The best laid plans of mice and men…. If you have been wondering what became of me, I have spent the last six months on a completely perpendicular course to what I had set out to take when starting this Journal. I was offered the chance to work for a small ham radio manufacturing and retail firm; an opportunity that combined my desires to be an entrepreneur with my favorite hobby.

While the gig was interesting for a while, it had became clear that it was distracting me from the CAD industry I have spent my career involved in. Despite the frustration with it I found, the experiences were enough to reinforce my beliefs that much of today’s technology is frustratingly inadequate for the smooth and efficient operation of business, and in particular those involved in design and manufacturing. While writing from an ivory tower of sorts at CADENCE magazine, I was often worried that my bitching at hardware and software that didn’t work as easily as I thought it should was much more easily dealt with by those of you in the “real world”.

Having experienced even more frustration in not being able to get all the applications the business uses to work well together (or sometimes, even by themselves) than I ever found conducting product reviews, I have a renewed sense of purpose, and a primary goal of focusing on usability, interoperability, and overall capability in returning to my original goal of creating a new sort of technology journalism.
Now, however, I’m off to Mobile Monday, to find out what Autodesk and others are up to in location-based services. A full report to follow tomorrow, along with an exposé on how the mobile web industry screwed up their browsers big time.

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