man of true humility and
humanity, none other than - drum roll - Andy Ihnatko!
Andy writes for the Chicago
Sun-Times and has written for more magazines and websites than
you can shake a stick at.
I interviewed Andy a while ago on iChat:
Tommy: I have to tell you, this is really cool for me to
sit down with you, Andy. I've enjoyed your columns for a long time.
:-)
Andy: No sweat!
Tommy: How was the career of the famous Andy Ihnatko
born?
Andy: Well, I started off by writing for my local user
group (the Boston Computer Society Macintosh User Group). The point
of a UG is that there are always things that need to be done, and
no money to pay anybody to do it. So when a volunteer shows up and
says, "Why don't I take a crack at that?", they don't ask to see a
resume.
Tommy: What jumped out at you about Apple that made you
wanna say, "Hey, I should write about it!"?
Andy: Well, I've been using Apples since I was a little
kid. Loved the Mac when it first came out, even though I wasn't
making nearly enough money on my paper route to afford one.
Chiefly, I wound up writing about Apples because of my involvement
with the BCS*Mac. I was writing in their monthly
newsletter/magazine, and I was also helping to run their monthly
meetings. One month, the editors of Macworld, MacWeek, and MacUser
were all there as the speakers/guests. I was giving some of my
usual talks up on stage . . . guess they liked what they
heard, because two of them approached me after the meeting! Can't
make it sound too casual, though, because I had a some
photocopies of my articles in my satchel (just in case).
Tommy: Good idea! Gotta stay one step ahead of the
curve.
Andy: Well, it's more a case of being ready for an
opportunity when it comes. My career wouldn't have started when it
did if I hadn't gone to the meeting, but it also wouldn't have
happened that way if I hadn't been writing something every day
since I was in Junior High! I mean, it's not enough to have some
clippings on you at all times. I like to think that I was ready for
the opportunity when the opportunity came.
Tommy: I'd say you were more than ready.
In 1999 is when I started writing, I was in high school. I wrote
for a couple of PC sites (gasp) reviewing hardware. Worked for a
couple of other sites up until 2002. Didn't return to writing until
I joined Low End Mac in August of 2006. That's when I knew I wanted
to write. That led me to this interview tonight, I'm glad to
say.
Andy: Well, there sure isn't anything wrong about writing
about PCs. I write about 'em damned-near every week for the
[Chicago] Sun-Times. Writing's a muscle . . . it responds
to exercise, no matter how you work it.
Tommy: Absolutely! I actually enjoyed writing about PC's,
although I mostly wrote reviews.
You have quite the loyal following. What do you attribute that
to besides good looks and personality?
...nobody tried to force me to write like a
normal person.
Andy: I suppose I'm lucky in that I've always tried to
develop my own writing style, and by the time I started working
with real editors, I'd gotten rid of enough of the spastic tics
that nobody tried to force me to write like a normal person.
The idea is that you have to have something original to deliver.
Otherwise, why should they read my stuff instead of anybody else's?
I'm not suggesting that my style is everybody's cuppa tea, but the
great thing is that I find myself the sole practitioner of my kind
of writing, so I've sort of cornered the market.
Tommy: The Macquarium - considered perhaps your most
popular article by many. How was the idea born?
Andy: This demonstrates the dangers of going for the
cheap, easy joke! I was writing the Help Folder column at MacUser,
answering reader questions (it was the gig I got from that BCS*Mac
meeting; I was answering questions spontaneously from the stage).
Someone wrote in and asked, "What's the best way to upgrade a 512K
Mac?" And Mr. Funnybones said, "Gut it out and turn it into an
aquarium!" Then I answered it seriously.
But even back then, a 512 was worth for 1/10299th of a gram more
than nothing. Much to my surprise, I started getting mail asking
"Wait . . . how do you turn a Mac into an
aquarium?" So I sort of felt like I had to answer it. Conversions
like that were a pretty common meme. I remember seeing my first
Macintosh aquarium back at the first or second Macworld Expo in
Boston.
But (a) the conversions were usually pretty lame (the person
would just putty up all of the openings and fill the case halfway
with water) and/or (b) really tough to pull off. I wanted to design
a solution that almost anybody could build and which would run the
waterline all the way past the top of the monitor cutout
. . . so it looked like a Really Good Screensaver. It
took me two or three tries before I hit upon the right design (an
angled four-sided box that sat atop a wooden platform). I still
have one of the prototypes I made out of wood. I wrote the first
version of the plans in a two-day marathon period, while I was
teaching about Macs at the BCS's Summer Computer Institute (sort of
a summer camp for adults wanting to learn Mac), stealing time
wherever I could. And it's been pretty cool. I still get plenty of
email from folks building their own. The charity auction record for
a completed Macquarium stands at $1,000 (for a PBS pledge
drive).
Tommy: That's definitely a cool story! Haven't tried it
myself, but who knows, there's a first time for everything!
Andy: Indeed!
Tommy: You have a hysterical, off-the-wall, wacky writing
style. Is it a natural thing, or does it consist of a regiment of
practice, pullin' all nighters, and watching too many movies?
Andy: To answer your question: Carpet adhesive. I close
the windows, open a can, breathe deeply, and then just write what
the orange pixies tell me to write. Buuuut seriously, folks.
Tommy: LOL!
Andy: I hate to sound so boring, but the to-the-point
answer is that I don't really sit down to write until I have a
clear picture in my head of where I want to go and what I want to
say, and I keep challenging myself to remove every cliché
and every quick and easy way of doing something from my
writing.
You can take that sort of thing way too far, of course
. . . the terrible extreme is when you're so in love with
seeming clever that nobody has any idea what the hell you're
talking about. But the fact remains that "The Zune is difficult to
use" isn't nearly as nice a phrase as "It was about as pleasant as
having an airbag deploy in your face," so any time you take to find
it is time well-spent.
Tommy: LOL!
Andy: And as any writer will tell you, most of the work
you do is preparing the soil, so to speak, so that when you sit
down to write, Good Things Will Happen.
Tommy: Amen.
Andy: Just the other day, I got my schedule a little
screwed up . . . I thought an editor needed something at
the end of the week when actually it was going to really help her
out if she could get it on Monday. I knew the bare bones of what I
wanted to write, but not specifically how I needed to go about it.
And as soon as I figured out the first sentence, blang, it landed
in the window easy as you please. But again, we come back to what I
said earlier: My writing muscles are well-worked. Deadline pressure
also works wonders. :-)
Tommy: Yep, I concur with you there. It gets the creative
juices a-flowin'! As for the carpet adhesive - that would make for
a great gag on The Simpsons, don't ya think?
Andy: I'm sure it did at some point. 18 seasons is a
lotttttt of dead air to fill.
Tommy: Amen!
Tommy: Inspiration-wise, who influenced and inspired Andy
Ihnatko most of all?
Andy: Douglas Adams, certainly, with a minor in Monty
Python. When I read The Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The
Galaxy, it really flipped that switch in my head. It proved
that there really weren't any hard and fast rules about how to
write something . . . so long as it's effective in
the end. He showed me that writing could be fun.
I sat down and wrote a desperately derivative short story (my
first ever, when not working under threats of teachers) shortly
after reading Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. And
I've been writing nearly every day, ever since.
Python, too, was a big influence; again, their greatest lesson
is that there's nothing, nothing that you can't do, so long
as you figure out a way to make it actually work. They were masters
of that; they'd have one idea, and use it as the backbone for an
entire show. Another idea, they'd (wisely) use as a quick
five-second gag that disappears before the laughter ends.
What I learned later on was that Adams had been hugely
influenced by PG Wodehouse,
who stands as my absolutely favorite writer, ever. I'm in awe of
his ability to hide every last scrap of hard work that obviously
went into his short stories and novels. I insist that The Code
Of The Woosters is one of the best novels ever written. It
never gets its due, of course, because it's a comedy.
But the thing that I've come to appreciate is that you never
stop acquiring influences. Every time I see a writer who can do
something that I can't, I want to figure out how he or she did it.
Whether it's a diarist from the 1700s or a blogger I just
encountered last week. Never be satisfied with your own stuff,
never be impressed by the last thing you did. Learning never
ends.
Tommy: That's what I try to do with my writing. Learning
lots from you as we speak! You are definitely one of my
influences.
Andy: Heh! Then I change my answer: I was utterly
disgusted by the pig's ear that had been made of English literature
and set out to reinvent it for a new, bolder generation.
Tommy: LOL!
Due to your rock star status, have you ever been mobbed in
public by crazed Mac fans asking for an autograph or wanting you to
sign their MacBook?
Andy: I confess that I have autographed the bottoms of
two women in my career. I have what I like to call "Phayme"" which
is like actual Fame in the same way that "Cheez" is similar to
Cheese. Close enough in many respects, but if you put it on a
product package, you'll get sued.
Tommy: LOL
Andy: On the streets, o' course, it happens less
frequently. But I'm occasionally flabbergasted. It's wonderful when
I stop in a diner in Maine and out of the blue . . .
"Hey, are you...?" But again, really, what I have couldn't really
be called "fame". I have a few legitimately famous friends, and if
I ever had any illusions about it, they were immediately
corrected!
Suffice to say that even when I stop by the Apple Store to pick
something up, I'm expecting that nobody will know who I am.
Tommy: What part of you screams "unique" - besides the
hat and shades?
Andy: I dunno. The sideburns, probably. Alas, this isn't
a costume. This is the way I actually dress.
Tommy: Rather snazzy I might add! I have a Tijuana side
of me which includes a straw hat, the famous Piña Colada
shirt, along with my own pair of shades.
Andy: A freak flag belongs in the air, not in a
drawer.
Tommy: LOL
Tommy: Has fame gone to your head, out the window, or
somewhere in between?
Andy: Oh, God, no. Again: It's "Phayme"" I think if I
ever let fame get to my head, I'd quickly discover how little of it
I actually have...! And ego doesn't help me get the next thing
written.
Tommy: Tell me about the Colossal Waste of Bandwidth.
Andy: Bless you for bringing it up. CWOB.com has been my
site since about 1995 or so; yes, I've been blogging for more than
a decade now!
I started it up back when MacUser offered me a free site, hosted
from their servers. It was a blast teaching myself HTML and stuff.
I named it "the colossal waste of bandwidth" because I believe in
truth in advertising. I would do things like upload the entire
database file from my comic-book collection . . . utterly
useless, and a thrilling abuse of the webspace that I had been
given.
Tommy: Do you keep your adoring fans up-to-date on the
latest in the the world of Ihnatko on CWOB.com?
Andy: Ideally, that's what I'd use it for . . .
actually, I wish I could be a blogging demon like so many other
folks. I manage to post six or seven things there a month, usually
just synaptic misfirings. The problem is that I still use my own
custom blogging software, and it makes it tough to go back in and
make edits. I keep having to fix the HTML by hand when I finally
spot grammatical errors and Dumb Ways To Have Said Something.
I still haven't even put up an announcement about my iPod book,
and that came out in November! So at least people know I'm not just
in this to pimp my product.
Tommy: Most annoying pains in the rump roast in regards
to writing . . . yours would be?
...you always have those days when you just
plain can't figure out what the first sentence ought to be.
Andy: Hard to articulate, but you always have those days
when you just plain can't figure out what the first sentence ought
to be. Nothing you write makes you happy.
Tommy: I've had those. Mental block, as it's
affectionately known.
Andy: But I always make a baseball analogy. I imagine Ted
Williams striking out and then stomping back to the dugout and
kicking the hell out of the water cooler.
Tommy: LOL
Andy: You gotta do that, because you have to get ready
for the next at-bat. And there will be another at-bat.
Tommy: Amen to that!
Andy: And "writers' block" is just an excuse. There's
always something to be written. If Thing One isn't working, write
Thing Two. I'm very, very fortunate in that I always have plenty of
different projects going at once. If the newspaper column isn't
working, I'll work on a magazine column. Or a book. Or a blog
thing. Or any of a number of other things. Never any excuse for not
writing. But remember what I said about kicking the water cooler.
Gets the bad hoodoo out.
Tommy: There's plenty of hoodoo and poopoo to go
around.
Are memoirs in your future? I can see it now: Ihnatko: My
Life, The Macquarium Nightmares, and How I Lived Through the
Insanity!
Andy: Heh. Only if I were allowed to make most of it up.
Like the bits where I worked Mission Control during Apollo 17.
Tommy: Greatest achievements personally and
professionally: What tops your list?
Andy: I suppose if I could pick one moment, it came years
ago, when I had written the pre-show to the Apple keynote at
Macworld Expo one year (this was before the Jobs years, of course).
It was at the 5,000-seat Metropolitan Center here in Boston, and I
acted as writer-director-producer. It was a funny game show
. . . I even wrote a program that was distributed at the
door.
The point is that after lots and lots of work, the show went on.
I was standing at the back of the theater in that little cubicle
where the sound guy and his board sit. I was wearing a headset in
full Producer mode. I.e., with nothing to do, really, but listen to
the crew and be on hand in case there were any problems. So for a
whole hour, I listened to thousands of people laugh at my stuff. I
was completely anonymous there, but the pride of seeing that
everything I'd written was working was a big one.
Tommy: Wow!
Andy: On a less specific note, every time they let me
keep writing for money, I'm terribly proud.
Another baseball thing: from Bull Durham, when the
catcher gets traded so that a raw pitcher could get some
experience. "What do I get?" he asks the manager. "You get to come
back to the ballpark . . . and you get to keep getting
paid to do it!" That's enough. I love the fact that every week and
every month, I get to keep coming back to the ballpark.
Tommy: I'm sure all Mac fans out there are too! I know I
am.
Your first experience with the Mac - tell me about it.
Andy: A little store called Unicom, near the movie
theater. I'd read about the Mac
in Softalk, the reigning Apple II mag, and when I was biking past
after a movie and saw that they had one, I dragged my bike in.
I still remember how it felt to use the thing. The first time I
ever used a mouse; the pointer seemed to move by telekinesis. The
screen: This was the first monitor that was so sharp, the
individual dots actually had corners. And it was crisp white
on deep black. Even the floppy drive: that low whrrrrrrrrrr
that would occasionally come up from time to time.
Tommy: Ahhhhh yes! Preach on!
Andy: Completely unlike anything else I'd ever used. The
back of my neck was tingling, literally. You used it, and you
wanted to keep using it. I was hooked; it was just plain
right.
Tommy: My sentiments exactly!
Andy: You're at a disadvantage, though: you'll never
understand how completely different the Mac was because (I'm
guessing) you weren't into computers during that time in human
history when Macs didn't exist. It really felt like the first time
airplanes started appearing. I wasn't around for that one, but I
can appreciate the sense of "Whoah..." You're like 22, right?
Tommy: Sadly, you're right on me not being into computers
at that time, I was too busy being a 2 year old....
Andy: Exactly.
Tommy: I didn't use my first computer until the Apple IIe
in 1987. My first home computer was an IBM PS/1 in 1993. I'm
ashamed to admit this, but didn't even know what a Mac was until
1997. I'm 25.
Andy: No shame in that. The first computer that I
actually bought myself was a PC/XT clone . . . for the
simple reason that I could get it on clearance for $500 instead of
the $2,500 that a Mac 512 would
have cost me. And it was a swell machine.
Tommy: I had many a fun hour on that PS/1, which I still
have. Played many hours of Earl Weaver Baseball on it, and
thoroughly enjoyed After Dark!
Andy: Yup. Earlier generations, their childhood memories
are attached to music, movies, cars . . . mine and yours
are attached to computers and games.
Tommy: I learned to appreciate the Mac even more after
many years of PCs and Windows. But I never forgot the memories of
my childhood on PCs.
What about Apple made you go, "Way Cool!"?
Andy: Right with the Apple II+ my family had as a tot. It
was like a Ford with a slant-six engine . . . you could
monkey around with it all you wanted. I did my own repairs and
eventually wrote my own OS for it. I never pwned a computer as much
as I pwned that Apple.
I also liked that you knew about the people who created
it. Nobody didn't know who Woz and Jobs were. You heard about Bert
Kersey and Mark Pelczarsky . . . they didn't build the
Apple II, but they wrote a lot of the best software for it.
Tommy: I remember the cluck-cluck-cluck of the floppy
drive as it loaded the program. It was like being in the back seat
of the car anxiously awaiting reaching your destination.
Andy: Yeah, that was a big help when cracking software.
With practice, you could figure out what the drive heads were
doing, and that'd show you where to go looking for the boot
blocks.
Tommy: Through the successes and failures of Apple over
the years, which stand out most to you?
Andy: Well, it's hard to choose a single failure out of
the dozens of awful Macs that
Apple made during the post-Sculley, pre-Jobs II era.
Apple had a reputation for not having the slightest clue what
they were meant to be doing. And what made things worse was the
fact that the Macs that they did make weren't very good. You
sort of tensed yourself every time a new model came out. Would it
be:
- A nice, fast processor inside an architecture that made it
impossible to realize any of that speed?
- An okay machine, kneecapped by bad, cheap, stupid design and
construction and destined for breakdowns? or
- A fairly decent Mac, but unbeknownst to the Mac community and
even maybe its project manager, there's going to be another Mac
released in two months that will completely outclass it at the
exact same price?
It was a bad time. Truth be told, Apple was never close to
self-destruction - when Jobs came back on, the Apple Doomsday Clock
stood at four years or so - but it was a bad time to be a Mac user.
Plenty of landmarks, though.
You really have to focus on the stuff that Changed Everything
. . . the Apple II, the Mac 128, the year of the first iMacs (for God's sake, shortly
thereafter, you could buy George Forman Grills in iMac colors!),
the iPod.
Tommy: The future of Apple - your thoughts?
Andy: Definitely moving more in the direction of a
general Consumer Electronics Company and away from its identity as
a Computer Company.
Tommy: I agree.
Andy: It's more than just deleting the word "Computer"
from its name. Services are going to become more and more important
in the coming years.
The iPod truly was a powerful idea: It's the true trifecta.
Apple gets to sell this bit of hardware; they get to control the
software that you need to operate it; and (biggest) A + B means
that you get to control this massive pipeline of commercial content
into personal and home devices.
Sell music and movies, sure. Apple TV - sell TV subscriptions
that download automatically. Make a more practical and
transformative form of YouTube, where folks stop thinking about
"video podcasts" and start simply thinking about TV shows that show
up on the box connected to their HDTV.
This is why the theoretical Beatles deal is such a huge thing.
The company that gets any sort of exclusive on Beatles material is
like the army that carries the Ark of the Covenant before it:
undefeatable.
The bad news might be that the Mac might become a support system
for iTunes content, as far as Apple is concerned. So fingers
crossed against that.
Tommy: On the same token, could we potentially see a
sequel of the age old battle Microsoft vs. Apple? Could history
repeat itself?
I'll put it a different way: Basically what I mean is, could we
see another showdown between Apple and Microsoft, albeit in a
different sector of technology or combined technologies?
Andy: I don't think it'll happen, because Microsoft and
Apple are now two very different companies with two very different
goals. At this stage, Apple can't really hope to become the
dominant OS maker on the planet and MS can't hope to become the
dominant maker of media players and media.
Tommy: So in other words, a stalemate?
Andy: Stalemate indicates two battling factions. This is
the Boston Red Sox and the LA Lakers. They're playing completely
different games. It's hard to imagine anything that Apple can do to
bring down Microsoft's OS dominance. Which is fine, because that
doesn't appear to be an Apple goal. Microsoft would love to get a
piece of digital music . . . but they just don't have
that power. At best, they need to contract with Viacom to build a
music store and contract with Toshiba to build them a music
player.
So instead, we have Apple, which would be happy to continue to
build market share (which is always good for the health of the
platform) but which is truly focused on creating the transistor
radio of the 21st century. That device that's in every pocket and
in every car and every home and office, which delivers the content
that everybody relies on. With the added twist that Apple also wets
its beak on the content, too.
And we have Microsoft, who will continue to attempt to leverage
the popularity of Windows, hopefully by creating new Internet and
desktop software standards that makes the OS more pertinent to
folks' daily lives.
Don't discount Xbox 360, which is a true MS success story. But
they need to have a far more ambitious and creative plan in place
in order to really exploit those 10,000,000 boxes.
This is actually the start of a very
vulnerable time for MS.
This is actually the start of a very vulnerable time for
MS. Vista isn't getting the job done, and if the average consumer
isn't considering Linux as an alternative, IT guys certainly are.
And Linux is making huge leaps.
Tommy: Something tells me that Apple may not have to lift
a finger to potentially dethrone MS. MS seems to be
self-destructing.
Andy: Well, that might be going a bit far. But I can
easily see their desktop market share dipping below 70% in the next
few years, which would have been unfathomable a few years ago.
Tommy: What's in Andy's Swiss army knife of favorite
commercial/shareware/freeware apps for Classic and OS X?
Andy: I can't really think off the top of my head.
Tommy: I say Microsoft, you think?
Andy: Big company, smart people, undermined by its
structure.
If Microsoft made the Zune team into a Skunk Works sort of
organization - "here you go . . . we've rented you a
building on the other side of town, here's your budget, get back to
us in a year with a player" - it could have been wonderful.
Like lots of MS products, though, it seems like the design went
up and down the bureaucracy way too many times.
Tommy: Microsoft past and present. Your thoughts?
Andy: It's like Saturday Night Live. It's just not
an environment in which innovation and exciting things can
flourish. It's a company that could have come up with
Spotlight and Automator first, but it just takes too long for the
right people to convince the right people that it's the right
idea.
Tommy: Breaking down any doors to get your hands on
Vista?
Andy: I've had it since September or late August. Not a
bad little OS.
Tommy: I played with it a little at
Walmart. Not too
shabby.
Microsoft = Innovation, truth or myth?
Andy: Hard to see it in their products, but a lot of that
is because they don't seem to have the guts to really see things
through. Every year, there's a CES keynote in which MS shows off
potentially neat stuff that they intend to sell. And then you never
hear about these things again . . . or they're released,
and after they fail to completely set the world on fire in the
first three months, MS stops promoting them.
Tommy: Will poopoo Zune's make a fashion statement in the
upcoming years?
Andy: Zune? What's that?
Tommy: ;-)
Andy: Which is sort of the point. When I wrote that it'll
be dead in six months, I didn't mean that they wouldn't be
available for sale anywhere. I meant that MS would do what they
always do: They'll forget that this product exists.
Tommy: I believe that myself. I think it was another one
of their misguided pet projects.
Andy: Not misguided at all; there's plenty of room for a
true iPod alternative.
If MS had made something like the iPhone - only without the
phone features - I mean, holy cats. But you don't do it by making
something that costs as much as an iPod without its
conveniences.
Tommy: Exactly.
Tommy: If Microsoft offered to hire you as a technology
consultant, what would your response be?
Andy: I'd have to say no, because it'd be an obvious
breach of journalistic ethics.
But if they offered to pay me so much that my retirement fund
would be fully vested in five years, and they convinced me that I'd
actually have some power to get things done . . . well,
that'd be interesting. But I don't think either thing would
happen.
Tommy: Which Mac in particular graces the home of
Ihnatko?
Andy: I have a bunch, of course. But the most important
one is my 1.25 GHz 15" PowerBook
Aluminum. It's the one that I do all of my writing on and all
of my personal stuff on. A.k.a., "the one thing I grab if there's a
fire."
Tommy: I hear ya there!
Tommy: Is there a particular cause you champion?
Andy: Give blood.
Someone you love is alive today because someone like you endured
1/5 of a second of discomfort and 20 minutes of lying down.
Tommy: I wholeheartedly agree with you!
Tommy: When you think back on all of Macdom, what's your
all-time favorite Mac?
Andy: Probably the
second iMac design, where the screen hovered on a steel arm.
Brilliant design. The screen was exactly where you wanted it to be,
in every possible situation. Nothin' like it.
Tommy: Love the hat on your Colossal Waste of Bandwidth.
Where could one obtain that along with an autographed photo?
Andy: I think my sister has that one. As for autographed
photo, I think I've only done three or four of those. It was on a
Geek Cruise last year . . . the ship takes these formal
portraits and I had a bit of fun with mine. Some of the folks in
the group paid $20 for their own copies and had me sign 'em.
Tommy: Cool.
Andy: I felt like Erik Estrada or something (circa 1980,
when he was still hot).
Tommy: LOL :-D
Tommy: In your infinite wisdom, would you care to share
it with today's youth no matter what they aspire to be?
Humility and compassion are the two tools
that will help you the most.
Andy: Humility and compassion are the two tools that will
help you the most. The more willing you are to ask yourself, "What
if my way of thinking and my understanding of the world
isn't the only way?" and "What does the world look like
through other people's eyes and experiences?", the less the world
will frustrate and surprise you.
Tommy: Well Andy, you are definitely full of humility and
compassion.
I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing Andy. He's quite a character.
Let me know what you thought of my interview with Andy at
thomas (at) lowendmac (dot) com. I'd love to hear from you!
Stay tuned for the next Welcome to Macintosh.... 
Go to the Welcome to
Macintosh Interviews index.
