最近才想起自己曾经很喜欢张震岳。三张专辑连续播放，不用跳歌。

 

    喜欢就是喜欢，一点都不复杂。但如果非要为喜欢找点理由的话，我想情意结的因素居多。

 

    早在发表《爱之初体验》的时候，便在Channel V上留意这个台湾胡须仔。在当时的华语乐坛来看，《爱之初体验》有如60年代的英式风格绝对是别树一格的，再加上没心没肺的歌词，可能就是这首歌唱到街知巷闻的原因了。不过喜欢不列颠味道的我当时觉得大概这个张震岳也只是one hit wonder，《爱之初体验》的英伦风味也只是所谓噱头。

 

    紧接的张震岳的下一张专集，证明了他绝对不是one hit wonder。《秘密基地》是我第一张他的专集，延续的是他的坏学生的形象，“打电话，给同学，问问题”这样的歌词都能唱出来，也真是服了他，不过也正是我们浑浑噩噩的写照。音乐上，摇滚部分来得更重型，是一份hard rock的味道；另外也有一些中慢板作品证实了张震岳的创作能力。《爱我别走》又是一首广为传唱的作品，也成了当时吉他友争相练习的曲目。

 

    正是这首《爱我别走》，使张震岳正式成为我的情意结之列。当年的吉他中级班练习曲目，就是《爱我别走》，花了我很多的时间。而在我与一帮朋友一起组band的年代，张震岳的歌也是我们jam的首选。阿森喜欢《想太多》，里面有让他show off他的solo的机会。大概当年很多组band的同志也是练张震岳的吧。这种对band sound的坚持，即使是在他化名为Orange之后发表的电子音乐里面或是后期一些带着Hip-hop、Rap元素的歌曲里也能找到。

 

    喜欢张震岳，最喜欢使他的创作能力，归根结底是他的作品里面简单朴实直接的气息，从来不会装模作样。隽永流畅的曲调带出的是真实的信息，有《山地小情歌》这样纯朴的情歌，也有《0204》这样的麻甩佬歌，真真的想唱就唱。

 

   情意结一直延续到他的《等我有一天》，这张目前我最喜欢的张震岳的专集。从前的坏学生形象渐渐褪去，而是变得更成熟内敛，开始探讨成年人面对社会的那种失落与无奈。《认输》认的是自己的失败，失败原来是早该懂得的道理现在才明白；经历了种种的失败，当美好都成为往事，才有《一切再重来》；懂得梦和现实的差别，就有了《男子汉》；从前嚷着“分手吧”的那个人，却在《秋天冬天》里面反省起来，错就错在当初以为自己太成熟。或许是这份成熟与内敛，使得张震岳更有味道，当然他还是有着那种强烈的玩世不恭。“一年发两张，两年发三张，三年死光光”是最真实的见解，绝对会让人会心一笑。

 

   最近喜欢在路上听着《等我有一天》感觉。“信用卡费还光光”绝对是道出了我最近的心声。受了现实的重击，眼前都模糊一片了，是需要一些《一切再重来》的勇气。如果某天我真的推翻现在的生活，选择一切再重来，当中一定有着这首歌给予的勇气。       

    我该相信吗？还是巧合？我宁可信其有。

 

 

    大概是昨晚我在写《Dreaming》的时候吧，一定是那时候。那么说，你一定看过我为你写的所有文字，你一定听过我为你写的歌。

 

    那大概你也知道，妈妈跟我说梦见你的时候，我刚回到宿舍楼下。她神神秘秘地说有些东西要告诉我的时候，我就已经猜到。不出所料，只是没料到这次你也是提着旅行箱的样子，又是出远门回来。不列颠？还是法兰西？远门，会有多远？

 

    在妈妈梦中你的模样通过描述准确地反映在我的脑海里，然后刺激我的泪腺，让我幼稚的相信你是真实的存在，还生活点滴中找来很多不经意来证明自己稚嫩的观点，可是最后连潜意识都不相信，导致眼泪来得更猛烈。

 

    其实，这且我都知道的，但我宁可相信。

No. 1

    八十年代的街道，在黄昏下闪闪发亮。我们的家，就离牌坊不远处。我坐在牌坊下，等着你回来。你像是出完远门，或是行完船，身披大衣，手提两个箱子，向我们珊珊走来。不列颠的风景好，声音也好听，你特意为我带来我最喜欢的东西，一如以往。满箱子都是乐器，曼陀铃，小号，声音美妙；我最爱的是你带回来的小提琴，我拿着它，走到牌坊下，准备为你奏一曲，可是我还没学会。你说你今晚会和外国乐团一起表演，没想到你精通中乐之余，西乐同样了得。只是还没等到去演奏厅，梦已醒来。

 

No.2

    不想工作，偷偷溜到繁华街道的酒吧里。叫了一杯卡布奇诺，我最喜欢的味道，还有一块蛋糕。和酒吧女郎搭讪聊天，享受阳光下的懒惰日子。忽然想起我的苹果留在你的办公室里了，专程去拿。去到你的公司，清洁的阿姨说你在开会，叫我先回家。只见你的背影在办公室的窗前轻轻掠过，见不到你，很不甘心。你已经很久没来过我的梦中了。

    2007年一开始，我的精选Playlist有了全新面貌。上个月狂听Eason Chan的《What's Going On...?》之后，这个月又再次迷恋曾经疯狂着迷的“Brit-pop野”。“Brit-pop野，果然好野！”

 

    1、Black Box Recorder - 《Season In The Sun》这首是我在众多版本里面觉得最好听的一个

 

    2、Block Party -《Like Eating Glass》、《Price of Gasoine》、《So Here We Are》、《Compliments》 大概Bloc Party已经能够不被称作“Brit-pop”了吧。05年最好的新晋乐队，轻狂幽暗得来也有像《So Here We Are》这样美丽动人的作品。

 

    3、Kula Shaker - 《Tattva》 听说最近复出，但有没有什么动静。独具印度特色和70年代感觉的音乐好得不得了，《Tattva》更是非常美妙，曾一度燃起我对印度教与印度哲学的兴趣。

 

    4、Manic Street Preachers - 《Ocean Spray》 初出茅庐的Sunday Sleepers翻唱表演的第一首歌，当年只是觉得曲调起伏好听，小号也来的惊喜。原来一直都没听懂，“Oh, Please stay awake, and then we can drink some ocean spray”，如今才能切身体会歌曲的意思。

 

    5、New Order - 《Crystal》 2002年买的唱片，当年的Crystal。

 

    6、Oasis - 《Turn Up The Sun》、《The Importence Of Being Idle》 《Don't Believe The Truth》是我认为继《(What's The Story) Morning Glory》之后最好的唱片。《Turn Up The Sun》势不可挡，《The Importance Of Being Idle》虽然有The Beatles的影子，但很有sing along的冲动。

 

    7、Richard Ashcroft - 《A Song For The Lovers》 Richard Ashcroft已经不断蜕变为一个“诗人般的创作歌手”了，虽然失去了The Verve时期的神韵，但实在是太过于习惯他的声音了。《A Song For The Lovers》和《Break The Night With Colour》是单飞之后最精彩的作品。

 

    8、Suede - 《So Young》 怎么可以没有Suede呢？只选了《So Young》一首，是因为当年第一次听到这一曲时，竟然有一种想高呼“好Brit-pop，好劲啊！”的感觉。Bernard Butler的吉他无论什么时候听都是那么厉害。

 

    9、UNKLE - 《Unreal》、《Lonely Soul》 终于是电子音乐了吧~~但整张唱片featuring的大都是英国红人，也被我勉强归入此类。当年听“夜元素”作了整整一周的UNKLE特集之后，就发誓在卖到这张唱片之前绝不卖其他唱片。苦寻半年，其间买过一张打口店专门帮我刻录的自家老翻（当年的老翻可没现在发达），终于在香港才能达成愿望。

 

    10、The Verve - 《Sonnet》、《Weeping Willow》、《Velvet Morning》 真正的All time favorite，第一张买了之后觉得自己买了的唱片，The Verve最受欢迎的时期。虽然已经流露出Richard日后将会成为“诗人般的创作歌手”的倾向，但依然充满着The Verve独有的个性。

    我爱苹果（Apple Computer），虽然我还在使用Microsoft的MSN Space，真讽刺。

    都忘了是什么时候喜欢这个牌子，大概是Steve Jobs复出之后的第一台Macintosh的时候。接着是台灯iMac，接着是越来越了解这个品牌的内涵，最后iPod首先征服了曾效忠Discman的我，最后是败在MacbookPro的手上。

    或许这一切和Steve Jobs的个人魅力有关，high-tech Rocker不是朗的虚名的。最新一期《新视线》其中一专栏为了迎接即将到来的Macworld，又来了一个Steve的专题。这次说的是他在Stanford的演讲，看完之后很感动，竟然有把它贴在自己的Space上的冲动。

    我的MSN Space从来都是出自本人的手笔，这次破例了：

 

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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 that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 world's 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.