I'm going to do this in sections. That way, it'll seem like I've been updating this periodically when in fact I haven't for a few days.

I wrote the essence of this on Sunday, November 9, 2003

I was thinking while I was walking in the airport here in Des Moines, imagine that. What if you were the owner of a business that manufactured a demand-driven product (like boomboxes) and it had been in your family for 80 years and suddenly a new technology became available that would allow you to produce this product using automation. Advantages are plenteous, as plenteous as each dollar you’d make. More, quicker, cheaper--a manufacturer’s dream. The disadvantage is that you have to lay off, say, a hundred employees. That’s possibly 100 families that now have no steady source of income. But if you don’t keep up with the technology, you might as well get out of the business, because competitors will eat you up. That’d be a tough decision, one which has been faced by many medium-sized businesses over the years, I'm sure.

This is a little more than two hours later, and I’m now in Cincinatti. It was an uneventful flight, but I am really tired. I kept drifting off to sleep and then this once I slipped into a dream-state, dreamed I needed to flail my arm, and actually flailed at the air with my arm, which woke me up. This was sort of embarrassing, hopefully nobody noticed.

I’m on my way home from Konrad & Shannon’s wedding in Iowa. It was a beautiful wedding, just very good all around, and the weekend was incredible.