Slept in this morning. Didn't get to the store until almost 10. Usually I'm there by 8AM. But it's Saturday. No repairs awaiting on this particular Saturday. Can't place orders because my suppliers are closed. Nothing coming in because UPS doesn't do Saturdays. Most of the to-do list at the shop is caught up. So then I have to ask why I feel I have to justify sleeping in until only an hour before opening. I'll get there whenever I darn well feel like it.

Now that we've lived with the net for awhile, what has it become? Not the vision of credit card orders of toothpaste to you door. Because the answer to this answers the question of where the economy as a whole is headed. Too many people sold us on the internet being this or that. That's what got us into this mess. It takes a new technology to break it. Or at least figure out how best to use this thing we just spent seven trillion on. It's a way for people to get information to other people. Family, friends, buyers, sellers, whatever. It may not be the best or the only way, but it is a way which can provide a richness in media that leaves traditional forms behind. We're gonna' wallow in this economic thing until the next thing rolls around that everybody's gotta' have. We've beat the internet thing to death. The next thing will probably be some gadget. A hundred gigs of non-volatile solid-state memory would do it. That would make hard disks obsolete. We're still riding through flat screen adoption as the prices slowly fall. Flat TV's is a huge market once those prices drop about one more order of magnitude. If you haven't already taken steps to abandon your VCR collection and start getting DVD's, there's a lot of money changing hands doing that. Any significant cost breakthrough in one of these areas could trigger a boom year at any time. The whole economic engine rests on the ability of people to come up with new things that everybody needs.

That's primarily what people do here in Silicon Valley. What do geeks do when they're unemployed? They come up with cool stuff. Because that's what they always do. It's nice to get paid for it. But when you're unemployed you've got time to work on it. Cool. Only the true geeks are left. Those that couldn't stomach the roller coaster have left in the droves they rode in on. A java programmer you say? For internet-ready cell phones? Ain't a job in that field to be found. It's soooo... 1999. Can you type? We could use a new receptionist...