Dateline: Convention Center, San Antonio TX, 1 November 2005

Flew in from Indy this morning, landing in Texas around noon.

I speak tonight at the Geoint (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation) Symposium's annual awards banquet.

They had me down to sign books from 2:30 to 3:30, and as I was signing books, I started working the brief on my laptop between people. I end up just hanging at this table next to the impromptu bookstore just outside the exhibit hall for the entire time between that first signing and the scheduled second one at 5:30-6:30. Felt like a couple hundred books in all, evenly split between BFA hardcovers and PNM paperbacks. Lotsa nice discussions, to include bumping into some old friends like Rob Holzer from the Office of Force Transformation.

Weird sort of way to spend an afternoon, signing books for four hours, but actually pretty cool to have all those discussions with very hardcore readers from throughout the defense community.

Here's the daily catch:

■ The SysAdmin force: now more than ever

■ The oh-so-Catholic Supreme Court

■ The next wave of laws to test companies' resiliency on rule sets

■ China's "Deadwood" capitalism persists

■ Malawi: too much globalization or too little? Ask the loggers.

■ EU on Tony the Tiger: "He's grrrrrrrrreat! (except in Denmark)

■ Another example of private-sector SysAdmin forces: born of sheer desperation

■ Iran's mullahs on Hollywood: Be afraid! Be very afraid!