JOURNAL: A TIME COMES IN YOUR LIFE

A time comes in your life when you finally get…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH1 Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening.

You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon.

You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you…and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are…and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.

You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself…and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

Your stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you – or didn’t do for you – and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.

You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and everything isn’t always about you.

So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself…and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.

You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties…and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.

You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.

You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with.

You learn that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for you next fix.

You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a bygone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.

You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not you job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.

Then you learn about love. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You learn that alone does not mean lonely.

You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO.

You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.

You learn that your body really is your temple. You begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin to eat a balanced diet, drinking more water, and take more time to exercise.

You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.

You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you deserve, and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen.

More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You learn that no one can do it all alone, and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.

You learn the only thing you must truly fear is fear itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms.

You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.

You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people…and you lean not to always take it personally.

You learn that nobody’s punishing you and everything isn’t always somebody’s fault. It’s just life happening. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.

You lean that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you.

You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.

Then, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than you heart’s desire.

You make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.

You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind.

Finally, with courage in you heart, you take a stand, you take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.

PERSONAL/LOVE LETTER: MY DEAR WIFE

My dear wife,

I have no idea who you are or where you are. But I think about you a lot. What our life may be like. How the decisions I make today will affect our lives together. Will we be totally different personalities or will we have all of our interests be the same?

I pray for you a lot. I pray that you make strong decisions that you won't regret. I pray that you have a whole bunch of patience because you'll need it for the rest of your life when you meet me. Maybe you're the calm and collected to my crazy. Or maybe you'll just make me even more crazy, though I don't know if that's possible.

I hope you know that I'll support you in life. I want your journey to be our journey and mine ours too. I hope you know that when your days don't go as planned, I'll always be there for you, I'll be your number one fan and I know you'll be mine.

While I enjoy being single, I can't wait to meet you and start our lives together. I can't wait to find the one I was meant to be with - that is if you believe in soul mates. You may even roll your eyes when I say that.

If I were to tell you one thing though, it's be persistent. I'll be hard to win over, careful to trust, hesitant to ever say "yes" to a date. But make me believe there's no other option for me. Make me realize that this will be the best decision of my life.

Because I won't realize it then. I won't realize how much I love you when you're standing right there in front of me.

But, know this, I do love you.

And I can't wait to meet you.

Love,

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: MY PRINCESS

My Princess,

You are Not alone in this World. If ever you think you are, close your eyes and surrender all of yourself to Me.Because I love you,  I will never force you to be with me but know I will always desire that you draw close to me. Please give me, a chance to love you the way you long to be loved. I am the lover of your soul. Won't you open your heart and let me embrace you? I want to steal your heart from the worries of this world and have you experience my love in a way that will make your heart dance today. Take a deep breath and get so lost in me that nothing can separate us. Come away with me my beloved and I will complete you today in every way.

Saying I love you with words might not be enough but still I will confess to you. I wanna be with you. Don’t forget there’s a person who will protect you. After I met you, I found something to do It is to make you smile all day, every single day. 

Love,

LOVE LETTER/PERSONAL: DEAR SOULMATE

Dear Soulmate

When it comes to you and I, let us adventure. Let us read. Let us travel. Let us pause to look at libraries, oceans, caterpillars and sports stadiums with equal passion and awe. Let us laugh for hours about you tube videos, memes and inappropriate typos in textersations. Let us lose ourselves in the throb of live music and the energy of the crowd. Let us stay up too late watching "just one more episode." Let us make french fry runs at 1am. Let us quote movies quotes heavyweights and harry potter. Let us paint the door blue and the ceiling gray. Let us take naps, oh yes please abundant naps. Let us push each other forward and let us keep each other young. Let us talk deep and let us talk shallow and let us realize the import of both. Let us keep each other's questions, doubts and worries safe. Let us ramble and let us be silent. Let us be the same and yet let us be different. Let us go out of our way to serve both friends and strangers. Let us be passionate about the human race. Let us pause to kiss unabashedly on street corners with wind in our hair and the sun in our eyes. Let us sail, fly, land and anchor. Let us drive out of our way on road trips to quirky cafes, legendary landmarks and Bigfoot Museums, and let us wear plaid and coonskin caps. Let us be fiercely independent, and yet let us place a hand always on the small of the back in a crowd, with every finger firmly saying safe, mine, don't worry, I'm here, I've got you.

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE..WE ARE ONE

Dear Soulmate,

Sometimes the only thing you can even think of is love it just rolls off the tip of your tongue, and makes your ears tickle. Your heart beats, the whole world revolves around the simple idea  of finding someone who loves you so unconditionally it hurts. It hurts them because they cannot think of not having you around it hurts you because your dream has come true. This hurt though is such an exhilarating and wonderful hurt that it makes you cry tears of overwhelming joy. Joy overcomes your whole being, lets you truly see why you're living. It creates love inside that makes you cherish and care for everything just a little bit more.  It makes you breathe a little deeper and opens your eyes to see what feeds your heart. You realize it is the simple things in life you love their laugh, the twinkle in their eye, the way they cut loose and bring out every emotion in your soul. Your mind snatches a picture of time, in all its purities and flaws  you truly see that loving yourself is where it all begins. To find that special thing, a key that opens your heart, mind, and soul  you must love yourself and unlock the doors within your heart to also let the light of joy and heartache into your heart. Love is such a powerful thing to lift you up where your wings spread  so you can fly forever, but then cuts you off and lets you fall. Loving means to get up, dust off, smile, and say to yourself  Not only will I fly again, but I will soar higher than ever.?

Your gaze gives me chills.Your name leaves me short of breath.Your touch skips a beat of my heart.Your kiss sends me flying.Every moment with you makes all my dreams become reality.Every dance with you makes me love you even  more. Upon hearing your name I have to take a moment to catch my breath and wipe the wide grin off my face. I think about you day and night. Wondering if your feelings are still the same when I look at the stars, or see the beach.I can't help but long for your touch and your gentle kiss. Thinking about the future and all I see is you.I long to wake up in your arms and welcome you home from work.Dreams right now, yes, they are but you can make one come true with just a few words.Just a note or something to tell me what you feel That's all I ask for?Until then... I'll just bask here in my dream world, but I would sure like for you, my Princess, to awake me from this dream world and make it all a reality.The way my mind works it thinks about you then I sleep, then think about you, then sleep, then think about you. As I believe we are, we are destined to be together forever. My heart knows no tommorrow unless you are there waiting  for me in the future. With every kiss I believe we are destined... to see our future. With... every look & every... time I think about. You... I know that I'm a little bit... Happier than I've seen before. I know that we are together when we are not because of the ways . I see us look at each other, through the stars. I feel that we are connected cosmically, through the souls of our future lives.  Through our eternal love,  I am eternally missing you always...we are one.

POETRY: I HAVE FALLEN IN THE DEPTH OF YOUR EYES

Walking in slow motion,
Gazing at Her wavering hair
fluctuating loosely in the wind-
The sensual scent of apple-pear
filling the very pores of His nose.
With a pounding heart
He steps closer,
closer to what stands before Him.
How clumsy He feels
for Oh, dreaded are those stretched toes!
Those sagging Sabre parts!
Faithfully He tries to carry on
when from over the way,
A screech leaps His melting heart.
"Must I forego my pursuit?" shortly He pondered
for "Never!" remarked the Princess...
Linked two glassy eyes.

2

In the still of the night I wrestled with my mind
 to not let my heart control my innermost feelings
  that come from deep within.
In the still of the night I saw the shadow of your
  face, though very glim.
  My heart wondered where you had been.
I reached out to touch you and hold you when
   at last I realized it was just the rustling of
   the leaves from the blowing of the wind.
In the still of the night as my eyes started to weaken
    the tears from my eyes and heart fell.
    I reached out for you and called your name but to
    no avail... again it was the still of the night.
In the still of the night I looked around the corner with a
    glimmer of hope that it was your voice I had heard
     but again it was the whisper of the wind calling my name.
In the still of the night I hold you my darlin' and I am holding
      you so tight. But when the dawn breaks and I am wide
       awake I realize in all my grief...
it was just a dream that was in the Still of the Night



3

All five senses in a relationship count
We have them all, if you want to know:

The mouth gives the romantic talks
 The nose smells the rocky fragrance
  The ear listens to the heart
   The mouth gives the love message
    And the eyes can tell you
    that the inside counts the most

But the Sixth sense is built between us
It is a strong bond that we use to overcome obstacles
It is not an individual work
But the hard work of two peaceful beating hearts
Giving faith and hope to why we have senses.


4

If only you could feel the love
I feel inside my heart
From the moment I first saw you
You gave me quite a start

This feeling is one I wish to share
It can't be held inside
How easily you've touched my soul
And left me filled with pride

There're many things we say we love
But this one's quite real
I feel I'm overflowing
With the love for you I feel

I know you only as a friend
But I sense you're so much more
Like I've walked with you
On that distant sandy shore

If only you could realize
What your friendship's done for me
An escape that's really needed
And a chance to feel I'm free.



5

How much time does it take
to pick up the phone or a pen
and let someone know
there is a piece of thought
that has become known?

There's a moment to be taken
to let that someone know
that this precious moment
was meant to be conveyed
with the best of one's ability...

in love




6

Every time I think of you,
I get a smile on my face.
One that warms me from the inside out,
And puts my heart at rest.

Every time I have a dream,
I see your face again,
It beckons me to come closer,
But disappears before I?m there.

Every time I imagine you,
A bird whistles a song,
A tune that gives you hope,
And the strength to go on.

And every time I talk to you,
I feel so out of sorts,
Just like a little boy,
With so little self-control.


7

I have fallen in
The depth of your eyes
You've seen the nakedness of my soul
You've stripped away my disguise

You've opened the door
To see the coffin in my heart
You got to me fast
A perfect shot in the dark.

You know my ins
You know my outs
You know my fears
You know my doubts

Being with you
Is like having a twin
Destined to be together
Our love will never end


8

I wish 
For a moment 
I could Travel 
to the deepest corners 
of your soul 
If just for a glimpse  
Of your true self 
Understand your feelings 
Mind and body 
To be one with your heart 
Your silent cries 
I would hear 
Expel your worries & fears 
And bask in wonders 
Your thoughts 
Can only provide 
I wish 
For a moment 
I could hold your essence 
The very inner glow 
That attracts me 
And weakens my soul 
Leaving me vulnerable 
To your sweetest words 
Spellbound 
By your beauty 
I wish for a moment 
I could stop 
The sands of time 
Embrace all 
That is you 
Give up my life 
For a minute of yours 
And indulge in your presence 
For evermore 
For soulmates 
We are destined 
By love 
I wish 
For a moment 
I could wish 
I would wish 
I would wish you

ARTICLE: THE BIRTH OF THE IPHONE..And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’ By FRED VOGELSTEIN

And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

By FRED VOGELSTEIN

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.

Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didn’t make calls, or didn’t connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life — often seven days a week — to the project.

Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all — kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon says. Only a chosen few were allowed to attend. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong,” Grignon says. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”

The preparations were top-secret. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage, it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards 24 hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple hired — from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound — sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.

Grignon knew the iPhone unveiling was not an ordinary product announcement, but no one could have anticipated what a seminal moment it would become. In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. They provided a platform for a new and hugely profitable software industry — mobile apps, which have generated more than $10 billion in revenue since they began selling in 2008. And they have upended the multibillion-dollar personal-computer industry. If you include iPad sales with those for desktops and laptops, Apple is now the largest P.C. maker in the world. Around 200 million iPhones and iPads were sold last year, or more than twice the number of cars sold worldwide.

The impact has been not only economic but also cultural. Apple’s innovations have set off an entire rethinking of how humans interact with machines. It’s not simply that we use our fingers now instead of a mouse. Smartphones, in particular, have become extensions of our brains. They have fundamentally changed the way people receive and process information. Ponder the individual impacts of the book, the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the tape recorder, the camera, the video camera, the compass, the television, the VCR and the DVD, the personal computer, the cellphone, the video game and the iPod. The smartphone is all those things, and it fits in your pocket. Its technology is changing the way we learn in school, the way doctors treat patients, the way we travel and explore. Entertainment and media are accessed and experienced in entirely new ways.

And yet Apple today is under siege. From the moment in late 2007 that Google unveiled Android — and its own plan to dominate the world of mobile phones and other mobile devices — Google hasn’t just tried to compete with the iPhone; it has succeeded in competing with the iPhone. Android has exploded in popularity since it took hold in 2010. Its share of the global smartphone market is approaching 80 percent, while Apple’s has fallen below 20 percent. A similar trend is under way with iPads: in 2010 the iPad had about 90 percent of the tablet market; now more than 60 percent of the tablets sold run Android.

What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed. When Jobs died in October 2011, the prevailing question wasn’t whether Tim Cook could succeed him, but whether anyone could. When Jobs ran Apple, the company was an innovation machine, churning out revolutionary products every three to five years. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had another breakthrough coming — a revolution in TV. But under Cook, nothing has materialized, and the lack of confidence among investors is palpable. Apple product announcements used to routinely send its stock soaring. When Cook presented the latest smartphones in September, the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s, Apple’s stock fell 10 percent. A year ago the company’s stock price was at $702 a share, making Apple the world’s most valuable corporation. Today, it’s down more than 25 percent from that peak.

Comparing anyone with Steve Jobs is unfair. And during his two years as Apple’s chief executive, Cook has taken pains to point out that Jobs himself made it clear to him that he didn’t want Cook running Apple the way he thought Jobs would want to, but the way Cook thought it should be done. It hardly needed to be said. When you look back at how the iPhone came to be, it’s clear that it had everything to do with the unreasonable demands — and unusual power — of an inimitable man.

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs.

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional. On announcement day, the software that ran Grignon’s radios still had bugs. So, too, did the software that managed the iPhone’s memory. And no one knew whether the extra electronics Jobs demanded the demo phones include would make these problems worse.

Jobs wanted the demo phones he would use onstage to have their screens mirrored on the big screen behind him. To show a gadget on a big screen, most companies just point a video camera at it, but that was unacceptable to Jobs. The audience would see his finger on the iPhone screen, which would mar the look of his presentation. So he had Apple engineers spend weeks fitting extra circuit boards and video cables onto the backs of the iPhones he would have onstage. The video cables were then connected to the projector, so that when Jobs touched the iPhone’s calendar app icon, for example, his finger wouldn’t appear, but the image on the big screen would respond to his finger’s commands. The effect was magical. People in the audience felt as if they were holding an iPhone in their own hands. But making the setup work flawlessly, given the iPhone’s other major problems, seemed hard to justify at the time.

The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. And audience members had to be prevented from getting on the frequency being used. “Even if the base station’s ID was hidden” — that is, not showing up when laptops scanned for Wi-Fi signals — “you had 5,000 nerds in the audience,” Grignon says. “They would have figured out how to hack into the signal.” The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States. Japanese Wi-Fi uses some frequencies that are not permitted in the U.S.

There was less they could do to make sure the phone calls Jobs planned to make from the stage went through. Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. “If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that,” Grignon says. “So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.”

None of these kludges fixed the iPhone’s biggest problem: it often ran out of memory and had to be restarted if made to do more than a handful of tasks at a time. Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he would switch to another while the first was restarted. But given how many demos Jobs planned, Grignon worried that there were far too many potential points of failure. If disaster didn’t strike during one of the dozen demos, it was sure to happen during the grand finale, when Jobs planned to show all the iPhone’s top features operating at the same time on the same phone. He’d play some music, take a call, put it on hold and take another call, find and e-mail a photo to the second caller, look up something on the Internet for the first caller and then return to his music. “Me and my guys were all so nervous about this,” Grignon says. “We only had 128 megabytes of memory in those phones” — maybe the equivalent of two dozen large digital photographs — “and because they weren’t finished, all these apps were still big and bloated.”

Jobs rarely backed himself into corners like this. He was well known as a taskmaster, seeming to know just how hard he could push his staff so that it delivered the impossible. But he always had a backup, a Plan B, that he could go to if his timetable was off.

But the iPhone was the only cool new thing Apple was working on. The iPhone had been such an all-encompassing project at Apple that this time there was no backup plan. “It was Apple TV or the iPhone,” Grignon says. “And if he had gone to Macworld with just Apple TV” — a new product that connected iTunes to a television set — “the world would have said, ‘What the heck was that?’ ”

The idea that one of the biggest moments of his career might implode made Grignon’s stomach hurt. By 2007 he’d spent virtually his entire career at Apple or companies affiliated with it. While at the University of Iowa in 1993, he and his friend Jeremy Wyld reprogrammed the Newton MessagePad to wirelessly connect to the Internet. Even though the Newton would not succeed as a product, many still regard it as the first mainstream hand-held computer, and their hack was quite a feat back then; it helped them both get jobs at Apple. Wyld ended up on the Newton team, while Grignon worked in Apple’s famous R. & D. lab — the Advanced Technology Group — on videoconferencing technology.

By 2000 Grignon had found his way to Pixo, a company started by a former Apple software developer that was building operating systems for cellphones and other small devices. When Pixo’s software ended up in the first iPod in 2001, Grignon found himself back at Apple again.

By then, thanks to his work at Pixo, he’d become prominent for two other areas of expertise besides videoconferencing technology: computer radio transmitters (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) and the workings of software inside small hand-held devices like cellphones. Grignon moves in an entirely different world from that inhabited by most software engineers in the valley. Most rarely have to think about whether their code takes up too much space on a hard drive or overloads a chip’s abilities. Hardware on desktop and laptop computers is powerful, modifiable and cheap; memory, hard drives and even processors can be upgraded inexpensively; and computers are either connected to electrical outlets or giant batteries. In Grignon’s area of embedded software, the hardware is fixed. Code that is too big won’t run. Meanwhile, a tiny battery — which might power a laptop for a couple of minutes — needs enough juice to last all day. When work on the iPhone began at the end of 2004, Grignon had a perfect set of skills to become one of the early engineers on the project.

Now, in 2007, he was emotionally exhausted. He’d gained 50 pounds. He’d put stress on his marriage. The iPhone team discovered early on that making a phone didn’t resemble building computers or iPods at all. “It was very dramatic,” Grignon says. “It had been drilled into everyone’s head that this was the next big thing to come out of Apple. So you put all these supersmart people with huge egos into very tight, confined quarters, with that kind of pressure, and crazy stuff starts to happen.”

Remarkably, Jobs had to be talked into having Apple build a phone at all. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: consumers would rather not carry two or three devices for e-mail, phone calls and music if they could carry one. But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection. E-mail was a fine function to add to a phone, but Research in Motion’s BlackBerry was fast locking up that market.

Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers. Back then the carriers expected to dominate any partnership with a phone maker, and because they controlled the network, they got their way. Jobs, a famed control freak, couldn’t imagine doing their bidding. Apple considered buying Motorola in 2003, but executives quickly concluded it would be too big an acquisition for the company then. (The two companies collaborated unsuccessfully a couple of years later.)

But by the fall of 2004, doing business with the carriers was starting to seem less onerous. Sprint was beginning to sell its wireless bandwidth wholesale. This meant that by buying and reselling bandwidth from Sprint, Apple could become its own wireless carrier — what’s known as a “mobile virtual network operator.” Apple could build a phone and barely have to deal with the carriers at all. Disney, on whose board Jobs sat, was already in discussions with Sprint about just such a deal to provide its own wireless service. Jobs was asking a lot of questions about whether Apple should pursue one as well. The deal Apple ultimately signed with Cingular (later acquired by AT&T) in 2006 took more than a year to hammer out, but it would prove easy compared to what Apple went through just to build the device.

Many executives and engineers, riding high from their success with the iPod, assumed a phone would be like building a small Macintosh. Instead, Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006. One person who worked on the project thinks Apple then made six fully working prototypes of the device it ultimately sold — each with its own set of hardware, software and design tweaks. Some on the team ended up so burned out that they left the company shortly after the first phone hit store shelves. “It was like the first moon mission,” says Tony Fadell, a key executive on the project. (He started his own company, Nest, in 2010.) “I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.”

Jobs wanted the iPhone to run a modified version of OS X, the software that comes with every Mac. But no one had ever put a gigantic program like OS X on a phone chip before. The software would have to be a tenth its usual size. Millions of lines of code would have to be stripped out or rewritten, and engineers would have to simulate chip speed and battery drain because actual chips weren’t available until 2006.

No one had ever put a multitouch screen in a mainstream consumer product before, either. Capacitive touch technology — a “touch” by either a finger or other conductive object completes a circuit — had been around since the 1960s. Capacitive multitouch, in which two or more fingers can be used and independently recognized, was vastly more complicated. Research into it began in the mid-1980s. It was well known, though, that to build the touch-screen Apple put on the iPhone and produce it in volume was a challenge few had the money or guts to take on. The next steps — to embed the technology invisibly in a piece of glass, to make it smart enough to display a virtual keyboard with autocorrect and to make it sophisticated enough to reliably manipulate photos or Web pages on that screen — made it hugely expensive even to produce a working prototype. Few production lines had experience manufacturing multitouch screens. The touch-screens in consumer electronics had typically been pressure-sensitive ones that users pushed with a finger or a stylus. (The PalmPilot and its successors like the Palm Treo were popular expressions of this technology.) Even if multitouch iPhone screens had been easy to make, it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, like on-screen keyboards and “tap to zoom,” were enhancements that consumers wanted.

As early as 2003, a handful of Apple engineers had figured out how to put multitouch technology in a tablet. “The story was that Steve wanted a device that he could use to read e-mail while on the toilet — that was the extent of the product spec,” says Joshua Strickon, one of the earliest engineers on that project. “But you couldn’t build a device with enough battery life to take out of the house, and you couldn’t get a chip with enough graphics capability to make it useful. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what to do.” Before joining Apple in 2003, Strickon had built a multitouch device for his master’s thesis at M.I.T. But given the lack of consensus at Apple about what to do with the prototypes he and his fellow engineers developed, he says, he left the company in 2004 thinking it wasn’t going to do anything with that technology.

Tim Bucher, one of Apple’s top executives at the time and the company’s biggest multitouch proponent, says part of the problem was that the prototypes they were building used software, OS X, that was designed to be used with a mouse, not a finger. “We were using 10- or 12-inch screens with Mac-mini-like guts . . . and then you would launch these demos that would do the different multitouch gestures. One demo was a keyboard application that would rise from the bottom — very much what ended up shipping in the iPhone two years later. But it wasn’t very pretty. It was very much wires, chewing gum and bailing wire.”

Few even thought about making touch-screen technology the centerpiece of a new kind of phone until Jobs started really pushing the idea in mid-2005. “He said: ‘Tony, come over here. Here’s something we’re working on. What do you think? Do you think we could make a phone out of this?’ ” Fadell says, referring to a demo Jobs was playing with. “It was huge. It filled the room. There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.” Fadell was aware of the touch-screen prototype, but not in great detail, because it was a Mac product, and he ran the iPod division. “So we all sat down and had a serious discussion about it — about what could be done.”

Fadell had strong doubts about shrinking such an enormous prototype so much and then manufacturing it. But he also knew better than to say no to Steve Jobs. He was one of Apple’s superstars, having joined the company in 2001 as a consultant to help build the first iPod, and he didn’t get there by being timid in the face of thorny technological problems. By 2005, with iPod sales exploding, he had become, at 36, arguably the single most important line executive at the company.

“I understood how it could be done,” Fadell says. “But it’s one thing to think that, and another to take a room full of special, one-off gear and make a million phone-size versions of that in a cost-effective, reliable manner.” The to-do list was exhausting just to think about. “You had to go to LCD vendors who knew how to embed technology like this in glass; you had to find time on their line; and then you had to come up with compensation and calibrating algorithms to keep the pixel electronics from generating all kinds of noise in the touch-screen” — which sat on top of the LCD. “It was a whole project just to make the touch-screen device. We tried two or three ways of actually making the touch-screen until we could make one in enough volume that would work.”

Shrinking OS X and building a multitouch screen, while innovative and difficult, were at least within the skills Apple had already mastered as a corporation. No one was better equipped to rethink OS X’s design. Apple knew LCD manufacturers because it put an LCD in every laptop and iPod. Mobile-phone physics was an entirely new field, however, and it took those working on the iPhone into 2006 to realize how little they knew. Apple built testing rooms and equipment to test the iPhone’s antenna. It created models of human heads, with viscous stuff inside to approximate the density of human brains, to help measure the radiation that users might be exposed to from using the phone. One senior executive believes that more than $150 million was spent creating the first iPhone.

From the start of the project, Jobs hoped that he would be able to develop a touch-screen iPhone running OS X similar to what he ended up unveiling. But in 2005 he had no idea how long that would take. So Apple’s first iPhone looked very much like the joke slide Jobs put up when introducing the real iPhone — an iPod with an old-fashioned rotary dial on it. The prototype really was an iPod with a phone radio that used the iPod click wheel as a dialer. “It was an easy way to get to market, but it was not cool like the devices we have today,” Grignon says.

The second iPhone prototype in early 2006 was much closer to what Jobs would ultimately introduce. It incorporated a touch-screen and OS X, but it was made entirely of brushed aluminum. Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, were exceedingly proud of it. But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well. “I and Rubén Caballero” — Apple’s antenna expert — “had to go up to the boardroom and explain to Steve and Ive that you cannot put radio waves through metal,” says Phil Kearney, an engineer who left Apple in 2008. “And it was not an easy explanation. Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.”

Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple.

Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired. In some cases, before a manager could ask you to join the project, you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement in his office. Then, after he told you what the project was, you had to sign another document confirming that you had indeed signed the NDA and would tell no one. “We put a sign on over the front door of the purple dorm” — the iPhone building — “that said ‘fight club,’ because the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club,” Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software until last October, testified in 2012 during the Apple v. Samsung trial. “Steve didn’t want to hire anyone from outside of Apple to work on the user interface, but he told me I could hire anyone in the company,” Forstall said. “So I’d bring them into my office, sit them down and tell them: ‘You are a superstar in your current role. I have another project that I want you to consider. I can’t tell you what it is. All I can say is that you will have to give up nights and weekends and that you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

One of the early iPhone engineers says, “My favorite part was what all the vendors said the day after the unveiling.” Big companies like Marvell, which made the Wi-Fi radio chip, and CSR, which provided the Bluetooth radio chip, hadn’t been told they were going to be in a new phone. They thought they were going to be in a new iPod. “We actually had fake schematics and fake industrial designs,” the engineer says. Grignon says that Apple even went as far as to impersonate employees of another company when they traveled, especially to Cingular. “The whole thing was you didn’t want the receptionist or whoever happens to be walking by to see all the badges lying out” with Apple’s name on them.

One of the most obvious manifestations of Jobs’s obsession with secrecy were the locked-down areas on the company’s campus — places that those not working on the iPhone could no longer go. “Steve loved this stuff,” Grignon says. “He loved to set up division. But it was a big ‘[expletive] you’ to the people who couldn’t get in. Everyone knows who the rock stars are in a company, and when you start to see them all slowly get plucked out of your area and put in a big room behind glass doors that you don’t have access to, it feels bad.”

Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance.

And no one outside Jobs’s inner circle was allowed into Jonathan Ive’s wing on the first floor of Building 2. The security surrounding Ive’s prototypes was so tight that some employees believed the badge reader called security if you tried to enter and weren’t authorized. “It was weird, because it wasn’t like you could avoid going by it. It was right off the lobby, behind a big metal door. Every now and then you’d see the door open and you’d try to look in and see, but you never tried to do more than that,” says an engineer whose first job out of college was working on the iPhone. Forstall said during his testimony that some labs required you to “badge in” four times.

The pressure to meet Jobs’s deadlines was so intense that normal discussions quickly devolved into shouting matches. Exhausted engineers quit their jobs — then came back to work a few days later once they had slept a little. Forstall’s chief of staff, Kim Vorrath, once slammed her office door so hard it got stuck and locked her in, and co-workers took more than an hour to get her out. “We were all standing there watching it,” Grignon says. “Part of it was funny. But it was also one of those moments where you step back and realize how [expletive] it all is.”

When Jobs started talking about the iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007, he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with myriad tales about why consumers hated their cellphones. Then he solved all their problems — definitively.

As Grignon and others from Apple sat nervously in the audience, Jobs had the iPhone play some music and a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent a text and an e-mail, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touch-screen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures smaller or bigger. He navigated The New York Times’s and Amazon’s Web sites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps — and called the number from the stage — to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: I LOVE YOU LIKE THE MOON AND THE SUN

I never compared anything to the oceans until I met you. Now seas are everything holding me back. Unsurpassable, boundless; The distance from here to where you are. Ships and souls and the vast blue nothingness that separates us both. Waves and tides and storms; everything that keeps my hands just out of reach of yours. Everything that’s stopping me from whispering hungry fingertips across bare flesh.

This is what I’m thinking as I listen to your voice.

Your laugh is echoing in my ears. I need to be with you. I need to feel your heartbeat against mine. But I am here. I am here and you are there. And there is still too far away…

I don’t want you to ever leave me again. I’m sick of this drowning feeling I get whenever I’m forced to let go of your hand. I know it won’t be long until I see you again, so I’ll pretend that I don’t need you desperately. I’ll pretend that I wasn’t curled up into a ball, listening to your voice, biting my lip and fighting back tears. I’ll pretend I don’t clench my fists to fill the empty spaces between my fingers. I’ll pretend I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you. I….I miss you. I miss you so much it’s stifling.

After you kiss me, your scent stays on my skin even after we’ve gone our separate ways. I love it. I close my eyes and I can still feel you. I’m reliving that moment over and over again.

I love you like the moon and the sun.  The way she mocks his light. She hides in his rays, wishing to absorb him into herself.

I love you in a way that is urgent. Like at any moment you will be taken away from me. Like all of this is a dream and soon I will have to wake up because how could something so perfect be allowed to exist? I will be forced to go back to my mundane life and the memory of our love will only exist in whispers and shadows. It will become one of those dreams that are amazing while you have them. You play them over and over again in your mind so as not to forget. But you do anyway. All of a sudden that dream is pushed away into some unexplored corner of your mind, forgotten until you are reminded of it months or even years later. By then it is only a fleeting thought. Most of it is blurry and it’s a strain to remember what the dream was even about.

I’m terrified that one day I will wake up and you won’t be mine anymore. You will be gone and I will be left with only memories. The heat from your skin permanently burned into my fingertips. Gone. Over. Two words I never want to hear pass your lips. I know that I will love you forever. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Maybe if I believed in soulmates, you would be it for me.

Maybe we’re just kids recklessly in love. We may not know anything about life or growing up but there is one thing I know for sure. You are the love of my life and I never want to leave your side.

I hate this feeling. When I’m away from you, everything is brutal. I miss you. 

I’ve burrowed myself into this corner, The thing about isolation is, it’s lonely. It makes you think about everywhere else you’d rather be. I’d rather be in your arms. But I know that’s near impossible. And I hate that. I keep trying to force the thought of you from my mind, but I can’t. When I miss you, I miss you like a child misses their mother. Sad and alone. All they can do is cry and scream their mother’s name until she comes back home.

That’s how I feel. I feel like curling up into this corner and whispering your name as if that’ll make you appear. I need you. I feel so incomplete without you. I wish I could stay in your arms forever, where it’s warm and safe. I want to bury my face into your chest and never have to worry about anything ever again. You’re my home, baby. You’re my whole world.

I love you,

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: YOUR HEARTBEAT BECOMING THE ONLY LULLABY I'LL EVER NEED

 Dear Soulmate

Above anything else, I am terrified. Above my love for you. Above the sheer bliss I feel when I’m with you. Above everything, above it all.

I’d rather die than let you go. So why am I entertaining that thought…why am I holding on to it? In your eyes, in your voice, in your touch there is no you. You don’t exist. Everything is clear. And when I am away I miss your presence. Every time I become certain of my decision, something is done to rock that certainty. I still love you…so deeply it hurts to think about. You will never understand how deep…how strong my love for you is. You will never…you have never loved me as much as I love you. If you had never did what you did…I would have loved you forever. I would have never let go. And that scares me. I love you too much.

Regardless of what has happened, you are still the beautiful woman who I gave my heart to. I don’t regret that decision. I need you to understand that I still love you as much as I always have. But this isn’t about me telling you how much I love you. You already know that. I spill my guts out to you daily; the good, the bad, and the horrendous. Now it’s your turn. Spill your guts out, love. Show me everything.

Once upon a time, I compared falling in love to facing a monster. Well the same can be said about letting go; it’s like facing a monster. It’s called “falling in love” for a reason. Once you fall, you’re kind of stuck. You don’t mind at the time because at the bottom of this well is someone who is just as stranded as you are. Until they find a way out…then you’re on your own. Unlucky for you, you haven’t the slightest clue as to what to do. It’s cold and dark. You are lonely. You are scared. Then, when you finally do make it out, you’re never truly out. You still bear the scars and have the memories. You never leave the same as you were before. Darkness does that to you. Darkness changes you.

You know what’s really scary? How fast emotions can change. How fast feelings can disappear.

I’ve always wondered, in the course of a relationship, at what point does love die?Is it sudden; an abrupt revelation? Or is it gradual? Does it die a little more each day until it has turned into a whisper? How does one even begin to fall out of love? The thought seems so..unfathomable. But in reality I’ve seen it happen too many times to count.

How can you go from promising someone forever, to hating them? How do you hate someone you once loved? Was the love an illusion? It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. See, people will tell you that heart break is just a part of life. Divorce is practically encouraged in today’s society. What happened to “‘Till death do us part.”? Did everyone just conveniently skip that part?

"I do….for right now."

"I love you….for right now."

This letter was more questions than anything else, but it’s just something that’s been weighing on my mind. Something I’m confused about. But know this, when I say I love you, it’s not an I love you for right now. It’s an I love you right now, today, tomorrow, next week, and for the rest of my life.

My mom says a man’s love is dangerous. When he loves, he loves with everything. He’d willingly give up everything for his woman; she becomes his whole world. You know what? She’s right.

I wish there was some way I could show you just how much I love you. Saying it isn’t enough. I can’t think about you without smiling, without feeling this…heaviness settle in my chest. I can’t say your name without tasting you. I can’t write these letters without having to pause to collect my thoughts.

There’s this…suffocating feeling I get whenever you’re not near me. And now that summer is gone I know that this drowning feeling is here to stay. So I’m acquainting myself with it; familiarizing myself with this ache that will frequent itself in my thoughts. Like I’m a dying patient and your an oxygen mask; I need you to breathe. I’m dying for you to hold me. I love your voice. I love your eyes. I love your smile. I hang on to every word you say. I know that all of this is such a cliche, so that’s why I write it here because it’s the only way I know how to get all of this out.


I have that odd-one-out feeling in every given situation. I’m an afterthought. I have to inject myself into everything and I feel like I’ve done that with you. xxxxxx said it best; I feel like a speck of dust. Harmless and invisible until I fling myself into your eyes and force you to see only me. I’m so terrified that eventually you’re going to get irritated and claw at your eyes until I’ve been dislodged.

I guess I’m…jealous? I don’t want to call it that because I don’t think it’s jealousy… I just get filled with disdain and grief whenever I see you with your friends, solely because you look so natural. You fit. I suppose that’s your “where I belong”. And I hate that because I know I could never fit. People are like puzzle pieces; you look for the people who look like you. But see….I haven’t found anyone who looks like me. I’m that one little piece at the bottom of the toy box, practically forgotten. No one knows what the hell I go to but I’m kept around because maybe, just maybe, you’ll find my matching set.

So I hate your friends. They’re all really really lucky. They’re around you more. They’ve known you longer. They’re your matching set and I can never be part of that.

That’s fine though. I only love you as much as anyone my age could love someone. But it’s only love…

I know I’m going to be restless tonight. I’m dead tired but sleep isn’t inviting me. Instead I’m wishing the heat from your skin still echoed through every part of my body. I’m wishing I still felt your breath on my neck. The memory of your kiss still burned into my thoughts. I can still taste you on my tongue and suddenly you seem miles and miles away. To far to reach by any means.

This is how I think. Silently wishing I was in your arms; my head on your chest feeling the steady rise and fall of your lungs. Completely taking in the fact that you’re here and you’re real and you’re mine. You’re mine and I am yours…Falling asleep in your arms…

Your heartbeat becoming the only lullaby I’ll ever need.