We got to hear from Major General Dean W. Cash at the 3rd annual Jonsson School Forum luncheon, jointly organized by the Metroplex Technology Business Council. General Cash started in the Army infantry and was the J9 in the Joint Forces Command by the time he retired after a distinguished 30 year career from the US Armed Forces. He currently is the Director for Joint Concepts and Experimentation for Raytheon Net Centric Systems and also Director of the Net Centric Enterprise Priority. He spoke on the topic of Fearless Engineering. An example of this is the Persistent Surveillance Dissemination System of Systems (PSDS2), which is currently deployed in Irag and had a complete development cycle of only 110 days. Fearless engineer is to response to that which has yet to be invented. The $140 Xbox has more computing power than the lunar lander. Like most of you, I have heard of Moore's law before but today was the first time I have heard of Metcalfe's law, which basically stated that "the value of a network equals approximately the square of the number of nodes of the system."

He's another gentleman with a great sense of humor I have had the privilege of listening to this week beside congressman Ralph Hall earlier this week. He had nothing to say about secretary Rumsfeld nor anything at all to say about those who had something to say about the secretary. Being an Alaskan native, he had a few things to be proud about Alaska, of which I can't remember all:

1. Minnesota is proud to be a land of ten thousand lakes, Alaska has over twenty one thousand lakes.
2. Arguing the fact that Texas is the second largest state in the Union, when the tide is out, the muddy area of Alaska alone is a larger area than the state of Texas so according to general Cash, Texas should be the third largest state in the Union.

And how can one have fun without picking on California. Here is the essence of the California model: "anything not worth doing, do it to excess."