With any luck, DSL will be installed today and I'll be able to post this entry....we've been here about three weeks now.  Although we're still unpacking, we're nearly done with the first phase of transition.  The installation of DSL marks a significant point of settlement for us -- since we're both tied to the net for our work, today's installation is terribly important for our success living here.  I'm confident all will go well....

Reno is phenomenal.  We spent the first week sleeping on a futon on the living room floor awaiting our belongings.  Once they arrived, we found ourselves working all day every day getting settled -- last night we got our Xmas tree, that too being a milestone of settlement.  Life is good.

The altitude here has been an adjustment for us too.  We didn't notice it when we came here shopping for land and an abode, but it hit us both pretty hard the first two weeks or so -- even while we had to apply ourselves to getting our belongings sorted out and restoring our lives to a homeostatic balance, our bodies craved adjustment. It was like in the Wizard of Oz, sleeping in the poppy fields.  We were just sleepy all the time, it seemed.  But that too passed.  We're Renoites now, or Nevadans, or whatever the locale dictates we call ourselves.  And life is good.

A word now on the .com meltdown, the election aftermath, and life in general --- things have gotten rather grim in the past few months, resulting in a very significant shrinkage in technology sector capitalization.  Sun has fallen from a split adjusted value of over $60 per share to around $27 per share, in just a few weeks.  And other companies have fared even worse.  Election uncertainty coupled with profit warnings from a lot of technology players has basically pulled the plug on the Internet bubble economy -- pop!  The balloon goes pop.  Is this the end of the Internet?

Hardly.  If anything, it's the beginning.  The "irrational exuberance" we've witnessed in the past three years or so has finally subsided, with capital markets today reflecting that loss of faith.  Our beliefs manifest our reality, and we've fooled ourselves as long as we could with the .com madness.  But that too has passed.  As it turns out, change is not so easy to enjoin as we might have once thought.

But the demise of the .com mythos is not as cut and dried as it might seem.  Companies like pets.com or furniture.com might not be the future, but companies like walmart.com and sears.com might be.  The Internet is still growing, if measured by data traffic and users.  And the nature of software is still to optimize.  Thus,  embracing Internet technologies will always make sense for the arbitrary firm that would increase productivity, which is the theoretical essence of any firm.    If we would continue to increase productivity, the Internet must continue to grow.

So while the .com bubble has finally been exposed as the fraud that it always was, the Internet will continue to grow.  And the real value of the Network Age will be realized in the process.  Productivity demands it.  I am confident, therefore, that companies like Sun, Cisco and Oracle should continue to grow as the demand for productivity-enhancing technologies increases. And life is very good.