I prevailed with the ardor of the job and am preparing to repeat the effort on a film beginning in a week. This film ‘Year of the Dog’ www.imdb.com is a story about mid life crisis, a story more fitting then twenty-something anxiety of the earlier film.

I read A few interesting books this past year. One “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman explains the migration of job offshore that were a result of technologies like the Internet. The world has changed and old solutions don’t work. This perspective has orientated my efforts on local projects where I can have a home court advantage. Having worked on a retail website of a store a hundred miles away it is clear being local has its advantage even with the web.

An equally alarming book “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil who discusses the convergence of living and artificial intelligence coming to a point of Singularity in fifty years. This reminds me of the enthusiasm I had while working on a trading floor developing systems. I could envision all the trading functions on the floor being programmed into one system, if the software was written correctly. I only later came to appreciate the political back lash that would occur with any attempt to rearrange the business.

The Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel wrote a book on the functioning of the brain-“In Search of Memory.” After reading Kurzweil’s book I felt it important to learn more about how the brain works. Great strides in understanding the mechanisms of learning are presently taking place. Kandel’s approach was to do research on a primitive animal with an accessible neuron. He chooses the Aplisa sea snail with a relatively simple behavior and researched the electrical and chemical processes responsible for short and long term learning.

This about concludes this blog entry intended only as a test to see if functions are working on the new framework.