I first worked with a Macintosh to edit my high school newspaper, using a program called Aldus Pagemaker to organize stories about football teams and Key Club fundraisers. Even though our newspaper wasn’t particularly good, the experience made me fall in love with writing. Unfortunately, back then I lacked the discipline to really work at it.

When I got to college, I tried acting for one semester, thinking that I’d become a writer/actor (I had also fallen in love with that in high school-and the drama girls were beautiful). Two months into my first acting class, I performed what was supposed to be a depressing monologue about a suicidal teenager. My acting was so bad that the class laughed hysterically, thinking that I was trying to be funny in some sort of a pre-hipster, ironic way. I wasn’t.

So I stopped trying to act. I graduated college and started a company, getting swept up in the dot-com boom. But through all of it, I never lost the bug. These days, I use the hours outside of work or family, when I have them, to write comic strips and short animations. Many of my friends are the same way, using their free time to make music, edit video, or dream up new technologies on computers that serve double duty for the left and right sides of their brains.

I don’t believe this would have been possible without Apple. Without Steve Jobs, I think the PC would have taken another decade to become more than spreadsheets and games. You can talk about his attitude, respect for graphic design, or love of art…whatever it was, it imbued his technology and fed our creative spirits.

For those of us who failed early at artistic endeavors, the tools we now have at our disposal allow us to continue creating long after we’ve started companies or taken day jobs in other fields.

Like everyone else, I love the beautiful toys. But I’m mostly grateful to Steve Jobs and Apple because I’m not sure I’d still be creating without them.

My buddy Nimo has spent the last year working with children in the slums of Ahmedebad to organize the EKATVA tour.  Find out more at www.ekatva.org.

This might be the most important speech Rick Perry has ever given.

There is no better way to explain why the Facebook Timeline is brilliant than this Mad Men mash-up.

Great essay that compares Cervantes to Colbert, in their power to reveal truths through fiction.  I think the article gives Colbert’s press corps act the credit that it deserves:

“The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady,” Colbert said, standing in front of the president of the United States. “You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.” Colbert’s routine mocked the administration’s slippery relation to truth (what happened Tuesday), and identified the president’s famous “resolution” as the character trait that the administration relied on to sell their version of reality.

The brilliance of Colbert’s attack, though, lay in how it was delivered. Colbert’s body was inhabited by two conflicting realities, one in which “Colbert” was a right-wing pundit expressing his admiration for the president, and another that undermined the first by reveling in its inanities. Like Cervantes before him, Colbert used irony to sever his audiences’ conflated identities; the discomfort and hilarity of his act stemmed from our watching as fictions that had blurred into truths were expertly extracted and revealed for what they were.

via ‘Quixote,’ Colbert and the Reality of Fiction – NYTimes.com.