iHero: Mosaics of Steve Jobs

January 22, 2011 5:38 AM

iHero: Mosaics of Steve Jobs - Charis Tsevis is a Greek artist and visual designer who creates interesting collages from objects related to the subject, often for publications like the Wall Street Journal and Time. Other works include Barack Obama, Charles Darwin, Jonathan Ive and much more.
posted by Blazecock Pileon (25 comments total)

Mosaics
posted by bobloblaw at 6:21 AM on January 22, 2011

Thanks, bobloblaw. My tags are correct, but I don't know why I didn't catch my mistake in the title. If someone wants to fix the spelling in the title, that's fine. Otherwise, I hope people can still figure it out.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:29 AM on January 22, 2011

Indigo forever, via Moses' Red Sea. An Icon is just that, Iceland Vs. Greenland, the material will outlast the flesh.
posted by Mblue at 7:14 AM on January 22, 2011

I wonder if Steve has a black turtleneck he wears around that says "iHero" on it.

Probably.

After he ended the genocide in Darfur I felt like he really sealed the deal.
posted by kbanas at 7:32 AM on January 22, 2011 [3 favorites]

No one has the proper tool required to fix the spelling in the title, Blazecock.
posted by Artichoke Dance Off!! at 7:48 AM on January 22, 2011 [5 favorites]

The tireless advocacy for Apple products by certain characters around here is a complete turnoff. I say this as someone who has used the Mac thing exclusively since 1993.

It. Is. A. Bore.
posted by Wolof at 7:53 AM on January 22, 2011 [4 favorites]

Same goes for the kneejerk detractors, obviously.
posted by Wolof at 7:55 AM on January 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

No one has the proper tool required to fix the spelling in the title, Blazecock.

You're right. The flaw will have to stay, sadly. Hopefully the links still work -- that usually the idea, here.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:10 AM on January 22, 2011

I wonder if Steve has a black turtleneck he wears around that says "iHero" on it.

Probably.

After he ended the genocide in Darfur I felt like he really sealed the deal.

Yeah, I really doubt Steve deifies himself, others do it. Or more likely people create in their heads hordes of fictitious others that deify Steve. The same psychological mechanism that drove the fear of the Red Peril, methinks.

Granted there are a few that do, but the few people I know of that are die-hard fans of Steve are far outnumbered by the people I know that devote a disproportionate amount of their lives and resources to say, Raiders or Chiefs worship.
posted by sourwookie at 8:24 AM on January 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

The tireless advocacy for Apple products by certain characters around here is a complete turnoff. I say this as someone who has used the Mac thing exclusively since 1993.

It. Is. A. Bore.
posted by Wolof at 7:53 AM on January 22 [+] [!]

I suspect a lot of those people are ones like me who are forced to watch their productivuty chewed away by Microsoft's crap at work and choose to use Apple's products elsewhere. Funny how that contrast makes one tend to develop strong feelings over time. But think of the IT jobs we would lose if Apple doubled their enterprise market penetration.

These mosaics are interesting. It's not a nice thing to speculate on Job's health, and I can't help but be impressed by the level of control over his status, but in the eventuality he does not pull through this, it's worth remembering that we ought to champion American innovators, even if you think they would have been wiser to be conducting peace talks in Darfur.
posted by docpops at 8:31 AM on January 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

There are meant to be ironic, right? 'Cause otherwise it would be kinda creepy.
posted by octothorpe at 8:57 AM on January 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

For those who clicked on the links, several were created for and used in publications.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:13 AM on January 22, 2011

This is a lot of freelance folio here.

Accusing the guy who does this of a bizarre obsession would be like accusing the guy who does the "wood cut" illustrations for the Wall Street Journal of Bernanke worship.
posted by sourwookie at 9:43 AM on January 22, 2011

arrgh how do I make this slideshow stop so I can actually look at these hyper-detailey things
posted by egypturnash at 10:11 AM on January 22, 2011

Interesting stuff.

I thought "Mosiacs" was a play on sounding like Wozniak in a creative poetic kind of way rather than a typo.

Thread management? Indeed, no lazy flinging around the term "hater" for completely unfounded reasons. Amazing things happen sometimes.
posted by juiceCake at 11:35 AM on January 22, 2011

[YOU KNOW WHERE METATALK IS. GO THERE IF YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT BEHAVIOR ON THE SITE. THANK YOU.]
posted by cortex at 11:51 AM on January 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

The tireless advocacy for Apple products by certain characters around here is a complete turnoff.

Why bring it up here? This is an interesting post on its own. I think it makes more sense to make Steve Jobs a consumer icon of sorts than, say, Bill Gates.

I suspect a lot of those people are ones like me who are forced to watch their productivuty chewed away by Microsoft's crap at work and choose to use Apple's products elsewhere. Funny how that contrast makes one tend to develop strong feelings over time. But think of the IT jobs we would lose if Apple doubled their enterprise market penetration.

I suspect a lot of that lost productivity is caused by the specific work environment, rather than Microsoft's crap. I was recently working with a guy from a big consulting firm, a big Apple fan. He had a Windows 7 laptop, and was complaining about its terrible performance. I had practically the same laptop, and mine flew and worked great. It turned out it was because of all the management software, login scripts, etc they'd dumped on his laptop.

I don't think we'd lose that many jobs if Apple doubled their enterprise market penetration, either - 2 x 0 is still 0.
posted by me & my monkey at 3:45 PM on January 22, 2011

Monkey, if it helps, we have 50 docs all running one basic program, Allscripts, on an XP platform on a Toshiba laptop. The average times each doc has to restart Allscripts in any given half day due to hangs is about six. Full reboots of the system, 1-2, all in the middle of crammed office encounters.

In 2 months of running the same software on a virtual machine on my 5 year old Macbook I have had Allscripts crash twice and zero restarts. Four more docs purchased their own MB Airs a few weeks ago with their own money.

My productivity is my career, my income, and my patient's welfare. I really don't care whose fault it is, but every box I have ever had the misfortune to own, more than ten by my count, built to run Windows, has been a joke. Jobs and Co. have, quite literally, saved my sanity and made me quite a lot of money.But our seven person IT dept.has a three day backlog of work in any given week, so they may feel differently.
posted by docpops at 6:28 PM on January 22, 2011

In 2 months of running the same software on a virtual machine on my 5 year old Macbook I have had Allscripts crash twice and zero restarts.

And that VM is running XP, right? Look, if it works in an XP VM, you can't say it's a Microsoft problem. If you copied that VM to a Windows 7 machine and ran it with VMware, IT WOULD RUN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. Maybe your Toshiba laptops suck. Maybe Allscripts sucks. Let's just say that Apple wouldn't pick this example for their marketing campaign.

every box I have ever had the misfortune to own, more than ten by my count, built to run Windows, has been a joke.

My experience has been different. The Windows boxes I've owned have been junk when I bought junk, and have been great when I bought non-junk. The Macs I've owned have generally been non-junk, but I've stuck to the higher-end models.

But our seven person IT dept.has a three day backlog of work in any given week, so they may feel differently.

I don't know your IT department. But I suspect that claiming that all they do is fix Windows problems would be like claiming all doctors do is play golf and write prescriptions.
posted by me & my monkey at 7:18 PM on January 22, 2011

Yeah, if you run mac software on windows in a VM and it doesn't crash, then windows is running your software without crashing. Sometimes Mac advocacy is just totally off the wall:

But think of the IT jobs we would lose if Apple doubled their enterprise market penetration.

Right because obviously if managing one Mac is easy managing a network full of them with moron users must also be totally easy, right? I have a PC at home and I think I've spent maybe a few hours on 'administration' since 2008. Same thing with my laptop. When you have a whole network it takes a lot more work. Macs are actually a lot harder for IT people since they don't have good centralized controls. Just look at askme and you can find tons of people having trouble with their Macs.
posted by delmoi at 5:06 AM on January 23, 2011

Every glitch I've ever experienced with a Mac I solved in a few minutes by researching on the web. Most recently iTunes kept failing to recognize iPhones and iPads. A software update just fixed it. Apple pays close attention to it's customers. What the hell is Toshiba or HP going to do outside of a physical problem with their hardware? You think Microsoft is burily solving it's customer's endless error inscrutable messages? I appreciate that there are excellent reasons, accurate ones, why I am wrong in my assertions that Non-Apple computing devices are buggier and tend to crash. I'm not a palsied octagenarian who can't operate a remote control. Maybe someone could tell me, if HP, Dell, and Toshiba can't run software properly, what company should I turn to next for my ideal Microsoft computing experience? Because now I clearly understand the fault has all been my own for making poor choices.
posted by docpops at 11:05 AM on January 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

Every glitch I've ever experienced with a Mac I solved in a few minutes by researching on the web. Most recently iTunes kept failing to recognize iPhones and iPads. A software update just fixed it.

That's great for you! Again, though, your anecdotal experience with iTunes doesn't really say anything about useful work experiences or anything else. Let me know when Apple fixes certificate-based L2TP VPN connectivity - it says it works on the box, and yet, no one can get it to work without buying third-party software. Maybe you can fix that for me by spending a few minutes researching on the web.

Apple pays close attention to it's customers.

... and then they ignore them. They tell their customers what they should want, and that makes the customers happy. I could go through a laundry list of examples here, but I won't.

Maybe someone could tell me, if HP, Dell, and Toshiba can't run software properly, what company should I turn to next for my ideal Microsoft computing experience? Because now I clearly understand the fault has all been my own for making poor choices.

I'm using a Dell Studio XPS 13, and it's worked very nicely. I haven't had any crashes, other than one the first day I got it, before I updated the BIOS. It was pretty expensive, but less expensive than a comparable Mac. I've had it for a couple of years now, and it's been outstanding.

I'm also using a MacBook Air, with OS X and Windows 7 installed. It's a very nice piece of hardware, and both OSs run on it very nicely. (Why do I have Windows installed? See above.) The build quality is better than the Dell, without question. This is what I use as my primary work laptop now. The first week I got it, though, I had to power it off and back on when a third-party OpenVPN client locked up. The entire machine became unresponsive. I haven't had a problem like that in YEARS on Windows. Nothing like having to take a break while teaching a class because I had to restart everything. But when I asked my mostly-Mac-using students if this was unusual, many told me they had similar problems occasionally.

Does that mean OS X sucks? No. Shit happens with computers, because they're very complicated. If you use Windows at work all day, then come home and use a Mac a couple of hours (not doing work, not running custom software that's probably fairly crappy on its own), you're likely to have more problems with Windows. Not to mention, you're running a pretty old version of Windows.

It's not your fault that you've had problems with Windows computers, but it is your fault that you're willing to ridiculously overgeneralize about it as a result.
posted by me & my monkey at 12:37 PM on January 23, 2011

I'm using a Dell Studio XPS 13, and it's worked very nicely.

Your anecdotal experience with Dell doesn't really say anything about useful work experiences or anything else.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:17 AM on January 24, 2011

I've had more problems with Macs personally (disappearing hard drives being the biggest one and then constant questions from my Mac using clients on how to find files, use their computer in general, and the I shouldn't have to know how to do something it should just do it attitude), even more than Ubuntu (drivers and Skype being the biggest issue), so I've stuck with Windows (just last week it was time for an upgrade and neither Ubuntu or OS X were even remotely on the list). I have no problems with productivity in terms of technical issues. Plus I get to build my own boxes to my specs for frankly great prices. That said, driver issues can happen to, but this is true of any system. In many ways it's what you're familiar with. I remember people telling me multiple mouse button are hand gymnastics and to complicated and yet multi-touch touch screen interfaces somehow aren't. Bizarre.

That said, there's nothing wrong with OS X or Ubuntu (they are great operating systems that suit millions of individuals) if you like it and you have no issues with it. I find it confusing that a single or even series of distasteful personal experiences would be extended to "this is the experience of millions". I know people who have had lemon Hondas for example. Does this make Hondas bad?

I work with people every day that use all the big platforms and I use Linux for anything server related (used to use Ubuntu for the netbook but I needs me my Skype). Over generalizing is absurd. We hear things like sheep, herd, and "real work" all to often, as if millions of people aren't individuals but sheep, as if millions upon millions of people don't get work done productively etc. I find people's personal and therefore (obviously I thought) individual preferences to be so minute that something can "suck" to them that doesn't "suck" to another. I can't stand PHP riddled themes in Wordpress for example, so I use MODx. Different approach which is more suitable to me and not so to others. Easy really. Means nothing more.

It's just a tool, not your identity, it means nothing, unless you're 14 perhaps. It's great to personalize things and go for it but realize that computers are just tools to millions and they use them every day without difficulty and they don't give a fuck about who makes it etc.
posted by juiceCake at 11:45 AM on January 24, 2011

Your anecdotal experience with Dell doesn't really say anything about useful work experiences or anything else.

Right! Which is why I'm not making the general statement that Windows is better than OS X, or that Dell is better than Apple. I'm sure you can see the difference.
posted by me & my monkey at 2:29 PM on January 24, 2011