Today I made the trek out to 鷲津駅¹ again. It's one of those stations where life tends to move just a little bit slower. Although it has two tracks, one going in each direction, trains typically only arrive every fifteen minutes. The bathroom is immensely old, making use of a squat toilet and some urinals that look to be from the mid-50s. Paint flecks can be seen on the ground where they fell some time ago. Unlike the stations closer to the city, this one does not see a lot of attention on the maintenance schedule.

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At last count there was something along the lines of 900-trillion blogs on the Internet. Many of them have fewer than a hundred posts written over the period of a year or two and have long since been abandoned. Some of them, like this one, have been active for a number of years and have a small following. A few of them are even wildly successful with massive followings and a solid revenue stream. That said, every blog on the world wide web is fundamentally the same. Text on a screen, presented in a bordered box and surrounded by other elements. How utterly boring this must be for truly creative people. Innovation in digital publishing has, for the most part, completely stagnated since the introduction of the powerful tools that make this process so easy. This begs the question: what's next?

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Interesting topics can come up at the most opportune times. Earlier today I was talking to a colleague about relative terms like success and genius. He is reading a book written by Malcolm Gladwell that discusses this topic, and it's said that people need to do something for about ten thousand hours before they reach a level of proficiency that makes them a craftsman-level professional. This number is not just an arbitrary number of hours, either, as several studies have been done to determine the base number of hours many of today's professionals have needed in order to become the well-known people they are. I haven't yet read the book, but I'm next in line to get my hands on the paperback¹. I look forward to learning more about this idea. The question I have, though, is where I fall in the scale.

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Today, for many people around the world, is Father's Day. I get to write a mock examination, though.

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At 9:30 am, the mercury is pushing 32˚ Celsius and people are taking refuge from the heat in any way they can. Many people have towels wrapped around their neck to prevent excessive perspiration from being absorbed into their clothing, children are wearing as little as possible, and nearly every woman over the age of 30 is carrying a parasol. Summer, like it or not, has descended upon central Japan. To mark the occasion, water fountains all over the area are operating during daylight hours to offer some relief from the heat and humidity.

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