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The iPad chipped away at me and now I want one. That's how I've felt about it since it was introduced. The value prop just got gradually better, little by little, and I would necessarily go past some tipping point. Here we are thanks to the new hardware and software.

I think the initial proposal was that Apple would sell you everything you wanted: books, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and maybe the occasional Angry Bird. But it looks like what emerged instead is a fractured ecosystem in which content makers privatized and decentralized whatever it is they offer. The downside is that I have to have separate apps to read, watch, or otherwise consume the stuff I want to. The New York Times and The Economist, two of my regulars, live in separate apps. But on the plus side, apps for Netflix and Hulu hold a lot of video. I can get live Japanese TV from NHK World. And with a web browser and an RSS reader I can follow all my usual websites. And once I can get a decent TV, for $100 I can start beaming all my stuff everywhere thanks to AirPlay. And best of all, I can do all of those things all over the world. 

What's more, iPhoto for iPad is a big deal. It's a fully-featured desktop app with a wholly replaced interface. It's the Minority Report interface we've dreamed about. We're now really getting stuff done with gestures and touch. It's Direct Manipulation taken to its logical extreme. I think it's a sign of very good things to come. 

One thing I love is the Photo Journals feature, where your photos fill up the page along with contextual maps, calendars, and blocks of text:

Why am I not publishing a website that looks more like that? Why aren't there images strewn about in every which direction? Why aren't there big quote boxes setting off my best lines? Some high-readership websites are beginning to take their cues from print magazine layouts, but why isn't that in my blog software? I think Apple has quietly pushed the envelope here for web design. 

I'm so swept up in the mood that I've changed this blog's design yet again, this time to something a little better suited to tablet reading. Images will be prominent, when they're there, and text columns are much wider for much less wasted space. Colors are very e-reader-ish, too. 

I think everyone will eventually hit the tablet tipping point, if they haven't already. This is just the time where I'm convinced I need one. 

Being Elmo is a documentary following Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who's always played Elmo. Even though it's a documentary in format and presentation, the story is heart-warming enough to be as good as the Oscar winners from a few hours ago.

Clash came from very humble origins - a house that could've passed for projects on the outskirts of Baltimore and no means to travel - but his passion for puppetry was spotted at a very early age. He put on puppet shows for local kids and survived constant heckling from classmates. That grew into a spot on local children's TV shows, which grew into a spot on the popular broadcast show Captain Kangaroo. 

In his senior year of high school, he got his big break and met his heroes: Jim Henson and his entire crew. He succeeded before Henson and eventually settled into a steady career on Sesame Street.

Elmo is his creation, his character made from a spare puppet that was rarely used on the set. The real pivotal point in the film - spoiler alert (if such a thing exists for documentaries) - is the revelation that each Muppet character is based on a very focused character. Fozzy Bear is a Vaudeville performer, first and foremost. Elmo's character, on the other hand, is a concentrated and raw form of love. Elmo always gives hugs and kisses. Elmo loves you. 

Everyone who was interviewed for the film, from fellow puppeteers to Henson's contemporaries to Whoopi Goldberg, pointed to that Elmo character as a hidden side of Clash that only gets to come out when he's in character. 

While I'm glossing over a lot of wonderfully heart-warming details, the sum of the parts is that Clash had this passion for puppetry from his youth, and he followed it with such whole-heartedness and dedication that it led him to meet his heroes, become part of that tribe, and win great professional success along with it.

At 27, I've started to fear that I've missed out on my Elmo moment.

When I was 4 and first saw a video game, that automatic, natural connection went off in my head the same way it did for Kevin Clash when he saw the pilot episode of Sesame Street and Bert and Ernie talked to him by looking straight into the camera. 

When I was 9, I tried to learn C++. When I was 10 or 11, I subscribed to Game Developer Magazine. All the while, I played with every level editor for every major PC game that was a part of my childhood: Doom, Descent, StarCraft, Quake, Unreal. I was trying to be creative, the equivalent of sewing my own puppets together. 

Opportunity knocked for me, the same way it did for Clash. I attended Dallas gaming conventions and met heroes like John Carmack and John Romero. I worked in the gaming press - the dream job to end all dream jobs, if you were a young kid. I even worked at an actual game studio and had so much fun I preferred work to home life. I was invited to work - not just attend - E3 2009.

Yet in each case, things fizzled. The Dallas gaming empire collapsed, and my heroes fell from the spotlight. I lost my gaming press job after a couple months. I lost the game development job after mere weeks. The publisher that tentatively hired me for E3 backed out. 

The games industry - my own calling since birth, as I saw it - chewed me up and spat me out multiple times. My desire to work a job that would last, and one where I'd be taken seriously, led me to Rakuten. 

I feel good about Rakuten - it connects a lot of dots from my past including the Internet business, business strategy, working globally, and of course the Japan thing. 

My ultimate, eventual goal is to be part of a creative place. The Pixars, Nintendos, Sesame Workshops and Apples of the world have in common one thing: love. As Al Gore put it at the global tribute to Steve Jobs, Apple has it. Pixar and Nintendo both have it, if you go read the books about those companies. Valve, too, has it, as its legions of fans will attest.

Kevin Clash has it in spades, obviously. And if you watch his documentary, you'll notice that the same Henson Workshop puppeteers from the 1970s are still around and have aged very gracefully in lives filled with happiness and passion.

My only fear about Rakuten - a company which is kindly giving me a job, a paycheck, training and a position with advancement capability in a sector where I have passion and experience in my favorite city in the world - is what happens to creativity in a business (and consequently a career) with success and failure defined by metrics.

"Suck it up," you may say to me. I should be thankful I'm employed at all. I should have to do some real work and pay my dues. Everyone else does "work work" and I'm not deserving of escaping that.

Feel free to say those things to me. Just keep the volume low enough that the four-year-old me can't hear. 

Ack!

Let's get down to it:

Spotify 

I should mention Spotify first, since the service is a decent music player but it's really an amazing platform for me to shout out my musical opinions and tastes to the people who may want to know about it. I haven't really been able to share music with my high school amigos since high school, thanks to the inevitable demise of our LAN parties, too much laziness to run FTP or other filesharing servers, and the increasing difficulty of using common desktop apps to send files back and forth.

Within a week or two of being converted to Spotify, Aroon, Alex and I basically got to play catch-up on several years' of diverging music collections. It's really good to be coming back together. If you're not using Spotify for its social features, it's because you don't have a taste in music.

All that said, I'm listening to:

Kenichiro Nishihara, Life - Mostly misses, especially compared to Humming Jazz, but don't miss Now I Know.

Funky DL, Blackcurrent Jazz 2 - DL's best since The 4th Quarter. Fantastic from start to finish. Don't miss Le Jazz Courant Noir. This is already the soundtrack to the rest of my time here in the US.

Nujabes, Spiritual State - You already know what I think.

Chris Botti Live in Boston - Sometimes you just need a little jazz.

Forza Motorspot 3 (yes, 3) - So good that I switched away from GT5. Can't wait to get my hands on 4.

Yakuza 4 - I loved 3, so no surprise I enjoyed this one. There was less to surprise me in this one, and no new environments, but the enhancements over 3 made it worth the run.

Uncharted 3 - Personally, my Best Game of 2011. I started playing and next thing I knew Aroon was planted on the couch watching the action. Then, next thing I knew, we started over and Nick planted himself on the couch too. This is what a blockbuster - game, movie, whatever - should be.

Battlefield 3 - Actually really enjoyed the singleplayer campaign, if only because it's marginally less ridiculous than Modern Warfare. I really should've paid the $10 for multiplayer access.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Hats off to Eidos Montreal. They pulled off what every studio promising a big reboot promises, except they actually delivered. I adore the atmosphere, the world, the attention to detail. Looking at the augmentation, or the hacking mini-game, or the linearity, and it isn't classic DX. But the spirit of the narrative - the poverty, the paranoia, the way that globalization gives way to corporate rule - is completely and satisfyingly present. Can't wait for the inevitable sequel, and I'm just fine if it takes five years to execute again.

Donkey Kong Country Returns - As a trip down memory lane, certainly better done than most Nintendo platformers that aren't Mario. As a platformer, however, waggle controls are annoying and disappointing. And the cartoony, low-poly look that the Wii is known for doesn't do DKC justice. It's worth 2 or 3 hours, but from that you've scratched the itch and you can put it away.

Sonic Generations - I'd been hankering for a good Sonic so badly that I bought Sonic CD and gave it my first whirl ever since I never had a Sega CD growing up. Then along came Generations and - holy moly - it's good! A good 3D Sonic! Hallelujah!

Tropico 4 - Like a Zynga game but with a bad interface. Shudder.

Final Fantasy XIII - Not worth the 60 hours it'd take to appreciate this game. After 5, I still have no idea what a fal'Cie is and I hate every character except the awesome black dude with the 'fro. Still, my hat goes off to the people who implemented the seriously beautiful motion graphics. Those little details were fantastic.

Steve Jobs' bio is worth the read.

(the new track comes in after 6:00, but you really should watch the whole performance)

You know those really touching commercials Google is running about sending photos to your daughter and finding French churches to wed the life-changing Parisienne? This is my Google commercial. I couldn't be in Shibuya last summer, but the videos on YouTube let the whole world watch. 

It's such a blessing.

An amazing team sport. Winners often credit their teams (that is, their crews and engineers), while the crews and engineers treat the driver like another part of the car. That's not a lack of respect, that's chemistry to an extreme. A football team specializes only along the range from huge and fast to huge and faster. A racing team ranges from PhD mechanical engineers to dudes who can lift serious weight using their necks.

Travel the world. Formula 1 hits a new destination in the world about every two weeks. Gaming career, what? What's a startup? I totally want to do something menial for Red Bull's F1 efforts just so I can follow the team around.

Way less advertising. Advertising in American sports has gotten way out of control. The first down line is sponsored. The line of scrimmage is sponsored. The scoreboard is sponsored. The commentators' predictions for who wins are sponsored. Individual clever comments or identifications of key plays are sponsored. The halftime show is sponsored. The two-minute warning is sponsored. Instant replays are sponsored. Oh, and the postgame show is sponsored too.

ALMS? In two and a half hours of continuous racing I've seen maybe 2 minutes of commercials and a 2-minute shameless plug interview with someone from Mobil 1. F1? Can't recall any shameless plugging, at least on the BBC broadcasts. Sure, there's plenty of logos all over the cars and drivers, but that doesn't detract from actually watching the action. Nor do commercials, because there really aren't any.

Decent announcers. You might enjoy Charles Barkley's trrbl talk but I could use something a little more intelligent. Racing announcers aren't always MENSA members, yes, but they're capable of taking complicated engineering talk and reducing it down to pedestrian levels. Pretty cool.

Plays nice with new technology. F1 fan? BBC's iPlayer has you covered. Le Mans fan? ESPN3 lets you watch entire races, commercial-free. No blackouts, no regional nonsense (unless you're British - I torrent F1 since there are no US sources to my knowledge), and no other such silliness deriving from American cable TV monopolies. 

So join me and start watching so we can talk about the races!