I would really like to figure out a way to make the thousand or so dollars I need to live by using computers in some interesting way. I have a color bubble jet printer and a scanner but have no wish to receive a visit from the Secret Service. Fact is, anything illegal is out of the question. Personal integrity and other such notions rule it out.

What the heck am I going to do? I have no outline. No plan. Plan? That is it. I will write a business plan. Well, I need a name. Off to whois.com. I called my frame company Elegant Custom Building so I will call this . . . Elegant Concepts. Yeah, that is a cool sounding name. Taken. A website for a bridal shop. OK, let us see here. I know, I am intrigued with biogenesis as in the origin of life. Taken. A website for cleaning solutions. Kind of like calling a lemonade stand a business enterprise. Oh, well. I was chatting with the aforementioned woman and told her of my dilemma. She suggested "innovations" in place of "concepts". Bingo! We got a live one, Mabel.

Got name will travel. How am I going to do that? Let me see, I downloaded Apache over New Years weekend when various extremist were huddled in their bomb shelters. Installed it and figured out that I had to change the servername to get it to come up as a virtual server on my system. That took about twenty minutes. (Yes, that is a pat on the back to all you contributors to Apache. I forgot to mention is was the binary for Windows that I downloaded. Have not made the move to Linux yet. That is next after I finish writing up my notes for this paper. But I am getting ahead of myself.)

Website hosting. Got server will host. Called the phone company. No DSL. Do costing on ISDN. Ouch. Hey, I am on semi-paid vacation here. I ain't got that kind of money. OK, there are still ways of doing this. A little surfing later. Yesh, there is a lot of competition out there for this kind of service. I need to offer some sort of twist. Some kind of innovation (duh). Well, it has to be something that is interesting to me or I am going to lose interest in it. (thats another duh) Well, I look at life with a humanistic point of view. I am working pretty hard at self-actualization. That is it. Self-actualization of the entire human species. (Am I leaping too fast for you?)

A niche portal or gateway community. As I survey the landscape of current human progress I can not help but notice that modern society has carried specialization quite far. So far in fact that scientists, engineers, politicians, marketing types, etc. don't really know jack about anything outside of their purview. How can politicians enact laws governing communications or decide budgeting for research when then don't know anything about it? How can engineers design environmentally friendly projects when they don't know anything about it? (I am not referring to dogmatic tree-hugger enviro-nazi propaganda but truly sane, sustainable technology that promotes human progress.) How is a scientist suppose to know that the signal hidden in the noise he sees fits the same pattern as was recently discovered in population trends of the dung beetle? That's right! Instead of reading that waste of tree fiber with his/her morning coffee they surf the community homepage.

Making progress now. Yeah, that is pretty good for a day's work. Time to relax, make a cup of tea, and wander the Internet. Boy! It is amazing the stuff you can find on the web. Like all sorts of leading edge movers and shakers who have been working on your brainstorm for years. I have spent a lot of time hiking around in the woods. One of my little fantasies is that I am the first human to have set foot on THAT particular piece of ground exactly underneath me foot. (Hey, I realized that humans have been walking around where I grew up for some twenty thousand years.) Well, it was a small let down to discover that people like Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Eric Drexler, and many others are working on the implications of my flight of fancy. But only for a second because if these people are working on this stuff it means I am headed in the right direction.

PCs are obsolete. Yeah, get a load of that. It is one of the things I have learned this last week. Since I am not currently on the bleeding edge of research, PCs will continue to be the only available computing tool to me for a number of years yet but they are obsolete. Think about. Computers are now mainstream. Well over a 100 million new PCs last year were added to the existing base.{note: find real data on this}

Plan? What plan? Yeah, well, my plan got toasted. That does not invalidate my original motivation. Just means I am going to have to dig deeper and come up with something else. What am I doing writing this paper then? Well, like I said at the top this is an exercise in mapping the current state of the art. Where are we at and why does this map say we are standing on that mountain over there? I am also going to take a look at some of the research projects underway so that maybe I can find a comfortable eddy to ride in the next wave.