What a life ! What a Journey !!

Robin Patricia Williams is the author of dozens of best-selling and award-winning books. She is much more than that .  We got introduced to her in before two days while discussing  “dissatisfaction” and  her dictionary “JARGON”.

Her life is full of freshness, zeal, enthusiasm, struggle & determination to carve a new path  and be a winner and only she can describe such a life  fully .

I found it worth reading many times over. Here it is for you ,  her “Real Bio Data” – as she calls it – and as written by her :

 QUOTE 

·        Born in Berkeley, California, (October 9, 1953) ,……

·        Lived a happy '50s childhood in San Jose and Fremont with two brothers and a sister and two parents who actually liked each other and liked all their kids.

·        Was conscious, by the time I was in my late teens, of the importance of trust and unconditional love.

·        Graduated from Washington High School in Fremont at 17.

·        Spent a month camping in Canada with another teenaged girl, Nicki Bouton. Got a job at Highland Hospital in Oakland as a medical secretary;

·        Moved away from home at 18 with Michelle deRoco.

·        Learned to scuba dive.

·        Quit my job to hitchhike across America with another 18-year-old girl, Marcia (Rogers) Carota.

·        Hitched 7,000 miles, got a job in Boston at Boston Children's Hospital, slept in graveyards, sides of freeways, under bridges, with relations.

·        Back in California, got my job back at the hospital.

·        Learned to sky dive.

·        Worked a second job at Herrick Hospital to make enough money to go to Europe.

·        Spent almost two years in Europe on $1,000.

·        Picked grapes in the south of France (got a tattoo);

·        pretended I was Canadian and got a job in London as a secretary for British Airways;

·        peeled potatoes and washed dishes at a pension in Austria, skiing every day;

·        traveled with my lover in the German band through Germany;

·        worked on boats on a Greek island and as a waitress;

·        Worked and lived in a kibbutz in Israel;

·        Spent some time in Paris.

·        Came back to California and got another job at the hospital in Oakland.

·        Quit to go back to school to study veterinary medicine.

·        Cynthia Katona at Ohlone Community College unveiled my passion for Shakespeare.

·        Ryan was born at home in Fremont, California, in 1977.

·        Changed majors because Nicki Bouton introduced me to graphic design;

·        Moved up to Santa Rosa, California, to go through a three-year graphic design program at Santa Rosa Junior College.

·        Began assistant-teaching the course.

·        Carmen Karr and I started our own graphic design business.

·        Was tricked into getting pregnant.

·        Jimmy was born at home in Santa Rosa in 1982.

·        I made the stupid mistake of marrying his father when Jimmy was four months old.

·        Continued to teach at the college part-time,

·        worked part-time designing video boxes for pornographic movies, freelanced graphic design in the middle of the nights,

·        Was a married single mother.

·        When Ryan was 7 years old he and I took a trip down to Oaxaca for several weeks.

·        I got dreadfully sick, came home, got pregnant while dreadfully sick, left that man when I was two months pregnant. I was much happier.

·        Scarlett was born at home in Santa Rosa in 1986.

·        Added a couple of other jobs to my collection because neither of the fathers thought they should pay child support.

·        Worked in an ad agency.

·        I have a tendency to like a job until I have learned everything I can, then move on.

·        Supported myself and my three children on $10,000 to $12,000 a year.

·        I became very good at being poor.

·        We built Christmas trees out of cardboard, stole toilet paper from public restrooms, learned fifty ways to cook beans, read stories and made up plays instead of watching television.

·        I couldn't do everything, though, so for ten years I didn't sleep much and the house was always a mess.

·        You have to give up somethin'. All that time, though, I was very conscious that it was my choice to be poor.

·        It was not an unhappy time. I chose to work several part-time jobs with no security, no benefits, no medical coverage, in exchange for being home when my kids came home from school, in exchange for jobs I could do in the middle of the night (freelance graphic jobs, preparing lesson plans, etc.) when my little ones were sleeping.

·        I traded graphics for theater tickets, for dance lessons for my kids, for books.

·        In 1984, of course, the Macintosh was invented. I was very resistant to computers. "I'm going to let computers pass me by. By the time they can do what I do in graphic design, I will be ninety years old and won't care." Well, was that stupid, of course.

·        One of my students, Brad Mager insisted I could not be computer-illiterate. He brought over his Mac Plus and plopped it on my kitchen table, which was the only flat surface in the house clear enough to set anything on.

·        We clicked. The Mac made perfect sense to me. Even the Font/DA Mover made sense.

·        I was teaching 8 hours a week but running the entire graphic design program, which took about 30 hours a week. I got paid for 8. So I quit the design program and asked to teach a HyperCard class.

·        Oh my !  that was fun. I asked if I could teach any other Macintosh classes. They said, "Can you teach spreadsheets and databases?" "Oh sure," I said.

·        I ran home and looked up "spreadsheet" and "database." I discovered that I love spreadsheets and databases--such clear, logical, and oh so useful programs.

·        Taught Microsoft Works, Intro to Macintosh, PageMaker.

·        I am a teacher. It is my path. It is what I am supposed to do.

·        No matter what is going on outside--divorce, unhappiness, anger, poverty, death--when I walk into my classroom nothing else exists except my students and our work.

·        Teachers certainly don't teach for the money. Real teachers teach because they are supposed to.

·        I didn't plan do what I'm doing. When I was in high school I had a small business teaching swimming in my parents' backyard, and all the moms and dads assumed I was going to be a kindergarten teacher. "A teacher!" I exclaimed with dismay. "Oh no, I will do something much more exciting than be a teacher!"

·        It took many years for my path to unfold, and I had no clue where it was leading.

·        But now that I am here, I see that it happened the way it was supposed to. I did not know I was on a path, but I see now that having the courage to live in the "wisdom of uncertainty," to take jobs I had a passion for instead of the ones that offered the most benefits and highest pay, to be willing to struggle to happily make ends meet rather than live in a miserable partnership, to take the anger and bitterness after a divorce and direct that energy to getting my own life together rather than trying to get money out of him, eventually led me to a very satisfying place, a place that offers so much more to me than I ever thought would happen in my life.

·        My teaching turned into writing a booklet for my students, which turned into my first two books, Macintosh Basics (shortly thereafter changed to The Little Mac Book) and The Mac is not a typewriter.

·        I borrowed money from my mother to self-publish these two books.

·        The previous year I had tried to get a HyperCard book published, but not one of the ten computer book publishers I queried said yes. So I decided to publish these two books myself.

·        I took a weekend workshop from Dan Poynter in Santa Barbara to learn how to market and sell them. They started selling.

·        I started work on a PageMaker book.

·        It's a long story, but through Scott Kronick, a contact I made at the Berkeley Mac User Group (BMUG), Ted Nace at Peachpit Press got hold of my book and asked if he could publish it.

·        Peachpit was just getting started at this time--the business was still in Ted's house in Berkeley. He agreed to publish both my existing books and also my PageMaker book.

·        I continued to teach at Santa Rosa Junior College and continued to write more books.

·        I bought a house. I had a broken heart and moved to New Mexico.

·        I realized, when I got here, that this is where I am supposed to be right now.

·        The broken heart was just a painful kick in the butt to get me here. So now I live in Santa Fe.

·        I started the Mac User Group here and have been president, vice-president, and board member, opened (and closed) Zuma's Electronic C@fe, had a column about the Internet in the Sunday edition of the local newspaper, was a Brownie leader for my daughter's troop, taught Electronic Typography at the local community college, appear on the local radio stations now and then, helped found the New Mexico Internet Professionals Association, am madly in love with the best designer in the state (probably the country) (probably the world).

·        In the past few years I have taken to teaching Shakespeare classes and leading monthly readings; I wrote a book about the woman who I believe may have written the works attributed to Shakespeare; founded the Mary Sidney Society; have had time to travel the world and ride elephants, camels, rickshaws, and zip-lines; and I continue to write columns and articles and books. My house is still a mess.

·        Scarlett is now 22, Jimmy is 26, and Ryan is 30.

·        I haven't been bored.

UNQUOTE

You can find more interesting facts  about her at http://www.ratz.com/robin/toc.html

Long Live Dissatisafaction – the mother of invention !

We learn from Wikipedia  that “ There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted  Dr Samuel Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas, equivalent to about £220,000 as of 2009. 

Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. Johnson took nearly nine years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. Remarkably, he did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy out the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.”

Even Johnson's dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

The key word is ‘dissatisfaction”…. and it has continued to survive and inspire people to keep bringing out newer and newer dictionaries.

I must mention here two very novel dictionaries , which  were created  to simplify the life of readers:

FIRST  is a series of several specialized dictionaries by SMH Collin / PH Collin ( published in India by Universal Book Stall under arrangement with Peter Collin Publishing Ltd, UK ). They are for different subjects – Accounting, Banking and Finance, Law, Medicine, Computing, Business, Govt. and Politics and Ecology & Environment, to name some titles.  They contain main entries in the range of about 5,000 words. All the words and expressions are defined in simple terms, and examples are given of how each word is used in context. Short notes point out differences in spelling and construction between British and American English, and encyclopaedic comments are given throughout the text to expand on the definitions. Quotations are given from British and US magazines and newspapers to show how the terms are used in "real life", and the supplement section gives notes on various financial documents.

But there is something special, unbelievable yet true, as each dictionary claims : “The main words are explained in simple English, using a limited vocabulary of about 500 words over and above those words which appear in the dictionary as main words !!

Thus, any one with a limited vocabulary can also understand difficult words which occur frequently while studying technical subjects like medicine, law, computing, etc. ( The 1994 Indian reprint was priced just at Rs.50-60 only ) !!  May God bless those who conceived  & produced them!!

 

 

SECOND  is an equally amazing dictionary , titled "JARGON: An Informal Dictionary of Computer Terms"   by  Robin Williams  

 Here is what Ms Williams ( who is a designer, single mother of three kids, contributing columnist for lots of design magazines, speaker, trainer and all-round wonderful person)  has to say about her creation  -in her own  words, "I wrote this book because I was frustrated with every computer dictionary and glossary I had collected. The explanations were usually so brief and they assumed I knew a host of other things. 

Jargon's purpose is to provide the beginning-to-average computer user with the full meaning of every important term in a way that's clear, complete, and non-stuffy. When I started work on Jargon, I scoped out a book of 160 pages; but eventually it grew to four times that size (700 to be precise) . As a teacher, I knew I wanted to provide longer, richer definitions than those cryptic little phrases you'd normally expect. Fortunately, the publishers  let me get carried away and create a computer dictionary that even my mother could enjoy."

Thumb through Jargon and you see definitions that are remarkably easy to find and to read (what a concept!). Rather than tiny lines of type packed in like sardines, the layout is clear and airy with plenty of white space. To enlighten readers and enliven Jargon even more, the book includes cartoons by John Grimes, whose humor has appeared with great popularity.  Robin Williams's sister Shannon contributed a cross-word puzzle to see whether you've been paying attention. And Robin's daughter Scarlett, age 7, created a delightful font - cleverly named Scarlett- for chapter headings .

It is a  book with hundreds of computer terms explained in such a way that the reader actually understands the word after reading the definition. Covers both the Macintosh and PC world, as well as peripheral terminology. Explains not only the technical definition of the word, but also the how and why of the word.

 
SIMPLE things are always beautiful ! Those who create them are no longer  the ordinary mortals. Our world is worth living because some one , some where is dissatisfied with the status quo and is labouring hard  for  creating a new gift for us


If this was the good news, the bad news is that as per my information, JARGON is out of print now! 

I hope I  am wrong , so that we can but it one more time !!