The iPad State of the Union

I'll admit it. I watched Steve Jobs' iPad keynote instead of the State of the Union last night.

After returning home from touring an airplane hanger with my local Boy Scout troop (I did have the State of the Union tuned in on the radio for the boys to listen to on the way home), I ate a little dinner, kissed Suzette on the forehead as she sat on the couch watching "Grey's Anatomy," and headed straight for the office to watch Jobs work his magic as he introduced the new Apple iPad.

Nevermind that I had texted Suzette from the hangar to ask her to please record the State of the Union speech. And nevermind that I was mildly intrigued on the way home hearing President Barack Obama declare his intention to seek significant cuts in the student loan burdens most graduating college students face after school (me included).

But what I was really intrigued about was how Steve Jobs was going to convince me that I must have Apple's most recent invention.

I have mixed feelings about Mr. Jobs. In a fit of rage one day during Apple's fetal stages, Jobs fired my dad (Jon Selden, Apple employee #29) for speaking up about the technical limitations of Jobs' then latest creation, the ill-fated Apple Lisa.

The Lisa, Apple's precursor to the Macintosh, was the first computer to use a newfangled thing called a "mouse" along with a "graphical user interface"—the first modern personal computer. Dad, a Princeton- and Standford-educated computer engineer, was on the original Lisa design team.

Apparently dad attracted Jobs rage by criticizing him for not considering other, non-mouse "pointing devices" like the touch screen. Jobs fired him, and a few other engineers on dad's side, on the spot.

We all heard the story second-hand from mom. Dad (who passed away with brain cancer in 1991) never talked about the episode. But, in a videotaped interview shortly before his death, he called it "the first time I ever failed at anything."

I won't claim vindication for dad, but I imagine he cracked a little smile of self-satisfaction wherever he was yesterday, watching Jobs unveil what he called the "magical and revolutionary," mouse-less, keyboard-less, 100 percent touchscreen iPad.

And don't worry Dad. I'll be standing in line in March to get one.

Winter

It's 32 degrees in Austin today and water mains are breaking. The Austin American-Statesman front page this morning declared: "Arctic Blast Arrives."

I'm going to Minnesota tomorrow for my Grandpa Walt's funeral. The high is expected to be 5 degrees. The low is -15 degrees. That's negative 15 degrees. Electrons stop revolving around atoms at temperatures much lower than that.

But I love the cold. It's in my blood. My Dad grew up in Minnesota winters and told us stories of playing ice hockey on frozen fields and ponds.

He moved our family to the cold, cold mountains of the Inland Northwest when I was five. He bought a Ford Bronco to drive around in. The kind with the rubber floor coating.

I grew up pushing old cars out of snow banks. I can't smell the gasoline-infused exhaust of an old car and not think about pushing my friend Brian Holdaway's '66 Mustang out of three-foot snow drifts on the way home from school.

Cold and snow and dim grey skies freeze themselves to your soul and never let go.

So I wore my wool sweater and put on my trench coat this morning and tried to get cold—even though I was sweating.