I loved the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. It provides an even-keeled, unblinking account of a very complicated man. After reading this book, that’s the most concise word I can think of for Jobs: complicated. How else can anyone account for what he accomplished in his life? People, from the so-called “Apple faithful”, to Wall Street analysts, to my own mom, wonder whether Apple will prosper in a post-Jobs era.

When I was fifteen years old, I was introduced to the Macintosh for the first time. It was 1988, and before that moment I was almost completely ignorant about computers. But this strange, peppy little box with its monochrome 9-inch display ended up turning my life upside down. Before that moment, I thought of myself as someone who would grow up to be a writer. Over the proceeding years, my ambitions changed: from writer, to publisher, to developer.

It’s with great relief that I stand on the other side of this Blitz Talk presentation for SecondConf 2011. I’ve done lots of presentations for larger groups, but nothing has been as challenging as those five minutes! There’s no margin for error if you have 15 seconds per slide, so I had to do a lot of practice. The execution was marred with errors, but the worst part was that my slides were very dense with information, and most of the room wasn’t able to see them!

When I was in my teens, I was a twig of a kid, tall and skinny. I think we all get our personal perception of our body type from how we were in high school. So I still have this picture in my head of myself as your average nerdy beanpole. But the mirror tells a different story. In the last 15 years, I’ve put on a lot of weight. Years spent sitting at my desk for long hours, eating convenience foods rather than proper meals, have taken their toll: I’ve gone from an apparently normal 160 to a pear-shaped sub-200 pounds.

About three months ago, I switched my Internet service from Rogers to TekSavvy. While the quality of my service with Rogers was just fine, it was an easy decision to make: TekSavvy leases Rogers’ cable lines, and offers dramatically higher monthly bandwidth (300GB vs 95), for a lower price. The switchover to the new service took about five weeks, owing primarily to the fact that I owned my cable modem (Rogers required you to buy a modem for their “Extreme” service a few years back).