I arrived at the Cherry Creek Mall garage this morning at 4:30, which was early enough to put me first in the line of those who had reserved iPods at the Apple Store. The blue-shirted team was pumped up and gave me a royal-geek welcome as James guided me through the simple purchase of a 16GB iPad WiFi only. I still don’t really know what hit me, or what I will do with this thing. It’s gorgeous, heavier than I expected, lousy to read in sunlight, and gorgeous. Even though it mimics the iPhone user interface closely, it still feels strange, which is part of the appeal to me. I love learning something entirely new. This qualifies.

Apple Store at Cherry Creek Mall, Denver

I hadn’t planned to be here this early.  But when I woke up at 3:20 a.m. I knew there was no point in trying to sleep. So I arrived at the mall parking garage at 4:30 a.m. and saw someone walk in just before 5.  I scooted in myself, relieved to find no one in the “Reservations” line outside the door of the store.  There is a separate line for walk-ins, and Daryl and his wife Rhonda are first there.  He’s a retired funeral home owner, and they drove two hours to get here from northeastern Colorado.  The second guy in the Reservations line is named Jim Kinch from Denver. He’s reading a Kindle DX, which is impressive.  He says he thinks he’ll still use it even when he’s got his iPad.

I see Robert Scoble has been in line all night at the Apple Store in Palo Alto.  It’s easy being an early adopter in Denver. “We’re not really waiting in line to get them,” Scoble told MercuryNews.com. “We’re here to celebrate geekdom. It’s always a fun party.” My sentiments exactly.

Though I might put it differently and say I’m here to celebrate innovation.  What I love about what I’ve seen of the iPad is that no one has seen anything like it before.  I had a Compaq tablet computer back in the day, but it was a clunky, unusable beast with a fat electric pen that used AAAA batteries, as I remember.  This thing is the Kindle to that era’s RocketBook. And because of the wild creativity in apps that it will unleash, there is no telling what will appear on that sleek, multitouch screen.

Of course I’m very interested in how the iPad will fare as an eBook reader.  Amazon has a huge head start, and they’re not slowing down.  Last night they announced their Kindle for iPad app, ready for business today. Today’s first iPad users will have 60,000 titles to choose from at Apple’s new iBooks Store – and half of them will be out-of-copyright free books – while over at the Kindle Store they will find more than 450,000 titles.   We all expect a new Kindle to come out later this year, with a color touchscreen that’s still reflective, i.e. easy on the eyes compared to staring into a flashlight, which is how an LCD screen seems to me after a while.  But even if the iPad topples the Kindle as hardware, Amazon will keep selling Kindle books, which was the plan from the beginning, I suspect.

But back to creativity.  One of the most interesting exchanges I’ve seen in the last days of the pre-iPad Era was a rant by Cory Doctorow bemoaning the way kids can’t hack into an iPad or much else these days, followed by a graceful reply from John Gruber.  John cited a 13-year-old who had pitched him a new iPhone app as an example of how the current environment gives smart geeky inventors an even better sandbox than existed a generation ago with the Apple II.  Here’s the kid’s message to Gruber:

I am 13 years old and a big fan of your site. I just made an app called iChalkboard. This is my second app, but my first iPad app. It allows you to simply sketch things out. Check it out: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ichalkboard/id322491414?mt=8. If you need any more info or a promo code, feel free to ask.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

I’m with Gruber on this one. Amazon’s team must have worked round the clock to launch the Kindle app in time for today. Meanwhile, somewhere in Nebraska, another 13-year-old kid has an idea…

Mike Hartman and Lauren Klein

We saw “Eventide” last night at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It is a gritty and luminous affirmation of love, set on the eastern plains of Colorado.  The play follows a novel of the same title by Kent Haruf. The Denver Post got it right in this review, calling it “the role of a lifetime for Mike Hartman.”  He plays the lead, Raymond McPheron, one of two bachelor ranchers living in loneliness and transformed by love.

It could have been a gooey disaster, but for the dark counterweight of a family in the same community of Holt, Colorado, beset by crushing problems of poverty, mental illness, and violence.   Those scenes are powerful and difficult to watch, frankly. But when we got home, Darlene and I realized that they made real and more powerful the fragile flowering of love between Ray McPheron and Rose, the widowed social worker whose caseload includes the tragic family.  The counterpoint of the hell those kids inhabit is the story of another boy, played superbly by Augustus Lane Filholm, growing up wonderfully with his ailing and cranky grandfather.

Knowing that Mike Hartman and the actor who plays Rose, Lauren Klein, are real-life husband and wife adds to the pleasure of watching their awkward and victorious dance of love.

The play runs till February 27.  If you are in Denver, please don’t miss it, and spread the word!

My wife’s quilting habit is a lot less portable than podcasting and social media.  We checked two huge bags for her, filled with fabric and I don’t know what else — needles?  We’re gradually setting up clothing and supplies at each home, so there’s no need to bring the usual stuff for a six-month sojourn.

Living in two different cities, six months at a time, is like leading parallel lives.  My wife says I’m a different guy in Denver than I am in Cambridge, Mass.  It’s more difficult to perceive the difference from inside myself, but I can sense what she means.  One big difference is that my roots are in the East. I grew up in Wayland, Mass., went to high school in Belmont, and attended college and graduate school in Cambridge.  But when I was 30 I moved to Casper, Wyoming, to take a job starting an energy magazine.  I was full of “Go West, Young Man” fervor, and I completely fell in love with Wyoming.  My wife and I met there and lived at the foot of Casper Mountain until 2000, when we moved to downtown Denver. All my adventures in Wyoming and Colorado have been of my own making, for good and sometimes ill.

But even in my cowboy boots and Stetson phase, New England was never far from me.  And now the lure of a grandson and the joy of reconnecting with parents, sister, daughters, and other extended family make our time in Cambridge a delight.

In each place, there is a shadow life lived by email, phone, and some video chats.  Condo association work gets done at a distance from Cambridge, and family stuff gets done remotely from Denver.

Boarding begins.  The show heads East. Long live the show…

When I hear the name “Medellin” I think of drug lords and death.  I had no idea that a reform coalition headed by a charismatic mathematician, Sergio Fajardo, won the mayor’s race in Medellin in 2004 with the intention of solving the city’s two huge and interrelated problems of violence and inequality.

I was pleased to hear Fajardo in his orienting of the Cornell audience explain that Medellin is “a mile high, a little less than Denver, 50 meters below Denver.”  This made me think he might be a natural participant in Denver’s exciting Biennial of the Americas scheduled for next year.  His mixture of creativity and pragmatism reminds me of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and if they have not already met I feel confident they would find themselves very at home in each other’s company.

“Since I am a mathematician, I like to address issues the way a mathematician would do,” Fajardo told his audience at Cornell, “to say, ‘What problems are we going to solve here?”  The first problem his team chose to address was inequality.  “Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, and within that most unequal region in the world, Colombia is one of the most unequal countries, and Medellin is part of Colombia, so we have a very unequal society,” he said.

The second problem this mathematician attacked is violence, which came into Medellin in full force at the beginning of the 1980s with the rise of narco-traffic. “That was a bomb that was thrown at our society, and that bomb has shaken the foundations of our city and the foundations of Colombia,” Fajardo stated, in his calm and resonant cadence.  To watch him on the video and hear his voice, you’d think this is a poet or a scientist at quiet work far from the hurly burly of urban and national politics.  His centered presence and equanimity remind me of another unlikely leader who has similarly promised to change not only policies, but the way politics are conducted in the U.S.

The story Fajardo told in the hour-long talk unfolded like a novel, or the account of a team of scientists hunting the cure for a killer virus.  They decided they could not address violence and inequality at the same time, because the roots of those two trees were too strong.  So they tackled violence first, beefing up the police force, and then they built library parks in the poorest neighborhoods of the city.  Fajardo did not sugarcoat the pain involved and the mistakes made.  But at each crisis or challenge, he simply looked at the next action that would make an improvement, and he never stopped.

As I listened to the podcast while working out on the cross-trainer, I tried to imagine how passionate conservatives like my parents would hear the story.  I liked to think it would not be easy to dismiss this man as simply one more Latin American Leftist bent on diminishing personal freedoms under the guise of equality.  He never mentioned taxes in his talk, and when someone asked how he had paid for all the good projects in the poor neighborhoods, he said that yes, they had raised land taxes.  This apparently was accepted by the wealthy who I’m sure paid the lion’s share of the increases, perhaps because of these two promises the new mayor’s team made:

Every single peso that you give us, we will translate into something like this: “Here are your taxes .” We had that statement in all the places we went to. So we managed to tell people that they were giving us the money and what they gave us we translated into something very good for everyone.  … And then, something very simple — we didn’t steal a single peso.

By the time of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas, this mathematician turned mayor might be the President of Colombia. This would be a great time for us to issue him an invitation to be a keynote speaker!