On life, and death. Everything else is secondary. Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:

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 is 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 is 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. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Living in New York City is a completely unpredictable affair. Some mornings you wake up, stagger out of bed, and the city passionately kisses you, filling the day with idyllic charm. Other mornings begin with what feels like a perfectly timed kick, worthy of the last penalty strike in a World Cup soccer match, that lands superlatively between your legs. Often, New York City greets you with both.

After 15 years of these kisses and kicks, it’s time for me to bid mercurial New York adieu; I’m moving to San Francisco. It’s a tough farewell, to say the least, but it’s time to say goodbye. (I’ll be staying with The New York Times, just working from the San Francisco bureau.)

I first arrived here in the summer of 1996. I was 20 years old at the time: skinny, nerdy and cluelessly wearing massive round glasses. I also sported raver pants too; a public uniform that paired with my spectacles, made me look like Harry Potter going through an identity crisis — minus the wand of course.

I entered the New York City alone. Slowly dragging the half-dozen tattered cardboard boxes that cointained my life across the piping hot concrete slabs of the city during summer. I remember feeling utterly forlorn when I arrived at my new home: a 7 foot by 10 foot box on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue — I later learned that New Yorkers call this “an apartment.”

The city was incredibly gritty and grimy back then, overrun with crime, club kids and politicians who knew how to hide their infidelities. I was warned by my first cab driver to steer clear of dozens of neighborhoods, including Alphabet City, Bushwick and the Lower East Side. In the mid-90s these areas were cesspools; now they are stacked with multi-million dollar glass condos, fake speakeasy bars and more hipsters than cockroaches.

I remember the panic that took ahold of me when I finally realized I was in New York, contemplating the reality that I didn’t actually know a single person among the 10 million I had just moved in with. I barely slept a wink my first night as I lay awake listening to the chaos below: endless stream of police sirens, screaming homeless people and gunshots in an alleyway nearby. (I learned the next morning that someone was shot over a drug-deal gone awry. Welcome to New York, as they say.)

Yet looking past my early fears and trepidation here, and the thousands of kicks between the legs, I really do owe New York City everything.

I came here without a job and now work for the best newspaper in the world: The New York Times! I’ve written a book here. I’ve been in a few bar fights; won some, lost more. I fell in love for the first time in New York. Then I had my heart broken into a million pieces. And I fell in love again, then had my heart broken again, this time into a trillion pieces. I’ve cried in parks, movie theaters and on random city streets. I had a girl throw-up on me during a first date in a bar (we didn’t make it to the 2nd date). I was trapped on the Subway during the blackout, forced to clamber through the tunnel with the sounds of rats scurrying nearby. I stood motionless downtown on a warm, cloudless September day and helplessly watched thousands of New Yorkers perish in the World Trade Center. I then melted into a city of millions who came together to help one another while F-16 fighter jets watched over from above. I met truly amazing, intelligent and caring friends, family and strangers here. And of course I met a fair share of jerks too. Like most New Yorkers, I never did visit the Statue of Liberty.

Yet in the end, I fell in love with a city that I can only hope fell in love with me too.

So, with that said, it’s time for me to say thank you and goodbye to New York City — for now. I’ll see you in San Francisco!

To get a free code reader, for iPhone, Android, Palm or Blackberry, either search in your smartphone app store for “ScanLife”, or go to the following URL on your mobile phone: http://j.mp/BiltonCode

Once you download the appropriate app, fire it up and you will see it access the camera on your phone, almost as if it’s taking a picture. Simply point the camera over the corresponding QR code in the book (hold it a couple of inches away) and you will be taken to a Web page with links, videos and the ability to comment on each chapter.

You don’t need to use the codes to access the additional content in the book, but it makes it easier than typing the URL of each chapter into your mobile phone. For those of you who would like to skip this process, simply point your browser to http://nickbilton.com/future/toc.

I’ve never been very good at taking tests.

My A.D.D. usually kicked in after the fourth of fifth question and I had more fun daydreaming about how I could land a plane if the pilot suffered a stroke, saving hundreds of beholden passengers, than plodding through a list of multiple choice questions.

This all changed in the summer of 1992. At the time I was a Freshman in high school, I got my hands on a fancy new wristwatch with a built-in calculator and ‘notes’ section. Typing on this thing was unbelievable: you would have to press one key three times to reach the desired letter.

But, being the nerd that I am, I loved my futuristic watch-computer-thing. Though I didn’t realize its full potential until I started cheating on tests.

I had Math class during the 4th period on Wednesdays, right after lunch; a friend had the same class an hour earlier. I convinced my compadre to enter into a business deal with me: I would supply him with 10 Blow Pops a week (they were selling for a quarter a pop in the underground High School candy market) and he would steal a copy of the weekly math test for me.

Test in hand, I would spend my entire lunch hour figuring out the answers to the multiple choice questions and entering them into my wristwatch. So instead of the time displayed on my watch, I saw something like this: ABCDAACDDDAD.

And whadya know, I went from F’s and D’s in Math to 100 percent test scores week after week.

Eventually I got caught. They took away my watch and I was suspended from school for three days. Although the principal lowered my sentence because he “was impressed by my creativity,” specifically when it came to technology.

So why am I writing about this now? A few years, and plenty of suspensions later (for unrelated offenses), I graduated high school and headed off to college—I was the class of 1999.

In a post I wrote for the Bits Blog on Tuesday, the class of 2014 will enter college at the end of this summer and according to a Beloit College survey, not only are this fresh crop of kids choosing to forgo wristwatches, but the mere act of pointing to your wrist to ask someone the time is completely alien to them.

The students entering the class of 2014, according to the survey, also don’t use e-mail because it’s too slow, have “never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone,” and say that the band Nirvana is only available on classic oldies station.

(There isn’t a universal symbol to ask for the time, the kids these days don’t need to ask anything as they all have cell phones with clocks front and center, 24-7.)

I’m not saying all this to lament the wristwatch, or any other technology; I traded in my watch for a smartphone many years ago. It’s just fascinating to watch society transition before our eyes in a digital age.

And who knows, when the class of 2014 graduates and the class of 2018 enters the halls of Beloit College, they will probably equate the swipe of unlocking an iPhone to my generation pointing to their wrist to ask the time. And by then I bet the class of 2018 will also say Justin Bieber is only available on classic oldies station.

Photo by arthurohm

Last week I wrote a story for the Bits Blog about 4Food, a new “healthy fast food” restaurant that’s opening in New York City in September.

I know what you’re probably thinking: “Huh, you’re don’t write about food for The Times, you write about nerd-stuff.” The reason I wrote about 4Food was because of the way it’s connected to the Web and allows a new kind of social integration with you lunch, integrating with Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

Plus there’s a neat gaming aspect to the restaurant, as I wrote in my post:

“Once you place your order, you can give it a name and off you go to pick it up. And this is where the game aspect comes in. 4Food has a leaderboard that shows the most-ordered burger. That turns it into a social networking food game.

Here’s how it works: I create a burger, call it “The Bits Burger” and broadcast it to Twitter or Facebook. Each time someone orders my special creation, I get 25 cents credit in the restaurant and my burger rises up the leaderboard. The more customers order my burger, the higher it goes and the more credits I get, until I’m eating free.”

4Food is currently offering a promotion on its site that gives new customers $12 towards a burger and other goodies if you sign up before the launch next month. And if you create a burger, tell me what it is in the comments so I can give it a taste.