That sound you hear is silence … since my three and a half week travel extravaganza started a couple of weeks ago my mind has not been able to focus. I have been stuck in winter weather along I-95 while driving to FL, been stranded in airports, cities, more snow, and now I face another leg of my journey with a pre-dawn flight to Chicago. I get to spend a little more than 24 hours in the windy city before I get to go back to FL for a little vacation time … that is the good news.

I spent several days — actually two more than I was supposed to — in northern California last week (and weekend) meeting primarily with Apple. As usual, our hosts were great — lots of good conversations, smart people, demos, and information that helps me make real decisions about real projects. I try to never miss a chance to spend time with a couple of key people at Apple. The thing with going to Apple is that the whole time you are there your head is spinning with stuff. You can’t talk about any of it because Apple takes its information very seriously and it takes years to establish trust with them … what that means is that my mind is filled with things I’d love to talk about, but can’t. It means my blog goes dead. Sorry about that.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Chicago to meet with the CIC Learning Technologies group. The CIC is essentially the Big Ten on the academic side of the house. It means I’ll get to spend a day an half with peers from schools that are heck of a lot like PSU. We’ll have time to share updates on a whole host of things and I am sure there will be some good bar talk about the things we aren’t really ready to share widely. I will attempt to capture some of that in a post that makes some sense — I need something to jar the wedge out of my brain. For some reason since traveling to the west coast I can’t focus or put two sentences together. Maybe over time it’ll get easier, but right now all I hear is a giant sucking sound in my head.