People spend too much time finding other people to blame too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being and not enough energy putting themselves on the line growing out of the past and getting on with their lives.

I am going to spend my time today just thanking the people that played a role in my career because I truly do believe that I was blessed by a lot of people that paths crossed mine as I went down the road in my career.

But when I was a teenager the idea of spending the rest of my life in a factory was real depressing. So the idea that I could become a musician opened up some possibilities I didn't see otherwise.

Educators are still spending way too much time trying to control what kids learn bending the content to their own purposes hoping beyond hope to change - by using technology - but not change too much.

Second we're spending a huge amount of money on technology so that everyone can check out laptops and portable phones. We're spending more money to write our existing information into databases or onto CD-ROM.

I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology.

I would like to spend my next two years showing how the aim of making technology available to every young person can be built into the effort to make our nation more secure. That is my latest concern and what I will be pushing over the next two years.

If you really want to improve technology if you want things to work better and be better you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort money and time developing that new technology.

A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company and that person complies and if the attacker gets in then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.

In the ideal classroom the teacher is either spending all of their time doing deep interventions with students on a one-on-one basis or facilitating true interactivity - labs simulations projects.