I've been meaning to write sooner, but it's been a busy few days for me. Right now I'm staying at Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, VA, setting up for a firm partners meeting later this week. I only have to stay here until Wednesday afternoon, to make sure the data circuits and servers we're setting up will work for us. The partners start arriving on Thursday, but I should be long gone by then. I'm a little disappointed about that, since the room is huge and all the food is free. I just checked out the health club and now I'm looking forward to my workout tomorrow morning. As usual, I miss Liz and the cats, but I'm happy to be out of the tiny apartment for a few days. It's becoming more and more apparent that we need to move sooner rather than later. That little apartment is starting to get to me.

This article was in last Friday's Washington Post. It started me thinking about my lifetime and the technological advances I've already witnessed in 28 years. What lies ahead could be even more exciting and world-altering. I'm also reading Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, which deals with the universe of the year in the title. All this speculation about the future has resurrected in me the idea that I was born in the wrong time. I would love to be able to travel through space and visit other star systems, ideally as the captain of a starship, but more likely as the computer geek running the ship. And I've always joked that I'll be the first one in line to get the cybernetic implant that will make me a cyborg. But what happens if those advances come when I'm 75, too old to enjoy them? I make fun of the old folks in my world, who don't understand the Internet, PDAs, or even something as simple as a DVD player. But how will I feel when the cyborgs are everywhere and I'm not one of them? I desperately want to see how the human race will evolve over the coming centuries: whether we turn out like something from Star Trek, or we blow ourselves up in a Mad Maxapocalypse, or we continue to develop like the civilized society in Clarke's book. It pains me to realize that I will never see many of humanity's advances. Maybe I should try to focus on enjoying what I have (and I do enjoy all of the technological toys that we have today -- for example, wireless networking is my new favorite thing and I can definitely see how it will revolutionize the way we work) and think less about what I could miss out on. Even if I were born 500 years from now, even with an advanced lifespan of 150 years, there could still be eons of human advancement to come that I would never see. I wonder what the science fiction of the year 2500 will be like?