review – Memory Leak

The Five Bullet Review is a condensed review format in as it states, five bullets

Bullet #1 — The good
Bullet #2 — The bad
Bullet #3 — The ugly
Bullet #4 — The surprising
Bullet #5 — Recommendation

I would definitely categorize myself as an “Apple Fan Boy”. When I was in middle school (circa 1989-1990) I found a dial-in bulletin board system (BBS) that hosted an online stock portfolio game where folks would be given pretend $100,000 to invest in stocks. Well, I put all my pretend $100,000 in Apple at the time because I was just caught up in Steve Jobs and that intersection of technology and the arts. It inspired me to focus on computer science and drove my passion to build great products throughout my career. I’m sure I failed the “balanced portfolio” aspect of the game but I think I would have won the long term return on investment game. Apple stock was priced around $0.30 in 1990. My $100,000 investment in Apple in 1989 would be worth roughly $55 million today. Not bad.

Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011. I remember where I was that day — at my desk running an engineering team for a mobile game studio in San Francisco building some of the first mobile games on the Apple iPhone. I even remember writing a brief blog post when it happened.

Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs came out soon after on October 24, 2011. The movie based on Walter Isaacson’s book screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin and staring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Seth Daniels came out in October 2015. All right on top of each other.

I recently had an opportunity re-read the book and re-watch the movie.

This review will be about the book, the movie and Steve.

The good — the book is very well written and very detailed. It’s a very long but reads very fast. Steve’s personality is so complex. He followed his heart and worked his ass off. His perseverance through adversity is amazing to witness. The setbacks are part of our journey and I think we’re all too easy to give up when it gets hard.
The bad — the movie was entertaining but felt forced in some places. It’s hard to believe the entire movie happened at three product launch events. The book was much better.
The ugly — its interesting to think what would have happened if Steve Jobs didn’t die. I bet there would have been many more years of innovation left in him.
The surprising — Steve Jobs is no Jesus. His personality had its imperfections and those imperfections likely helped drive him towards the success he became. Also, it’s amazing to me how detailed Steve got into the development of new products. His name is on over 458 patents.
Recommendation — If you are even a little bit an Apple fan or enjoy a story of the persistence, you will enjoy this book. I highly recommend it.

Bonus: If you have a moment, rewatch Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl advertisement, Apple’s Think Different advertisement and his commencement speech at Stanford University. Very enjoyable. I re-watched his commencement speech with my daughter.

Leave a comment. Thank you for reading!

-rjm

Hello Friends & Family,

I’m generally a heavy research guy when I buy things. I get excited digging in deep about a new area, topic or product. It annoys the heck out of Sarah because she would prefer I “just pick something” rather than spend weeks and months learning about every corner case or limitation. However, I can get annoyed by the overly exhaustive reviews or long videos about things. Sometimes I just need the TL;DR . So, I’m inventing the wildly innovative “Five Bullet Review” (sarcasm) — a short form review of well, anything.

Bullet #1 — The good
Bullet #2 — The bad
Bullet #3 — The ugly
Bullet #4 — The surprising
Bullet #5 — Recommendation

Feels straight forward, right? And it’s ode to a classic Clint Eastwood film.

So, what should I review? I have no idea but I thought I would start simple and review Dune by Frank Herbert which I recently read and listened to the Audible audio book during my time off. Widely considered one of the top ten science fiction books of all time.

Dune is set in the distant future amidst a feudal interstellar society in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs. It tells the story of young Paul Atreides, whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis. While the planet is an inhospitable and sparsely populated desert wasteland, it is the only source of melange, or “spice”, a drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities. Melange is also necessary for space navigation, which requires a kind of multidimensional awareness and foresight that only the drug provides. As melange can only be produced on Arrakis, control of the planet is a coveted and dangerous undertaking. The story explores the multilayered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the factions of the empire confront each other in a struggle for the control of Arrakis and its spice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)

So, what did I think?

The good — Lived up to the hype. Well written. Fantastic character development. Deep world building.
The bad — Don’t listen to the Audible audio book. “A” for effort but it got confusing as hell. They had multiple readers reading different characters in different voices with different special effects. The voices would change and you ask yourself, who the heck is that? And why does that guy sound like Darth Vader?
The ugly — Wow, the 1984 movie adaptation of Dune was a mess. It was such a terrible movie that it turned me off to reading the book. Thank goodness the most recent adaptation by Denis Villeneuve is spectacular.

The surprising — surprisingly fast read because there is plenty of action. Some science fiction can get into annoyingly deep detail on things but in this case, Herbert did a good job keeping the story moving.
Recommendation — if you like science fiction, you need to read Dune. If you don’t, some of the world building might bore you but I still think it’s worth the read.

Well, here’s to some more interesting reviews in the future.

Let me know what you think. Thank you for reading!