Igneous Quill

In January 2006, IgneousQuill was born. It came in the aftermath of the worst year of my life thus far, the year I lost my father, quit full-time ministry and moved my family across country from New Mexico to New Jersey. In those difficult days, the original blog provided a means to sort out my thoughts and find my heart again. Over the years that blog shifted from personal to theological to technological in focus, and then broke into four blogs, each with a distinct subject area. For about a year or so I've been mulling over the future of the "brand," if I dare call it that, and have finally decided to retire it.

The blogs bearing the IgneousQuill name will remain live online, at least for the foreseeable future, but will no longer be updated. I'm now blogging at "Missional Journeyman," and invite you to join me there.

If you are a blogger and have me in your blogroll, please update the link.

Thanks for your continued readership.

It's been a good run. 

This morning before work I turned on the TV and "Telecurso" was on TV Globo, the Brazilian channel we subscribe to on cable. I'd heard of this program before, an educational initiative maintained by the Fundação Roberto Marinho. Curious, I looked it up online and discovered the full series (with new episodes being added) available on YouTube.

This program can be good not only for Brazilians, but also to non-Brazilians like myself who speak Portuguese and could benefit from the Brazilian history lessons and Portuguese classes. I plan to watch the episodes that pertain to Brazilian history first, and then review the Portuguese classes.

Click here to check out the page on YouTube. The following video is one example of what's offered.

Access to education has long been a problem in Brazil, and while illiteracy remains high in that country, there have been significant improvements in recent decades. Basic literacy alone, however, won't provide the educated public that a democratic republic needs to survive. There has been explosive growth in the area of private education in Brazil in recent years, and just the other day I came across an interesting article that explains the current situation and overall strategy from the perspective of the government. You can read the full article by clicking here, and the following are some quotes I found interesting.

The "varying quality" is mentioned there is no joke. Some private schools in Brazil have a better reputation than others, but in general the public universities have the best reputations of all. This is odd to me, as someone who grew up in the Midwestern United States in an environment where I came to see private universities at least of equal quality to the public options. One of my sisters-in-law is studying to be a nurse in Brazil and, while her educational experience has been generally good, she has told a few stories of lackadaisical professors that sound terribly similar to some community college teachers my wife has suffered under.

Public education on all levels in Brazil is "free," but admittance to a public university usually requires passing a very difficult entrance examination called the "Vestibular." There is also now an option that involves annual testing in high school, but it is also very challenging. Those who have the benefit of private high school education (which is generally very good in Brazil) and expensive "pre-Vestibular" courses have a distinct advantage over public high school graduates. Thus, the better-off often have a better chance of enrolling at a higher quality, free public university than their less-well-off counterparts. Those with fewer means end up paying for an education that may or may not be of good quality.

This "some kind of education or no education at all" question is similar to what I've long asked about higher education in the United States. I've heard of countless literature and history majors graduating with no job prospects at all. It made me wonder what they thought they'd do with that degree. Even I have at times sorely regretted my "Bachelor of Ministry" degree (no amount of accreditation makes it particularly worthwhile outside the field of Christian ministry). Then again, if the goal is an educated populace rather than personal success, any degree will be "good enough" and better than nothing.

As for the 80% of law students who never pass the exam to become lawyers in Brazil, I found that more than a little daunting. It's long been a dream of mine to study and practice law in Brazil. I suppose I'll have to study all the harder, especially given my cultural and linguistic disadvantage.

There is no doubt that private higher education is very much in demand in Brazil, and I certainly agree that having more citizens better educated will be a benefit to the nation as a whole. At the same time, it would do those private university students well to consider carefully the school they'll be paying to attend, as well as the preferred course of study.

See also:BRAZIL: Private education far better than none at all (University World News)

For the past several days my brother-in-law, Marcelo Lima, has been staying with my family. We are his last stop before returning home from a support-raising tour of churches in the American South and Midwest. He is a missionary in Brazil. My wife and I intend to move our family back to Brazil in a few years, where I hope to work in technology and also help HOPE worldwide expand its outreach. Hearing from him about the current situation in Brazil has been both encouraging and concerning.

Brazil is making great strides in reforming its bureaucracy and promoting business. International investors are taking strong interest in the country and the upcoming World Cup and Olympics to be held in the country are contributing to new infrastructure and a renewed commitment to fight corruption.

On the other hand, the cost of living continues to be ridiculously high in Brazil. Everything from gasoline to cable television are luxury items for the upper middle class (although, of course, many who can't really afford "luxuries" find a way to obtain them anyway). Taxes overwhelmingly burdensome and what should be simple paperwork to open a back account or start a business can take weeks or months to complete.

When we move to Brazil, my family will be making some sacrifices. We'd better be ready for it. Brazil may be a giant that's awakening, but it's still a pretty drowsy beast.

With the passing of Steve Jobs, the world has lost a visionary leader in technology and business. As many have already commented, he was ahead of the curve and saw what we would want before we even thought about it.

The following is the video and text of Mr. Jobs' 2005 Commencement address at Standford University. A lot of great thoughts here, but perhaps my favorite:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

AOL's "Daily Finance" is calling the projected expansion of broadband in Brazil a "gold rush" for multinational companies, but I think the real growth will actually follow the development of the communication infrastructure. Brazil is a nation of young and increasingly tech-savvy people. The only two restrictions on a massive explosion of start-up work (at least that I can see) are the nation's adverse business laws and bureaucracy, and the lack of suitable infrastructure. Even just solving the second problem would open the door to an enormous increase in start-up activity.

With just a little improvement, Brazil could potentially become home to the new Silicon Valley of our day.

During my brief time of residence in Brazil from 2001 to 2003 it seemed to me that cell phones were everywhere. Everyone from old ladies at the bus stop to boys playing soccer in the street had cell phones, and I joked that soon enough dogs would have them there too. Still, phone calls were expensive, and a lot of people (including me) had pre-paid phones and took advantage of the fact that there was no charge to the user on incoming calls (it cost the person calling a cell phone quite a bit though). For this reason I've doubted for a while that smartphones could make much headway in Brazil, assuming that the Internet connection would cost a fortune. Turns out, I was wrong.

Two of my nieces in Brazil are roughly my daughter's age, in their early teens. They've explained to me that although regular phone calls continue to be expensive, unlimited texting and unlimited Internet are only 50 centavos (about 27 US cents) each per day. This puts texting and mobile Internet access well within the reach of many Brazilians.

For years average Brazilians have gotten along with buggy, virus-laden copies of Windows on their desktops (for those who even own computers). With cell phones already so much a part of the culture and with reasonable rates for mobile data, it seems to me that Brazil is set up to make the leap on the consumer level from desktop to smartphones, and quite possibly from Windows to Android. Still, while the Brazilian government officially supports open source technology, it has also encouraged the opening of an iPhone and iPad factory in the country. In any event, mobile technology has been and will continue to be very important in Brazil.

Given all this, the wise focus for future software development work in Brazil appears to be in mobile apps. That's where I'll be giving my attention, in any case.

These are interesting days for Netflix, but not necessarily good ones. The company has expanded its offerings internationally, including into Brazil, but is receiving very poor reviews in that market. At the same time, due largely to a roughly 60% price hike for subscriptions it will be reporting a loss of around 1 million subscribers for Q3.

As I said, all I'm seeing are poor reviews of Netflix in Brazil. Here's one (poorly translated through Google) that pretty much expresses the complaints I've been hearing (click here for the original Portuguese). The selection is limited and most content is dubbed, rather than subtitled. It isn't worth it to Brazilian subscribers. Not yet, anyway. Considering the relatively limited access to residential broadband in many parts of Brazil, though, it does seem a bit early to me for people to be declaring Netflix's failure there. As the infrastructure improves and licenses are signed for more content the service will likely improve. If it can survive long enough to reach that point, of course.

Here in the United States folks (like me) are already beginning to wonder if even the streaming-only option is worthwhile. I haven't seen any quality new content added for a while now, and with news that Starz won't be renewing agreements with Netflix beginning early next year, the prospects are bleak. I will be dropping our household entirely off the streaming + DVD plan before our next billing cycle, and if the content doesn't improve dramatically in the next couple of months I won't see any reason to keep even streaming going. Apparently, I'm not alone in this evaluation.

See Also:

Distribuição de filmes e séries online ainda é patética (tecnoblog)

Netflix To Lose U.S. Subscribers in Q3, First Loss In Over 4 Years (Business Insider)

Netflix to lose Starz, its most valuable source of new movies (Los Angeles Times)

This past week I came across an infographic and a customized Google map that provide very distinct perspectives on Brazil.

The first, provided by The Economist, is a map of Brazil with the states replaced by countries of the world that are economically equivalent. It was sobering to see Santa Catarina matched with Qatar, and even more so to see that São Paulo is on the same level as Poland.

The second is a map of Brazil with links to videos created to promote different regions of the country for tourism.

Both of the above give us a broader perspective on a large, diverse and growing nation.

See Also:

Comparing Brazilian states with countries (The Economist)
Brazil at its best (Deep Brazil)

On September 7 Brazil celebrates its independence from Portugal. From my experience living in Brazil, besides being a day off work, it really doesn't inspire the same level of patriotic pride that July 4 brings out in Americans. In any event, some in Brazil are using the occasion this year to march against corruption. Brazil has been plagued by the greed and misdeeds of the powerful (and the not-so-powerful) since the earliest days of its settlement by the Portuguese. The culture has become so permeated by this climate that Brazilians are accustomed to looking for a "jeitinho" ("little way") around any and all bureaucratic barriers they encounter. It's survival. What I wonder is if and how large foreign companies that are not so amenable to this way of doing business will manage. Of particular note, at least to me, is Google.

Google receives a fairly regular stream of requests for disclosure of user data from the Brazilian government. Given that Google's social network "Orkut" is so popular in Brazil this isn't too surprising. Brazil's strict anti-hate speech laws are no doubt a large driving force behind this number, as well as the laws prohibiting causing "moral harm" to people through things said about them online (even when not involving racism or libel). An recent case of Google refusing to hand over user data illustrates the problem of excessive regulation of speech and political corruption.

The mayor of Varzea Alegre, a small backwater town in northern Brazil -- population 38,000 -- filed suit against Google Brasil near the beginning of this year because three people using Blogger anonymously were accusing him of corruption and embezzlement. The local judge ordered Google to shut down the blogs and hand over identifying information for the users, but Google refused, citing free speech and the fact the company only provides hosting services in this case. The judge applied a $3100 fine for each day the blogs remained active, and just last month froze US$141,000 of Google's bank assets in Brazil for non-compliance and non-payment of earlier fines.

In my opinion, three changes need to take place in Brazil if it is to realize its full potential as a democracy, especially in the modern tech world.

First, the legal/judicial system needs to learn to distinguish between those engaging in hate speech or other forms of restricted communication and the platform used. Google is in no way responsible for the views expressed by users on Orkut, Blogger or any of its other online properties. It cannot filter every status update, every photo and every blog post before it is made public. It simply can't be done.

Second, Brazil must review it's position on what is restricted speech. As distasteful as Nazis and pedophiles are online, the line needs to be moved in Brazil. Just offending someone cannot be sufficient reason to take legal action and pursue criminal charges.

Third, the Brazilian government has to undergo a thorough, merciless housecleaning. Zero tolerance for corruption. No more 'secret votes' to absolve politicians of wrongdoing.

Brazil has so much potential and seems to be on the rise as a world power. It's past time the nation took steps to ensure good governance, ethical leadership and sustainable technological development through legal reform and rigorous investigations and prosecutions wherever corruption is found.

See Also:

Google fined in Brazil for refusing to reveal bloggers' identities (TNW)
What Keeps Brazil Back (IgneousQuill.org)
Dealing With Brazil's Red Tape (IgneousQuill.org)
Google Transparency Report