Sheep Guarding Llama

The big news, IMHO, this week is Alcatel-Lucent’s patent infringement win over Microsoft for MP3 technology. Now, before I discuss the ramifications of this suite, I just want to state that in this case I feel that Microsoft is a completely innocent party who was scammed by Fraunhofer who sold them (and everyone else who has ever used MP3s) worthless licenses for the proprietary technology. Microsoft paid their license fees and this shows by software patents are so poor in the United States. Years after everyone involved believes the business is completely legitimate a non-player can pop out of nowhere, claim patent ownership and sue for billions of dollars over a wortless, outdated technology that people were only still using because it was “handy” and not because it was good.

The basics of this suite are that Alcatel-Lucente owns the rights to the MP3 audio codec and that the codec which we thought was finally free of patents and could be used legally by anyone is, in fact, not. So now using MP3, once again, could get you into deep patent hot water. The biggest problem with this is that the MP3 format is not even a good audio format. AAC, MP3Pro, WMV and Ogg Vorbis all outperform MP3 and Ogg Vorbis is completely patent free now and forever. The lesson that we should learn here? Obviously that patents are bad and poorly managed. But barring the ability to convince the US Patent Office to behave responsibly or to join us in the twenty-first century the lesson that each and everyone of us can take away from this is to seek out and use unencumbered software that has no patent claims on it. We can never be completely sure that any technology is patent free – one of the true blunders of the US Patent Office making every single American live in fear that at any moment they could be liable for patent infringement on a technology that are not even aware of on a patent that violates US patent law from a company no one has ever heard of for a patent that even a patent lawyer couldn’t identify.

But, in this instance, MP3 was well known to be an encumbered technology and it is very difficult to determine who is the legal licenser of the patent. Everyone has thought for years that it was Frauhofer and everyone has been paying them money for it. Much like SCO licensing UNIX when it was, in fact, owned by Novell. And, more recently, licensing Linux even though it is owned by the Linux developers. Anyone who has bought a license from SCO not only paid money unnecessarily to a patent con-artist (pun intended) but also did nothing to protect themselves from the legitimate technology owners. But how could any normal person know? Even the courts are taking years getting to the bottom of it all. We cannot let the entire American marketplace grind to a halt while we wait for any new technology or appearance of technology to age significantly before it is safe to use. And now that the US Patent Office is allowing patents on obvious business practice nothing is safe. “Good customer service”, “cool web site”, “order now button” are all possibly patents that we have to be worried about. Amazon even managed to patent the number of times you click to place an order!

So what do we do now in the wake of this ridiculous MP3 patent issue? Simple. Switch to Ogg Vorbis. OV is easy to use. Gives you smaller file sizes than MP3 most of the time. It gives you higher quality audio than MP3 most of the time. It is FREE. Go use it. Go. Now.

In Star Trek news: Scientists at Purdue University have developed the real life tricorder. Also the first dynamically balancing robots have been developed which is very impressive as it is the first robot to actually walk like a human. We have come a long way indeed.

Last night, after I got home, Dominica and I went immediately over to the Theater Square Grill for our “get to know your neighbours” party. The party was awfully early so very few people were able to make it. Even getting out of work early I was only barely able to make it before everyone started to disperse. People do things earlier in Newark than anywhere else on Earth, I do believe. They had free wine and hors d’oeuvres which were very good. We did get to meet a couple of people that live in our building so we did get to do a little of what we had gone there to do. We enjoyed the food so much though that we decided to stay and have dinner. We ended up talking to the general manager of the restaurant for a while and had a really good time.

Dinner was excellent and we are very happy that we got an opportunity to try out the Theater Square Grill. It is so close to our home and the food is excellent. It is always strange to find a place like that so close to where we live that we can just walk there anytime that we want. Very handy.

We came home and pretty much went straight to bed. It was an early night for us. I didn’t manage to get everything that I had hoped to accomplish done before going to bed but I did get everything critical done.

Work was busy today. Busy enough to keep me hopping all day just to keep up although there weren’t that many requests for things coming in. Just a lot of project stuff that needed to be done. No rest for the weary I guess. A lot of paperwork today too. I hate paperwork.

Even being busy today I still managed to finally get caught up with RocketBoom. I am pretty sure that I have, once again, watched every episode ever made. That is a lot of RocketBoom. From there I decided to move on to the Jet Set Show which I am also behind on.

I also managed to pay the bills today. Grrr. I hate bills.

Dominica has decided that she is really tired and that she has been traveling too much so she is planning no staying in Newark this weekend while I go up to Geneseo to continue the packing process. There isn’t very much packing work for her to do anyway. Almost everything requires me to work on it so it isn’t too bad for her to take the weekend off.

I stayed at work a little on the late side tonight to get myself caught up with everything as much as possible. Like I said, it was a busy day.

I found an intriguing story about Microsoft’s Windows Vista download today. Apparently you are able to purchase Windows Vista, at a discount, as a download instead of going to the store to pick up a copy. Just one of the ways that Microsoft is attempting to catch up with Linux from ten, nay, fifteen years ago. (Similarly Windows Vista finally does serious caching utilizing all of the available memory to speed things up – another page from the Linux playbook of yore.) However Microsoft does not allow you to create an installation DVD from the download. Therefore this must only be available as an update option. The real problem comes in when the installation fails. Apparently when Vista dies both the built in help functions AND Microsoft’s own tech support have no solution but to go and buy Vista on DVD so that you can complete the repair. That is all they have. Now THAT is what I call tech support. I can’t believe that people pay for this stuff! This is a pretty sad state of affairs for Vista. Once again showing that Microsoft can attempt to copy Linux but can’t pull it off when it counts. Almost any Linux distribution will happily allow you to download the entire package, make a CD or DVD for installation, never force you to do a upgrade when a full install is always so much better and I can’t imagine when they would ever require you to go “get something else” to fix the system.

It was almost seven before I reached escape velocity from the office.  Tomorrow is my work from home day.  Oreo has barely had any time to get worn out this week.  I expect that he will want to play a lot tomorrow.

When considering the diarian pursuits of famous English language ephemerists, of which I hope to someday be of note, I find it encouraging that Samual Pepys was born on February 23rd and John Evelyn died on February 27th with my birthday squarely in-between them. Apparently the final week of February is an important week in the field of serious journaling.

The weather is milder today and Oreo is very excited to be returning to Doggie Paradise after taking a four day hiatus. He has a lot of pent up energy that he needs to get out. He is going to be a terror to the other dogs today.

I got into the office a little earlier than usual. My team is almost completely out today so the place is very quiet but I need to be in the office as there is pretty much no one to cover the phones or anything today. So I don’t even get to go out to lunch today and will just be eating in the office.

This coming weekend Dominica is planning on traveling to Frankfort via Amtrak while Oreo and I head back up to Geneseo for another weekend of packing and moving. With Dominica not there I might be able to complete the basement in one last big push leaving only the big objects that are perfect for the professional movers and the computer equipment that just can’t be moved until the last minute. Dominica will be staying in Newark on Friday night and leaving for Utica early on Saturday morning. I will be leaving on Friday night and making a stop in Scranton, I hope, on the way north.

Tonight there is a “Meet your Neighbours” party for the residents of 1180 Raymond Blvd over at the Theater Square Grill at NJPAC that Dominica and I are planning on attending. We are concerned that when we RSVP’d that they had asked for our “company” which leads us to believe that there will be a lot of people going to this event that are not from our building which will cause the whole thing to end up a lot like the last party at 1180 where the residents were definitely an afterthought and we pretty much felt like intruders in our own homes. It was quite uncomfortable and very inappropriate considering the prices that we are paying to live in the building. But the management would appear to prefer to use our facilities as a community showcase. They tend to forget that that space that they are so willing to give away for outsiders to use is space that we are paying for in our monthly rent charges and its availability is reserved for the residents who are being charged for it. I think that the rental company often has a hard time remembering who exactly its customers are and is far too concerned with its own publicity.

To be sure that the Theater Square Grill party was not actually an attempt to garner investors while attempting to appease the residents by giving them some snacks. We asked the concierge whose job it is to know everything going on in the building and, of course, they were not even told of the event which leads us to believe that it is simply a renegade event without any authority to have gone through the building putting invitations into everyone’s doorways. Never, ever, should an announcement like that make it throughout the building without having completely informed our concierge with all of the details. We should never have to bring papers that have been shoved into our doors down to the desk and inform the concierge ourselves of what is going on and yet we constantly have to. I think that the management has completely forgotten that the concierge is even there and has a job to do.

Today I called to find out what the dress code is for the event tonight and at least by now (the day of the event) the concierge has been told about the meet and greet at the grill. Of course the word is “no dress code” but that is what we heard for the last party and that was basically black tie and we were pretty uncomfortable even after having dressed up. Anyone coming in or out of the building on their normal way to or from work or the grocery store or whatever would have been very uncomfortable indeed.

During lunch today I took the opportunity to watch a lot of RocketBoom that I have been missing from being so busy as of late. I can’t wait until more shows get started of the quality of RocketBoom. It is amazing, to me, that RB has been able to do so much, so well for so long and that no one has really come along with anything on par with it after all of this time. Some Internet television companies need to step up to the challenge and start creating some really incredible content.

Speaking of Internet television, last night I finally began converting the XHTML Web Design class that I taught two years ago at Castile Christian Academy from MPG to XVid so that they can be made actually useful when posted online. I think that I am going to need to modify them and tweak them using a video editor to make them really useful as the audio is pretty weak. But for now, I have the entire series converted (it took about twelve hours with an Athlon 64 3200+ processor doing nothing else!) and each of the twelve “episodes” which were close to 3GB each under MPG compressed nicely to under 200MB using Xvid. To be fair I did lower the resolution a bit to be a more manageable size as having them at full 640×480 seems a might silly considering the whole videos are nothing more than me talking but even when you play the new 320×240 resolution videos blown up to 640×480 it looks very much the same. That is some massive compression gains! XVid rulz! My plan is to extract the MP3 audio tracks and make the classes readily available as just audio as well as making XVid and MP4 videos available for download (MP4 for the iPod people.)

I have a major goal that I am attempting to reach even given my limited free time today: decommissioning of one of the big servers remaining in Geneseo. The single most powerful machine there (and I believe the largest power draw) is a big Athlon 64 3800+ server that is just about ready to be shut down and my goal is to turn it off tonight after migrating the very last of its services to Scranton. That will be a big relief and a large piece of equipment that can be disassembled and moved out of the house when I am up there this weekend. One less thing to worry about! And less electricity to be paying for too. My electric and gas bill in Geneseo is still at $170 even with us almost never being there! Talk about taking a big loss. I can’t wait to stem that flow of cash.

Today was a pretty slow day – I got a lot of chance to talk to people on the phone today and do some catching up in the office. You need that from time to time. Even being slow the day just flew by.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is changing this year which a few of you might know already and everyone needs to be prepared. The time is changing on March 11th early in the morning so don’t forget. It is less than two weeks away! Don’t forget to change your clocks. If you run an old computer operating system like Windows 95 or Windows NT 4 you can expect to be left in the dust as this is your “Y2K” and your computer is done as far as the time goes. Time to get Vista. And a new computer.

Dad did his first (I assume) MPEG2 to Xvid conversion today. He converted a parade that I marched in with Kelley’s Heroes in late 2001 in Caledonia. It turned out to be the last normal parade that I would march in with the Heroes and the only parade that Dominica ever got a chance to attend. It also happened to be the day that I picked up my bright yellow (Zoom Zoom) 2002 Mazda Protege 5 stick shift. My first ever new car. I believe that Dominica and I drove the new car out to Frankfort to visit her family immediately after the parade. I hope to have the video of this parade posted to OurMedia sometime soon. Maybe even by tomorrow.

I managed to get out of the office just before six so that I could head home and get to the evening’s event which started pretty early for metro folks who have to commute.  This is our first time hitting the Theater Squire Grill so we are interested to see how it is.  So I am posting early as I know that tonight is going to be very busy even if nothing goes wrong.

Dominica and I slept in until almost nine this morning. By the time that we got up the roads seemed to be getting a lot better and we felt that we should be able to get back to New Jersey without too much hassle. The snow plows were not out last night so driving was perilous but today it would appear to be fine. We ate breakfast from the continental breakfast offerings in the lobby.

It was about ten when we finally got onto the road and we made good time back to Newark. Dominica got ready for work as quickly as she could and was out the door by just after one. So she managed to get a full half day of work in and is hoping to be able to make up the rest of the time throughout the week by working through her lunches which should be an option since they are short-handed this week at her office.

I got ready for work after Dominica left but did work from home in the interim as I had done early this morning and last night from the hotel. I decided that it would be best to just eat and then go into work so as not to waste any additional time once I got there. So I ran over to Food for Life for a Tuna BLT sandwich.

While I was at Food for Life a man came in to order take out that I thought looked very familiar.  We started talking and he sat down at the “bar” (FFL has a diner style breakfast bar that I normally eat at when I am alone) and we talked for a while while we were waiting for our food to be prepared.  It only took me a minute to realize that it was Cory Booker, the Mayor of Newark.  We had a really nice chat before he had to take off.  He is a busy guy.

I put in almost a half day physically in the office.  I came home and Dominica made an organic hamburger helper sort of thing that was pretty good.  Quorn as the protein it was a lasagna sort of product.  But only barely.  But it was pretty tasty.

We watched Angel and relaxed after a lot of driving and rushing around today.  Then it was time for bed.

Yup, it’s my birthday. Thirty-one years old today.

I got up with seven hours of sleep and started in on the packing again. There is just so much to do. Dominica slept in quite a bit today. She has been exhausted all weekend. The morning packing went pretty well.

A little after noon dad came over and picked us up and we went over to the Omega Grill and met Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo, Sara and Jeremy for my birthday lunch. We had a good time hanging out. We were probably there for close to two hours.

Dad came over and hung out again at the house while the packing continued. We packed until about three thirty. At the “end of the day” our verdict is that the packing seems to be going pretty well. There really isn’t that much left to go and we are feeling very good about the progress. After next weekend we should be in really good shape with almost nothing left to worry about.

We were on the road by four thirty which was about exactly when I had wanted to be. We were a little concerned about the weather but it seemed pretty good as we left. By the time that we reached Elmira we were hitting some heavy snow fall and by the time we were halfway to Binghamton the driving was getting pretty bad and we were starting to get concerned about being able to complete the drive.

As we headed south into the Endless Mountains region the weather rapidly worsened and we needed some travel assistance. We called dad and he checked the radar and saw that Newark was at the center of the storm and that our drive was going to get worse the entire way to there. So we started looking for a hotel near Scranton. Dad found that the Comfort Inn in Clark Summit had Internet access and accepts Boston Terriers so we headed right there. By the time that dad found the hotel we were just two miles away from the exit. It worked out perfectly.

So we pulled into the hotel after eight and settled in for the night. We tried to get dinner from the Bennigans that is right next door but they closed early and wouldn’t make us food for take out even though they hadn’t technically closed yet 🙁 So we ordered our standard Dominos hotel meal and just relaxed in the hotel and watched the Food Network. Dominica called into her office’s snow line and let them know that she might not make it in tomorrow and I emailed into my team to let them know that I would be working from the hotel tomorrow. We will have to wait until tomorrow to see how the storm goes to know whether or not we can continue on to the apartment in Newark or if we have to remain in Scranton for another night as the weather is supposed to be pretty rough tomorrow as well.

For some reason I was awake this morning at a quarter till eight!  That was way too early.  Quite a bit less than five hours of sleep.  I got up and checked email, showered and got started on the packing.  Dad came over at nine and we took the PR5 over to M&R in Geneseo to get the car inspected.  Then it was back to the house to wait for Dominica to get up so that we could all go to breakfast at the Omega Grill.

After breakfast dad came over and hung out at the house most of the day while we packed.  Dominica did some light packing upstairs while I did the big stuff in the basement.  Overall we were pretty happy with the progress of the day.  There is a lot to do but we are working our way through it and the biggest deal is not in the actual packing but that we are taking the time to really go through everything and to make sure that we aren’t packing things that should really be thrown away.  We are throwing away a LOT of stuff.  Andy would be proud.

At six we drove down to Perry to see Nate and Tammy who are having a family party so that everyone in the family can meet their new baby boy Eli.  We ended up hanging out there until about nine.  Then we drove over to dad’s and sat around in the living room in front of the fireplace until it was midnight and we could declare me to officially be 31 years old.  Then it was time to get to bed.