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Thomas K. Mattingly II: “It’s very hard to take yourself too seriously when you look at the world from outer space.”

It is Father’s Day today, my second, and one to remember, again! Misha made me not one, not two, but three drawings! We still don’t really understand the reasoning behind Father’s Day…why is it just one day?! So, being the sweet angel that he is, he agreed to make every day Father’s Day….and Mother’s Day *and* Children’s Day…easy!! 😉

Charles Wadsworth: “By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.”

My mom turns 64 today, age still doesn’t show! 😉 We are unfortunately not able to be there in person today, though being a whole week together in Norway last week was fantastic ‘alternative’!

From sunny Norway; Happy Birthday Mom!

Peter Ustinov: “Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”

Real Live Preacher: “Your world is made of your memories, and your memories are given to you by your world. The whispering voice of happenstance is always in our ears. ‘This is the world. This is the way things are. Look. Pay attention. Remember.'”

Henry David Thoreau: “Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”

Plutarch: “The whole life of man is but a point of time; let us enjoy it.”

Apple uses the yearly Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to show off its next generation software and technologies for developers. The general public follows it closely via many live-blogs and generally can’t wait to have the upcoming goodies in their hands.

The opening Keynote speech kicked-off the WWDC today and it showed some very interesting developments:

• Mac OS X 10.9 preview. It will be called Mavericks (as Apple ran out of cats and OS X Sea Lion was a too far fetched name 😉 ) and released this fall. The highlights: Finder Tabs, Tags, Multiple display support done right, various great advanced features, Compressed memory, Safari on steroids, iCould Keychain (I like that as I was recently checking out various password managers such as 1Password, which might now become obsolete ;)), improved Notifications/Calendar/Maps and, finally, iBooks come to the Mac!
• An updated Macbook Air which brings  huge improvements on battery life (12h on the 13″ model!)
• Newly designed Airport Basestations supporting faster WiFi and more
• A sneak peak of the next Mac Pro…you gotta see this one for yourself, WoW!
• iCloud updates including the next member of the iWork family, iWork for iCloud, allowing you to fully edit your documents from within a browser thus *also* on a PC!
• iOS 7, the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of iPhone. It’s packed with amazing new features and a stunning new user interface. Believe me, this one is moves up the level for smartphone OS’s. New hardware to support all the features (iPhone 5S, iPad 5 and iPad mini 2 will be announced in the coming weeks…). The most exciting new features of iOS 7: A easy access Control Center (finally a way to put your phone into flight mode directly from the lock-screen 😉 ), true multitasking for all apps, great improvements on Safari (including loosing the 8 tab limit 😉 ), Airdrop (a supereasy way to share files between iDevices and Macs, greatly improved Camera and Photos App (especially the lather will make browsing your Photo library fun), Siri got even smarter (and might be useable), iOS in the car, App store, localised apps near me, automatically app updates, Music, iTunes Radio

Extra attention was given to Apple’s values in designing products, as you can see from the opening shots in the Keynote speech video:

if everyone
is busy making everything
how can anyone perfect anything?
we start to confuse convenience
with joy
Abundance with choice.
designing something requires
focus
the first thing we ask is
what do we want people to feel?
delight
surprise
love
connection
Then we begin to craft around our invention
It takes time…
There are a thousand no’s
for every yes.
we simplify
we perfect
we start over
until everything we touch
enhances each life
it touches.
only then do we sign our work.
designed by Apple in California

At the end of the Keynote, Tim Cook said: “I’d like to close this morning with a reminder. That our goal at Apple is to make amazing products that our customers love. Really great products that enrich peoples’ lives. The words you saw at the beginning of the show are more than just words to us. They are the values we live by. They drive us. You’ve seen them reflected in our products over the years and just as much in the products this morning…And you’ll continue to see these reflected in the products we do in the future.”

Norman Thomas: “The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.”

My parents gave Misha a swing while they are visiting us in Norway and my father and I made the construction to hold it this weekend. Ha, we ‘had to’ make it sooner than later; Misha was jumping up and down wanting to play with his present! 😉

No surprise, he LOVES it and can’t stop swinging! 😉

Margaret Lee Runbeck: “Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.”

Amazing, and who would have thought… I really believed that I had Great Tits in da house, but it turns out that they were Blue Tits instead (also called Nuns, *that* would be hilarious!! 😉 )…well, there are still Tits in da house that the good news, or actually, Tits flying out of da house…really fantastic to see these little birds flying in and out!!

Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but should be lived forwards.”

The greatest artist of all time has his Birthday today, which is a great excuse to promote one of his songs to a Song of the Day…well, all of his songs are ‘Song of the Day’ worthy, so ‘excuses’ are not needed. It should be obvious, the artist is Prince, and for today I picked ‘Nothing Compares 2 U‘. Once again he wrote  a brilliant song, made famous by Sinead O’Connor.

The true meaning of this song might surprise you, not many are aware of it… 😉

As Prince is somewhat anti-internet (understatement 😉 ), an album version of the song performed by His Royal Badness cannot be found online, yet I believe that the clip below is a perfect ‘second-best’; Prince on stage together with Candy Dulfer (When I want sax, I call Candy 😉 )…Njoy y’all!

Kathy Sierra: “In many cases, the more you try to compete, the less competitive you actually are.”

Summer vacation is knocking on the door so Misha’s kindergarten organized a summerparty for kids and their parents. Misha took the opportunity to show how much fun he has at the kindergarten; running around, sliding off the slide, having fun on the swing and eating fishburgers that my father prepared on the BBQ, and entertaining us and other parents with his dancing skills…what a boy, heaps of fun! 😉

(click to enlarge)

Confucius: “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

Mitch Albom: “But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”