RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011

With his passing just six weeks after stepping away from his role as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs has made Wednesday, October 5th, 2011, one of those days that many of us will remember for the rest of our lives - a day when someone whose shining brilliance and persistence brought him victory after victory throughout the past four decades. The only thing that beat him, and even that took seven years, was pancreatic cancer.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say right away that the same major surgical procedure Jobs had in July 2004, called a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure"), is one I myself underwent in March of this year, and for the exact same reasons. The full (and somewhat grisly) details of the procedure are perhaps best left to Wikipedia, but one thing I can vouch for is that it requires, shall we say, one's full attention.

The idea, for those of us - like Jobs and myself - "lucky" enough to have a tumor on the head of the pancreas rather than elsewhere, is to remove not just most of the pancreas but also a welter of other internal organs that alas represent the collateral damage of this particular operation. I may put quotes around lucky but in truth it really was a stroke of luck, for both him and me. Because the prognosis for pancreatic cancer anywhere else in the pancreas is not exactly uplifting.

The Jobs operation in July 2004 went well, as did mine in 2011...a tribute to the prescience of the U.S. surgeon Allen Whipple who first devised the procedure as long ago as 1935, making it one of surgery's longstanding success stories. Resecting a malignant tumor is a serious business, Whipple's original methodology has understandably been refined and improved, but those surgeons who perform this procedure - which can take anything up to eight hours - are to my mind surely some of the bravest and finest in the front-line of oncology.

Allen Whipple died in 1963 when Jobs was just eight. But it would have been interesting had the two of them met, because both were pioneers in the truest sense: they were both individuals whose gift was to be the first to enter a new region, thus opening it for eventual occupation and development by others.

The regions of technology that Jobs and his companies (plural) entered first are known to us all. His legacy is all around us. The international Cloud Expo team, in particular, will be thinking of him in just one week's time, when Apple's iCloud service is due to launch.

RIP Steve Jobs.

Live By the Web, Die by the Web

I just this morning received the following enthusiastic message from Klout:



Summer of Klout

Way to go! Your Klout Score braved the dog days of summer and still came out on top! Maybe it's time for a vacation?

This made me chuckle, because if one thing is true about my Summer it is that I didn't brave the dog days, not at all. Instead I vanished into the haze that those few lucky enough to be cured of pancreatic cancer can vanish into. Part physical, part psychological, it's a kind of Never-Never Land - or, more accurately maybe, a Sargasso Sea, a zone characterized by the calm winds of the horse latitudes.

So, no matter what Klout may say to the contrary, this was for me a summer of seaweed rather than sagacity...and I apologize to those who were expecting me to show greater resilience to my chemotherapy. No one has been more surprised than me. I am certainly not out, but it would be wrong of me to pretend that I'm not down. I'll come back fast, I always do; but it may not be till the final doses of Gemcitabine have been injected into me in the epic half-hour infusions that come twice every three weeks to crush my white cell production and, along with it, that of any would-be neoplasms.

"Better safe than sorry," that's all one can say. Along with, "Roll on, 9th Cloud Expo!" - because by then, I will be free and clear of chemistry and cytotoxins will no longer be mixed in with my bloodstream.

I - quite literally - cannot wait.

How Four Months Can Very Soon Feel Like Four Years

Strange just how much can happen in one-third of a year.

Four months ago to the day, I was wheeled into an operating theater in Denmark's top hospital. In the intense few hours that followed, a gifted surgeon and a deeply professional team obtained a dream result: they successfully resected a malignant tumor from my pancreas and then took an incredible number of biopsies from surrounding tissue, just to be on the safe side. Each and every one subsequently came up negative, so the cancer hadn't spread.

I wrote briefly about the experience of being both diagnosed with the deadliest of all the cancers and spared/saved from it all within the space of three weeks. Many people have asked me: how have things been going since?

The answer is not simple, for one reason: chemotherapy.

As part of its world-beating approach to combating deadly cancers, Denmark's University Hospital recommends and requires that a "cured" patient nonetheless undergo follow-up chemotherapy...for six months.

Three of those months - nearly - have now elapsed, though I have to admit that no month when you are undergoing chemo "elapses" (if only). Having one's post-operative existence divided up into 21-day cycles, each one marked by rising levels of heavy metals in one's body, well it's no walk in the park, alas. And the side-effects of the chemicals used [PDF] - I can testify - are in some ways as insidious as the original cancer, in that they are gradual, but comprehensive.

In my case, and remember each and every cancer patient reacts difficulty, I managed the first three cycles, 63 days, with only a few setbacks. But the fourth cycle somehow knocked me sideways, which is why you have heard so very little from @jg21 on Twitter, and seen so very little of me on Facebook since June's wonderful 8th Cloud Expo in NYC.

The past three weeks, in fact, have brought me face-to-face with some very harsh realities. The final three months of chemo are going to be a challenge...and, in order to successfully meet that challenge, I am going to have to dramatically rearrange my professional priorities so as to maximize healing time, minimize stress, and optimize my working day.

For all indirectly affected by this epiphany, which would probably have been better had it come a tad sooner, I apologize. But never has "less is more" been truer. For me to be back to fighting fitness - and weight! - for the Fall, I need finally to accept that convalescence (from Latin convalescere, whose root is in valescere, to be strong...which I currently am not) isn't something that you just "fit in" around all your other commitments; it is something you have to prioritize ahead of those commitments.

My aim in July, August and September then is to write, but to do so largely offline. You will still see the results online, but only as and when they are uploaded. Look out soon, for example, for my updated and hugely expanded Top 350 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem, for an entirely new feature, Around the Cloud in Eighty URLs, and assorted other features aimed at providing convenient one-stop destinations for Cloud insights and information.

I need a 3-month respite from Twitter. By the final three months of 2011 I shall be completely done with chemotherapy, will no longer be tasting heavy metal at the back of my throat 24x7, will no longer be falling asleep for 12 hours at a time, and will no longer see every muscle group in my entire body subject to the ravages that only chemo can exact...a fierceness that has no respect for former waist or neck sizes.

I repeat to myself twenty times a day that it is better than the alternative. And it is. But it would be wrong of me to pretend that this hasn't been the longest four months of my life, and that I am steeling myself for a rough final three months still ahead.

When all is said and done, it seems a ridiculously small price to pay for surviving pancreatic cancer. I am very very grateful.

It brings to mind the words of the writer Melodie Beattie, who memorably noted:

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, [and] the unexpected into perfect timing."

8th International Cloud Expo: It is going to be simply Cloudtastic!

Okay, things have been happening just so fast and furiously just recently that many people have asked me to just take a deep breath and help them play catch-up. Here goes...

Basically all you need to know is that I am back from having "lost" two months of my life.

In those two months I somehow managed to 1. discover that for some reason or other I was not myself, 2. ascribe the blame (wrongly) to a recurrence of the shingles that I had contracted 27 years ago, 3. achieve a diagnosis (correctly) of a massively distended gall-bladder, and 4. pursue that line of inquiry to its logical end...which was alas that the entrance to not just my gall-bladder but three other internal organs - a sort of 4-way traffic junction if you will - was being obstructed by a two-centimeter tumor lodged at the head of my pancreas.

Stranger still, in the same two months I also managed to 5. have the tumor resected (sliced out) successfully, 6. have my entire digestive system rearranged in a so-called "Whipple procedure" (feel free to Wikipedia it, but make sure you are sitting down first), 7. recover from the radical surgery and 8. begin the first cycle of a nine-cycle, six-month course of "preventative" chemotherapy aimed at minimizing the possibility of any return of pancreatic or any other kind of cancer to anywhere in my body.|

It wasn't quite the 2011 that I had scheduled back in November and December of 2010.

To claim that my work didn't get majorly disrupted would be ludicrous, delusional. On the other hand, Cloud Expo New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo - thanks to the amazing team effort that has characterized this event since its inception seven successful shows ago - is trending to be the biggest Cloud event ever. We have over one hundred exhibitors from every level of the cloud computing ecosystem and a non-stop, 4-day technical program, with expert speakers from every top Cloud player, including Abiquo, Amazon, AppZero, AT&T, CA Technologies, Cloud.com, Dell, Dell Boomi, Eucalyptus Systems, Fusion-io, Google, HP, IBM, Layered Technologies, Layer7, LogLogic, McAfee, Microsoft, OpSource, Oracle, OutSystems, OxygenCloud, PayPal, PerspecSys, Quest Software, Rackspace, RightScale, Spoon, Stoneware, Terremark, Virtela, VMware, Xiotech and Zetta.

Altogether, not too shabby. But then, this is the tech conference world's top team. Cloud Expo New York may be only the eighth successive Cloud Expo, but it is actually my fiftieth consecutive event as Conference Chair...so we are building on a fairly decent track record of eleven busy years of producing conferences for the Internet technology community.

But before you worry that maybe, among my newfound plans, there might lurk some wheeze to write the book Pancreatic Cancer is Good for You, let me assure you that on the contrary never in all my life have I felt so humble and privileged and plain dumb lucky.

I am fully aware that the odds I have beaten - or, rather that I have been helped to beat by a brilliant piece of highly invasive surgery carried out both fast and well - were very very long. Lots of different stars had to line up for me to be declared, essentially, cancer-free just seven weeks after being diagnosed with what turned out to be a malignant tumor straight out of Pancreatic Cancer 101 - as in, not only able to kill, but usually successful in killing, if not within a year or two, then almost always within five.

"The silent killer" is what they call pancreatic cancer. Its survival rate is, in the words of one of the earlier websites that (alas!) I chanced upon very early while trying to get a sense of what I was up against, "dismal." And even the less dramatic and more scholarly sites that I found a little later were still very forthright: only 20% of pancreatic cancers are even operable...and of the 20% that are operated on, only a certain percentage seem to end up cured. Most still seem to end up dead. (The mystery of that one still defies me, but perhaps other patients are typically older, or less fit, than I was when diagnosed, so that their tumors, although removed, left traces of cancer behind...)

But then again, what actual use are statistics? What matters, when you are up against a major medical challenge, is you...not some sample of other patients. What matters is to feel strong, to feel loved, and to feel optimistic - and I was blessed with all three. So actually it isn't really surprising at all that I beat the odds. With all that strength (partly from fitness, mostly from stubbornness!), all that love (from my family, my friends, and colleagues who have simply blown me away with their compassion and concern and positive karma, and not least all that optimism (supplied to me at birth in almost infinite quantities)...how could I ever have failed?

I promise you that this is last time that any of you will have to endure hearing about one man's brush with "PanCan" as this scary killer is called. From here on all have to say about it will be said through actions rather than words, specifically my participation in the 2011 San Francisco Marathon on July 31, when I hope you will consider helping raise $10,000 for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (>www.PanCan.org) which is trying to double the survival rate for pancreatic cancer by 2020. The money will go directly to much needed R&D, much neded because for whatever reason very little real progress has been made in fighting this particular cancer in the recent past.

Either way, whether you decide to allocate a few dollars to fighting PanCan or not, know that I will be there on the podium as ever at Cloud Expo New York, and that you will truly not be able to discern any difference: I will still be my same old self...for better or for worse! So look out for me as conference emcee, Power Panel moderator, SYS-CON.tv host, and as a general all-purpose go-to guy if you have a bone to pick with Cloud Expo or (even better) a constructive suggestion as to how we can go on making the event more and more valuable to those who participate, whether as delegates, speakers, exhibitors, sponsors, or attending press & analysts. I should be pretty easy to find! :)

So.....see you in New York City at the Jacob Javits, 6 - 9 June. It is going to be simply Cloudtastic!