We’re all anxiously awaiting the presidential inauguration ceremony, and we’ll be viewing it via the usual media. Hopefully Obama’s off to a running start and will be successful in straightening out the financial mess that mostly Wall Street created for us. My feeling is that if that gets straightened out, then other things will follow. An organized approach is essential for Obama to succeed, and he needs to keep his eye on the most important priority: the economy.

We haven’t forgotten about the new book that we’re writing. We’re anxiously awaiting news from Ike Williams, our agent in Boston, on where we stand. As soon as we hear back from Ike, we’ll make final changes to the proposal and begin the process of shopping it around to the publishers in New York City.

On Monday Mary Ann and the FED organization were visited by their DARPA sponsor. This occurs on a quarterly or semiannual basis to run through the progress to date and discuss the results we have obtained from our SBIR transition support project. It appears that our progress has been good and the ramp up going as planned.

On Thursday I had lunch with my good friend Jordan Becker, who works with SAIC. Jordan is a very sharp IT guy and joined SAIC many years ago. I have maintained my relationship with him because the two of us have such similar technical interests. He’s in a better position at SAIC to feed ideas into the system than I am.

On Friday we decided to take Solutions to Catalina. We left early in the morning and those attending were Ron Arnold, skipper of the ship; Mark Waldschmidt, friend and associate from SAIC; Paul Kouris, former chief counsel at SAIC; and myself. This was an extremely enjoyable trip since we don’t get to Catalina very often and the seas were behaving themselves. It’s about 72 miles, and we made the trip across in about two and one-half hours. It was somewhat less time on the return. Hopefully we will be able to make several more visits to Catalina — possibly one with the Venter folks to do sampling again.

– Bob