hard deadlines

The local tourist train-slash-kiddie park in Carver MA, the Edaville Railroad, was featuring Thomas the Tank Engine® and friends this weekend. We took Jack up for father's day and Jack had a blast.

It's been heavily blogged, but the wisdom of Jobs's address is profound. And while a lot of folks have picked up on the death thing, I was struck more by the serendipity example. Jobs quit college, but kept dropping in to calligraphy classes at Reed, driven by pure aesthetic interest, only to have typography become, years later, the linchpin of the Mac's success. Jobs:

"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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

Read the whole address at Stanford University.

[Posted with ecto]

Okay, okay, I know I'm wading into a religious war here, but I'm just too stupid to keep my mouth shut. Am I really the only one who thinks the emperor has no clothes?

About once a year I need a new sketchbook, and based on all the chatter in the blogosphere about these famous little critters, I checked them out. My criteria lean toward the functional: good paper for a range of media — pencil, ink pens, and rapidograph — and a compact form factor.

While the size, exterior design, and fit & finish of the notebook and sketchbook are superb, the paper choices are just puzzling. The sketchbook paper is very hard, thick and stiff, and the unlined notebook paper is so thin that one can write on only one side of the page (and can clearly expect bleedthrough.)

Really spent time with it in the store. Rubbed the paper. Imagined using it. Even lit a candle and Dreamed of Famous Literary Figures scribbling Big Important Texts. The awesome beauty of the Moleskine experience...

Not a sausage. Went to Walden and bought my usual Sketchbook-brand sketchbook, $3.99 on the knockoff table. Shrug. I'm a heathen.

At least the Washington Post is continuing to poke around this story. In this piece, they pick up on the connection between the timing of the memo and John Bolton's successful efforts to get a key UN chemical weapons inspector fired.

Where, though, is the wider coverage? Why are we not above the fold in the Gray Lady? Where's the followup to Elisabeth Bumiller's piece — oh, wait, I guess none is necessary, since Bush's comment is "There's nothing farther from the truth." That settles that.

In Congress, where it can be conveniently dismissed as partisan wrangling, at least a few are standing up. Gotta love John Conyers (D-MI) letter to Bush, "I deplore the fact that our media have been so reticent on the question of whether there was a secret planning of a war for which neither the Congress nor the American people had given permission. "