I'll admit it: I am a geek. I've always been a geek and I have been in love with technology for as long as I can remember. I was the cause of many minor and not so minor explosions in and around my neighborhood in my youth. That was back in the days when the scientific supply houses would sell a 12-year-old sulfuric acid and all those other fun things that didn't come with your A.C. Gilbert chemistry set. (The only thing they finally balked on was liquid nitrogen-and they would have let me have that if I had a more suitable container than my father's coffee thermos). As a teenager I made model rockets in the days before you could purchase kits or rocket engines. I made my own solid fuel engines and built rockets that hit altitudes of thousands of feet. I ripped apart old television sets and built radios and a primitive Turing machine using vacuum tube technology.

Computers and software were just a natural step for me. Today I'm wired and connected 24/7 with laptops, workstations, pagers, cellular devices, PDAs, and servers everywhere I look.

Using technology for technology's sake can certainly be fun, but it's probably bad business. If you take a look at the insurance and financial services industry, you can see where technology makes sense...and where it doesn't.