Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

I just finished seeing the interview from D5 of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It was pretty cool! They’re sitting up on stage and being interviewed about the impact they’ve had on the industry and how the see what’s happened so far. Highly recommended to watch.
This quote by Steve Jobs stood out:

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones [who] were successful loved what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?

So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to have passion and I think that’s the high-order bit.

The second thing is, you’ve got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people and you’ve got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well and hire them and, you know, see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to help, you know, build an organization that can eventually just, you know, build itself because you need great people around you.

- Steve Jobs at D5

I think that’s really interesting: you’ve got to have passion, love what you do, and be a good judge of talent.

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This Saturday I returned from nearly 3 weeks of vacation in the States. Good times as always, sad to leave. I met up with my brother in New York, and stayed there for a couple of days. Picked up a rental car in Newark. The car (categorized as a midsize by the rental guy) turned out to be a big Kia Sorento with a big 3,8L V6 engine. We headed towards Boston where we stayed at the Prescott in Everett. Boston was nice, we walked the Freedom Trail and saw MIT and Harvard. Next on the trip was Niagara Falls, and on the I90 going there we experienced the wildest batch of rain I’ve ever seen. Incredible the amount of water coming down. Traffic almost came to a complete stop, because you couldn’t see anything! We spend the night in Rochester, which left us with an 1,5 hours driving the next day. Niagara Falls was great! Went on the packaged tour which means Maid of the Mist (sailing into the Horseshoe Falls), Cave of the Winds (walking close to the Bridal Veil Falls) and the lookout tower. Highly recommended. We spend the night outside Erie, PA, where we also checked out Isle de la Presque. Drove to Morgantown and meet Rune, and saw WVU. We ate at Texas Roadhouse and hte Boston Beanery, had a chance to say hello to Todd and aussie I meet while studying there. Genereally just good times and fun memories. I bought some more WVU merchandise. After Motown we turned the car towards my uncle’s in Delaware, where we spent the last week. Mainly just relaxing, going to malls and buying stuff. One day was spent in Washington, another going to the beach (Bethany). Our trip to Washington was kinda cool. We drove down there and parked in a garage in Downtown 10 minutes walk from the White House. No problem what so ever. Going bac kwas another story. The traffic was thick and people were driving like crazy. But we managed to get out with a non bruised car and our nerves intact.
On the day of departure we drove to Newark to drp of the car. We entered the rental car return area running on the fumes of gas. Great timing. My brother and his friend took the train to JFK, and I went to Terminal B to see if I could drop off my bags early. Luckily for me I could, so with the bags out of the way I took the NJ Transit to NY Penn Station and spent a good 6 hours in the city. Mainly I just wandered around and let time pass. The flight home was rather uneventfull besides a kid who more or less screaemd the entire flight In Kastrup my bags didn’t show at first, but after a couple of hours of searching other luggage belts, filling out a baggage reclaim form, I found my bags by accident. My brother and his friend had kind of the same experience when they landed 4 hours later. All in all it doesn’t bode well for the luggage handling in Kastrup. I wonder who delivered their baggage handling system. 5,5 hours later by train I was back in Aalborg.

However, I miss Dunkin Donuts, Taco Bell, the big Kia, and a lot of other stuff. Hopefully it won’t be long before I can get ovethere again.

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It seems that Niels and I are now featured on the Danish Microsoft web site as Student Partners. Go check it out. I was contacted a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could answer a couple of questions. My answers would be used as a kind of “putting a face on the Danish Microsoft Student Partners”. Sure thing. And now it’s up. The page erroneously lists me as a student, which is wrong. Anyway, who am I to complain If my scribblings can help explain to prospective Student Partners what it’s all about I’m happy.

Btw. Niels is a Student Partner for Aarhus University.

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Fred Brooks may have said there’s no such thing as a silver bullet. I guess he wasn’t thinking of Coors Light. My uncle is home from the US and was kind enough to bring with him a batch of Coors Light cans. So nice. For the uninitiated it’s an American beer. I usually enjoy quite a few of them when in the US. It may be quite thin and watery but it does relieve you of thirst. So I’m currently enjoying a silver bullet while cooking dinner. Maybe we should try to incorporate more silver bullets in software development – the Coors kind not the Brooks kind

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