No one needed me at work so we stopped by at Pastel’s for a late breakfast or early lunch.  When we stopped we noticed that the new Indian restaurant that we have been impatiently awaiting the opening of in the Beach Shopping Center had silently opened this past Friday the 14th!  How exciting.  It was only eleven when we were there and they do not open for lunch until eleven thirty so we vowed to return for dinner this evening.  We are very, very excited.  We have not had access to an Indian restaurant since moving to Peekskill.  This is a really big deal.

There is a rumor floating around the Internet today that the final release of Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard operating system may be pushed forward to less than two weeks from now.  I have been waiting for forever for Apple to release Snow Leopard before buying my new Mac Mini.  This means that I might have it in no time. The reality is, though, that I will have no time at all to use it before my trip to Germany so even if it does release early I really should probably wait until after I return before ordering it.  I am really hopeful that a new version of the Mac Mini with a quad-core processor and at least 4GB of RAM will be available at the same time although I find that to be awfully unlikely.  Apple just never gives their Mac Mini product enough horsepower.  Now it is practically anemic in comparison to normal machines on the market for a bit less money.

Work slowed down considerably this afternoon and I actually had some time to relax.  I had time to make our first CAT5e cable and test it out.  Of course, on the first try, the cheaper cable worked perfectly!  This is great news while, at the same time, very annoying.  At least now we know that the cable itself is bad and it was not anything that we were doing.  So now we need more cabling from Home Depot.  Now we have to rip out all of the existing in-wall cabling and start our entire house wiring process over again.

At four thirty Dominica and Liesl ran out to do some shopping.  They hit the post office and then Home Depot to get another five hundred feet of cable in addition to the one hundred feet that we picked up early this morning.  It may not be enough for everything that we plan to do but at least it is a start on it without spending too much money.  We only have so much time to be making cable this week anyway.  She also hit Pier One Imports and a few others stores and got some important home decorating items like a new running for our side board table in the dining room and a serving tray that is going to go on it where we are going to keep the alcohol – very European style like you see in As Time Goes By. She also got several picture frames that we are going to be mounting this week around the house.  Now that we are printing photos at home we are getting ready to start using them for decoration.

After they got back I had to work for about half an hour more and then we were able to head out to dinner.  We drove down to the Beach Shopping Center and first hit the liquor store there as we now need an assortment of mixers to display on our side board so we picked up some vodka, Pimms and Irish whiskey.  Then we went to the brand new Ruchi (I hope that I got the name right) for dinner.

We were the only people eating at Ruchi’s until just before we left one additional couple came in to eat.  It is going to be a slow start getting an Indian restaurant going in Peekskill and most people associate Indian food with buffets so the lunch crowd there is probably a lot more popular – or will be once we get word out about the place.  The people there were super nice and the food was really good.  We were so excited to discover that they have south Indian cuisine like dosas.  We were totally not expecting them to have dosa.  There was so little chance of that and yet they have it.  This is going to massively improve our quality of life here in Peekskill.

The food was really good.  We split an appetizer and each got a dosa.  We also got some curry to split as well.  We skipped lunch having only had a late breakfast so we were both really ready for a large meal.  Everyone working there just loved Liesl and kept coming over to talk to and play with her.  She loved all of the attention even though she was getting tired and really just wanted to go home so that she could go to bed.

Liesl got to taste her very first curry tonight.  It was a buttery mild vegetable curry.  Not in the least bit spicy.  She just had a little bit but she liked it.  She also had a bit piece of garlic naan which she really enjoyed.  We had to keep taking it away from her because she was trying to eat the whole chunk at once.

There is a very real possibility that we will be going back to Ruchi tomorrow for the lunch buffet to check that out as well.  Dominica has only had Indian once in the last year or more.  We were eating it constantly when we lived in North Brunswick and got it occasionally in Newark but there it was a real struggle.  I was able to get it in the city from time to time.  Now that we have ready access to it again we are going to be on an Indian cuisine rampage for a while.

Once we got back to the house Liesl pretty much went straight to bed.  Then Dominica and I worked on hanging a picture in the dining room and getting other pictures ready to hang tomorrow.  Then the big job for the evening – assembling the baker’s rack in the utility room.  Unfortunately because of the tiny doorway we are stuck building the rack inside of the utility room instead of our in the den area.

After the rack was built Dominica felt really exhausted and fell right asleep on the recliner in the basement while I worked on cleaning up anything that could be gathered up and placed on the rack which included a lot of bins, paint cans, servers, etc.  Suddenly there is room for things in the basement again!  This place already looks much, much better and there is a lot left to be done.  Tomorrow is going to be cable making day.  We have a minimum of eight cables to make and to get run to really get things cleaned up.

I worked for another three hours after Dominica fell asleep.  I booked my hours for last week and realized that I worked approximately ninety-two hours for the office last week!  That is a bit ridiculous.

At the end of today the move conversion count is at three hundred and twenty seven movies!  That does not include television shows, music videos, miscellaneous stuff or whatever.  Just the filesystem count of files in the movies directory.  So some days it doesn’t move at all and some days it climbs quickly.  Overall, though, it gives a fair status of the overall progress.  When the count nears twelve hundred it means that the entire process is roughly “done”.  Although done will just mean “caught up”.  The process will never really be completed as new material will always be added.  It just won’t be coming from a massive backlog of material.

I found out tonight from dad that hurricane Bill is scheduled to be slamming into the Hudson Valley this weekend.  It is still five days away from making landfall in the northeast but the Hudson Valley is roughly in the center of the prediction zone so there is a really good chance that we will be hit.  We live on the top of a really tall hill and are a good twenty five miles from Long Island Sound and at least forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean proper so we are only likely to see amazingly heavy wind and rain at most but it should make for an interesting weekend with my grandparents and Aunt Gayle visiting us from Ohio.

Roads are possibly the easiest to visualize since we see them every day. For most people there is only one road that passes near enough to their property, assuming that they own or rent property, to allow direct access. Even if another road exists nearby it is often not accessible without crossing other people’s property lines to reach it. For the average person having a “backup” access road to their home is simply not possible.

More importantly than the theoretical ability to access a second road (since we could mandate that all houses be built with a road on either side – at massive additional cost financially and environmentally) is the improbability that we could manage a system where one company would own and manage one set of roads and another would own and manage the second set of roads so that every resident would have the choice of whose roads to drive on. At best the road directly at your driveway would be clear but as soon as you reached an intersection there would be a dispute as to whose responsibility the intersection was. Each family would need to choose which road system they were going to access and pay road maintenance fees for repairs, snow removal, insurance, etc. just for the one that they use. That company would then need to pay access fees to the alternate road company so that you would have the right to visit friends across town who opted to use the primary road carrier – the one that you didn’t choose. At some point you will need to switch onto their roads to get into your friend’s driveway. Remember that the choice is to which road system you can access. Just because the road is next to your house doesn’t mean that you are allowed onto it – it is simply the competitor’s product.

The same situation would be true of water. What if you want a company to compete with your town’s water supply. Perhaps they will offer cleaner water at a premium price or cheaper water but that is only good enough for washing the car. Sounds like a great deal. But now a new set of water mains has to be dug under your entire city. That isn’t going to make people happy. And a second water treatment facility will have to be built somewhere in town. And every yard, yes even yours, will have to be dug up to allow the water hookup to be brought to your house. And if you think that the price of water will go down because of competition keep in mind that all of this infrastructure cost money and now each water treatment facility only processes half as much water meaning it takes more people and more equipment to process the same amount of water. Prices have to go up. Inconvenient and more expensive.

It is because of these factors that you have never heard of a village offering competitive road or water services – imagine the disaster with competing sewage systems! Villages, towns and cities almost ubiquitously oversee all key utilities of this nature because it is in everyone’s interest that everyone have clean, safe water, efficient sewers and safe roads. It keeps the population healthy and allows everyone to go to work. These utilities are so obvious and have been around for so long that every village knows exactly how to perform these services and how to do them very efficiently.

We begin to see problems arise when we start looking at core infrastructure services that have only existed for the last century or so. Principally this means electrical, gas, telephone and cable. These services, because they required additional capital investments, connect to additional infrastructure outside of the village or town and require greater technical knowledge have almost purely been left to the purview of private industry generally operating under strict regulations.

Electrical power supply is the oldest of the “new” infrastructure services and, as such, has the most potential to be taken over and managed by the municipality itself. It is not uncommon to find small towns and jurisdictions that have decided to take their power needs “in house” and run their own power plants and maintain their own infrastructure. In many cases this proves to be very beneficial to the local residents as overall costs are often lower and service is local and friendly instead of being handled by some far away corporation. It can also generate local jobs that are stable and reliable. Local power plants are generally not able to take advantage of hydroelectric or nuclear power, however, so they are not always the best option. But the potential is there and with new wind and solar technologies today there could be more potential for this in the future. We must be aware, though, that one of the cost saving measures in small town power management often comes from having no research and development whatsoever which will produce short term gains at long term expense. Large electric companies spend a lot of money making sure that they power is safe, cheap and reliable for a long time to come.

As we move towards newer and more “technology” focused services we move farther and farther away from a general understanding from the overall populace and we also move farther away from municipalities feeling that they should bring these services “in house.” This feeling, I believe, comes from three primary issues. The first is that telephone and cable are massively more complex than even electric generation which causes municipalities to need more extensively trained, and therefore paid, staff for a rather small-scale deployment. The second is that these services are newer and have a greater sense of being “optional” rather than “required” services like water, sewer or electric. The third is that these system inherently must connect to the outside world or they have no meaning. Other key services can, under ideal circumstances, exist completely within the borders of the jurisdiction and operate quite satisfactorily.

Telephone and cable services fall prey to the same issues affecting our other infrastructure components. Even though it is feasible to bring two sets of telephones lines and two sets of cable lines through a town this results in a conflict for right-of-way access which is a complex issue, it creates an unsightly mess in many areas and it decreases revenue potential for all businesses involved which is fine in urban areas but would result in a complete loss of service in rural areas.

The current telephony monopoly situation originated when AT&T was given an almost total monopoly but was required to provide the same service at approximately the same cost to its urban and rural customers. Urban customers in areas with high telephone termination density would pay slightly more than the service would be expected to cost and rural customers would pay the same. But AT&T took a loss on rural telephone terminations under this system making up the cost in their guaranteed urban profit centers. If telephone providers were forced to compete in the urban areas they would be under no obligation to provide service to “profit loss” centers and would not choose to do so.

Some municipalities have decided to compete with the incumbent local carriers and have provided their own telephone and cable services. These services generally are technological dinosaurs, however, and roll out at very high cost with very few features. Few local regions have the capability to supply these services at a level competitive with large technology companies that service the major markets. This situation is likely to change over time as the technologies involved become increasingly commonplace and as convergence removes the need for as many overlapping services.

In today’s Internet dominated communications world we actually have arrived at a situation with far more choice than we have had for the past several generations. Because both the traditional telephone infrastructure as well as the cable television infrastructures and even to some degree the cellular phone infrastructure can carry Internet access to our homes we have, for the first time, have the ability to choose between competitors for a core infrastructure service. These competition is simply the result of redundant legacy technologies being replaced with a converged modern technology. If the Internet had come first there would never have been two separate telephone and cable television systems and all of those services would have been delivered over a single Internet access line and people today would be furious at the thought of stringing another entire set of cables up in the sky overhead. But those decisions were made long ago in a different era.

This competition of services has proved to be very good for us today and not only gives us the opportunity to choose and change Internet access suppliers but also to purchase duplicate services providing ourselves with a degree of reliability that did not exist for either service individually. In some rare areas Internet access is even available or has been proposed to be made available through the electrical power distribution system providing a third vector for access to our homes. Multi-service Internet access is now commonplace enough that major vendors such as Netgear now sell home router/firewall units that are designed to aggregate service across dual connections to provide better speed and reliability simply and automatically.

So the unfortunate situation that we find ourselves in is that there is no good answer for infrastructure services.  We must either submit to socialized control of these services by municipalities and regional authorities which leaves us with generally lower prices as the cost of development, advancement and options or we can allow private corporations to run these utilities where we are “forced” to hand over monopolistic controls in the hopes that regulations will keep prices and services in line.  The risk of either approach, of course, is that our access to critical services and, in some cases, information and our view of the outside world is controlled by agencies and companies for whom there is no true competition.

As technology service become more commonplace I believe that we have a great opportunity for convergence and socialization again.  As some rare regions have done, telephone and cable infrastructure can be brought “in house” through heavy investment in fiber optic networking allowing all services of this nature to be delivered with higher service levels, greater safety and at lower long-term cost through a single, small cable.  Municipalities that choose to go this integrated services route will find that they can leverage scale for cost effective Internet access through a few competitive long-haul carriers, allow residents to choose “telephone” services from Internet VoIP carriers that must compete on price and service, lower the power requirements providing additional cost savings and safety and greatly reduce the number of cables that must be strung through their regions.

For a relatively small investment a village, for example, could make Gigabit speed fiber optic connections available to every single resident of the village for a fixed fee and allow competing “cable television” companies to house their distribution systems within the village’s cabling hub giving residents the right to choose which television provider to choose or to choose none at all.  Telephone service could be purchased from a large number of carriers or residents could build their own telephony systems and even bypass those competitive carriers.  Only the core Internet access service – the base on which all else is derived – would be “owned” and management by the community providing a minimum amount of infrastructure for a maximum amount of services.

I have written these things and have been disputed again and again that television is so dominant and that the idea of getting videos on physical media is so core to our culture that it would be many years if not many decades before these things will change. But I believe that the end is already here. Driven, in part, by the industry division caused by the competing media formats which are too complex for the average consumer to differentiate between, partially because of the poor standards of HDTV and its inability to handle the de facto high definition standard of 1080p, partially because of intentionally misleading marketing and specifications on high definition display products but mostly because the time and technology are right.

There are several technology players who have stepped up to the plate recently to tackle the world of physical and traditional media. I have opined in the past that non-commercial services like YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and RSS feed based downloadable content from shows like Rocketboom, Wandering West Michigan and others through software like FireANT or Democracy would be the disruptive factors deciding the fate of media. I still believe that they will remain major plays and, over time, will come to dominate the marketplace as people turn away from commercial production finding more niche content delivered in a more personal way to be more valuable. But before that can happen there is an intermediate phase, I believe, in which commercial content will be delivered through next-generation methods and this will remove the underpinnings of traditional media.

Enter Netflix and AppleTV. There are others, of course. And some that came earlier. Amazon Unbox covers much of the same ground. But Netflix and AppleTV look to be the most disruptive and visible of the players in this new content delivery space.

The first serious, large scale implementation of a network delivery system for digital video content came from Apple’s iTunes. iTunes and AppleTV together form a cache and store content delivery network with complex Digital Rights Management (DRM) allowing for a simply and traditionally styled interface to television like content delivered over the Internet. Because of its cache and store architecture iTunes is able to function with very high definition video even over slower and less reliable network connections. The iTunes licensing team has secured a large volume of current television shows and movies that can be purchased through iTunes and watched on a computer, on a media center or on the AppleTV. The system is straightforward for most consumers and works very well. And the quality of the content generally meets or exceeds the alternatives of broadcast HDTV or DVD. Additionally the iTunes system blends alternative content from RSS/Atom feeds seamlessly into the picture allowing The Jet Set Show or Channel Frederator programs to appear as any other “television” content. Even YouTube can be viewed through the system. For consumers used to the high costs of cable and the unavailability of broadcast signals iTunes and AppleTV is a high quality, low cost competitor to traditional television with the advantage of having no commercials and all content being available on demand.

Netflix has recently entered the arena with their own disruptive service. Netflix’s primary business is as a movie rental alternative whereby movie renters can sign up for a monthly rental service and have DVDs or, more recently, HD-DVD and BlueRay Discs, delivered to them by post. The cost is extremely low and the ease of use and vast selection makes it very easy to choose over traditional rental services. Over the past few years Netflix has become very popular especially with the serious cinema market.  The new service from Netflix is the ability to view movies over the Internet via a streaming video service.  This service is included with all of the normal movie rental pricing plans making it “free” for their current user base to test and try.  This service, for people with moderate quality Internet connections, provides instant access to a massive, and constantly growing, library of “on demand” movies, documentaries and television programs.  For only a tiny fraction of the normal cost of cable service one can subscribe to Netflix’s unlimited download service and get unlimited, commercial free on-demand content.  The system is new but massively disruptive.

What is truly amazing about these two systems and their competitive counterparts like Amazon Unboxed is that they are not competing with the content of current media but only competing with the content delivery system.  By switching from traditional television and movie rentals to these services one will, under the vast majority of circumstances, save money,  increase easy of use after initial learning curve, remove commercials, remove reliance on “schedules” or “hours of business”, reduce necessary planning, increase selection, increase quality and remove expensive and incompatible devices which are currently popular to “mimick” these types of services such as DVRs.

What we are seeing now is an adaptation allowing people to continue to use the content that they are used to while receiving it through modern methods.  These new distribution systems will, in all likelihood,  prove to be ideal conduits for new types of content that can be delivered just as easily as traditional content.  The end of traditional television is here.  No longer is television just a legacy technology delivering a unique form of commercial entertainment and content that was not yet available through modern means – now it is simply legacy.