Much of the market issues have been caused by confusion for buyers being unable to identify high end video media formats one from another. This is not the fault of BD and HD-DVD, however, as even many (or possibly most) news outlets have been referring to both formats as forms of DVDs which they most certainly are not. An HD-DVD or a BluRay Disc are no more DVD than a CD is or a Laserdisc is. These are five discrete and independent formats that share little in common other than their size and the fact that they are plastic based media carriers. But few consumers have the ability to clearly discern a DVD from a CD (both can be audio, data or video carriers in common usage) even after both formats have widely run their courses and are about to be retired. So expecting them to grasp modern formats is sadly asking too much.

For those who did any research into the formats it was clear that BluRay had a huge advantage and no format that isn’t supported by the high end market ever survives. Videophiles are often the earliest adopters of any new format and they are willing to do research and generally understand the reasons for choosing formats. To this market, as well as the computer data market, HD-DVD was a senseless format aimed at using a confusing nomenclature to grab uneducated market share quickly. But the uneducated consumer market is not heavy in the early adopter space and that mistake sealed the fate of HD-DVD.

More importantly, however, I believe is that BluRay will not be a highly successful format simply because the era of physical media is waning and there is little need for it today. For a short time it will pick up steam and surpass DVD but with its slow start caused by market confusion it did not get the foothold that it needed while network deliver mechanism were still nascent and now it will face a very difficult and ultimately impossibly battle with “instant satisfaction” network based deliver systems.

At the moment BluRay must face competition from AppleTV, Amazon UnBox, Netflix and on-demand cable and satellite services in addition to ad-hoc Internet based delivery systems. But BluRay has a minor upfront advantage in that its massive storage capacity is extremely difficult to compete with over these network delivery systems. But this capacity is only an advantage when the content will be viewed on high end devices and only when the original content exists in a quality high enough to warrant the extra storage space. (This is another reason why HD-DVD could not survive, its meager storage capacity would be eclipsed much sooner by content delivery networks.) At the moment only 1080p cinematic content is really of high enough value to be worth the extra effort of using BluRay. But as network speeds increase, network based content availability increases and as network based systems continue to refine and redefine compression algorithms the static BluRay format will fall farther and farther behind.

Today is President’s Day and I have the day off from the office. I spent the last two days relaxing and today I have to take my final exam in my Project Management class. Oreo is home with me but Dominica had to go to work today. But her friend Katie as the day off and is going in to have lunch with Dominica and the crew at her office.

I slept in a little this morning but not too long. I was up around nine in the morning. It was nice to get to really relax though. I am ready to face the day. The plan is to feed and walk Oreo early this morning and to go right on to my exam so that I can get that out of the way. It is always a concern that Oreo will interrupt me during the exam since the exam is timed and is three hours long.

I ended up not being able to work on my exam this morning due to a “Trojan horse” emergency in Ithaca that ended up taking my entire day. The malware ended up being one that could not be identified by any software that I was able to get my hands on including Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, Kaspersky or Panda. I eventually learned that the malware was utilizing Window’s explorer.exe and that if I shut that process down that it appeared that the system was functioning correctly otherwise. That was no little trick though since the Trojan had used Group Policy Objects to lock out the Task Manager. What a day.

This would not have been so bad had I not had one disaster after another on my own network. By the end of the day my Netgear FVG318 finally just started to die. It has been having problems for quite some time and over the past week or so the wireless has completely died. It no longer has a functioning interface to the wireless settings nor is there any wireless coming from the unit at all. Today it decided to completely restart itself and reset itself to system defaults but later added other custom settings back in. And by the afternoon it started going through a slow death requiring me to restart it by physically unplugging and plugging it back in once an hour. It would start off fine but slowly degrade over the course of the house from stable to instable to just plain off.

So I spent at least ten hours today dealing with that virus and/or my own network. It was awful. The work was hard and extremely stressful. And it took every possibly free second of my day. It was all that I could do to get Oreo fed and walked. He ended up spending the entire day in bed leaving me to my work.

Dominica picked up dinner from On the Border near her office so that I could just eat and get back to work. The food was good – beer battered fish tacos. We really liked it and will be adding that to our food rotation.

I think that I forgot to mention previously that we have decided to get Oreo a doggy potty that will go in the apartment. Our lifestyle is just so difficult for him even though we work very hard to accommodate his needs. He needs a place to go in the apartment and there are a lot of times when we need him to be able to do so. So Dominica ordered that over the weekend and we are hoping to have it by the end of the week. It is a 38″x20″ artificial turf unit that we are going to put next to the book shelf behind the recliner in the living room. It is made of black plexiglass. We really hope that he will learn to use it. It will make us all much happier.

I finally managed to start my final exam at about eight thirty in the evening. Nothing like waiting until the last minute. It is a three hour exam and must be completed by midnight. In a pinch I was going to take my laptop down to the lounge to work but that would have been dreadfully uncomfortable considering the amount of writing that needed to be done.

I wrapped up around eleven thirty and was thoroughly exhausted but unable to sleep. Dominica spent the evening watching the DVDs of Christie that dad had lent to us. I had wanted to watch it too but simply do not have enough time to watch everything that Dominica watches and we just have to pick and choose quite a bit. The more that we have that she can watch without me, the better.

Since I couldn’t go right to sleep and since Dominica wasn’t really sleepy either we decided to start watching the new, direct to DVD cartoon, Dragons of Autumn Twilight based on the amazing novel by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman that kicked off the Dragonlance series of novels in the 1980s. In recent years there has been a young reader adaptation of the book series as well with this first chapter being made available as two novels “A Rumor of Dragons” and “Night of the Dragons“.

We watched about half of the movie which, unfortunately but expectedly, did not deliver at all on the incredible depth of the original novel. “Dragons of Autumn Twilight” is one of the truly great, ground-breading novels in the fantasy genre with deep character development and along, involved storyline. The character interactions are great and the world is lush and realistic. It was this novel that first drew me into fantasy literature when I was between the ages of ten and twelve in the 1980s. The book was original published in 1984 and I have the original trilogy in their original first edition printing.

The Dungeons and Dragons game is on for tomorrow.  This is our secondary group with just four players in which I actually get to play instead of Dungeon Mastering.  Tomorrow night will be the first time that we actually get a chance to play instead of just setting up the characters.

The weather was nice this morning for the walk into the office. Cool but not cold which is nice because you don’t tend to overheat during the long stretches of walking.

I had lunch with a colleague over at Chevy’s on the west side of the island near the World Financial Center which was a bit of a hike for lunch time but the exercise is always a good idea for me anyway as was the grilled fish and beans that I had for lunch. So no complaints. We mostly just hung out and were “geeky” talking about IT issues both technical and within the field at large.

Microsoft and Seagate have a cute “Heroes Happen Here” comic series out now. Good stuff.

I am consulting for Previsor / Brainbench again. It has been about a year, I think, since the last time that I consulted for them. This time I get to work on a Web Design certification which should be fun. My work starts on Monday.

This weekend should be pretty slow. My work isn’t scheduled late tonight. I have one small project for eight o’clock tomorrow morning but that isn’t bad. No Dungeons and Dragons this weekend as everyone else is too busy. We might have a New Orleans benefit dinner on Sunday afternoon but we don’t know yet if there is anything for us to eat there as neither Dominica nor I can handle eating much seafood anymore. Strangely scallops seem to be an exception for me which is funny since most of my adult life I haven’t particularly cared for them. Shrimp, lobster and crayfish – the mainstays of Creole cuisine – are definitely out though. I am still okay with lobster bisque, crab cakes and shrimp cakes and once in a great while, possibly but not likely, fried shrimp.

I placed a small Amazon order this afternoon. The free shipping option takes a little while but I figure if I place overlapping orders on a regular basis I get to have a continuous stream of books on their way to me which I can look forward to receiving. I am hoping that one book that I ordered not long ago will arrive today but I don’t think that it did even though it left Jersey City yesterday.

I didn’t have to work that late tonight which was nice for a change. I was able to escape the office at six thirty and hit the road for home. (Or hit the rails, more appropriately.)

I got home just minutes after Dominica and Oreo.  We ordered in some Italian from Nino’s for dinner and watched The Hudsucker Proxy on DVD that Dominica had just gotten last night from Netflix.  The Hudsucker Proxy is one of those truly great films that came out of the cinema renaissance of the early 1990s.  It is one of, if not indeed the, best performance ever given by Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh who are the stars.  Other notable actors include Paul Newman, Charles Durning, John Mahoney, Bruce Campbell, Bill Cobbs, Peter Gallagher, Anna Nicole Smith, Steve Buscemi, Sam Raimi and John Goodman.  It was quite a Who’s Who of 1994 Hollywood.  Dominica had never seen the film and for some bizarre reason we only own in on LaserDisc.  I have seen it so many times on LD that it is hard to imagine that we didn’t own in on DVD but it has been one of those movies that I have told her about so much but haven’t seen myself since we unhooked the last LD player in regular use around 2002, not long after Nate and I bought the first DVD player in our group.

After the movie we pretty much went straight off to bed.  Dominica was really exhausted and was asleep before eleven.  I did a little work but went to bed not long afterwards.  I wasn’t very tired though.  But didn’t feel like staying up late either.  I do have to work first thing in the morning tomorrow so sleeping in late isn’t an option.  Never is these days.  It’s tough getting older and having responsibilities.

I came to Ithaca several times from 1994 until 2000 without having lived here.  Nathan Parker moved here in the fall of 1994 to attend school at Ithaca College.  I was able to visit fairly often during those first few years because our school schedules were so drastically different.  I had talked about moving to Ithaca for some time but hadn’t had a strategy to do so until this new project started and I no longer had to live in any particular location when not working on site at the client facility.  So Ithaca it was and a momentous decision it was in many ways.

Today we tried to get the apartment into some sort of order although there was little to be done.  In addition to all of my furniture I also had a giant Compaq Proliant 5000 quad Pentium server which took up all kinds of space and would move from apartment to apartment with me until many years later it was taken off of my hands by John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard.)  It was the prize piece of my collection at the time though.  In 2000, owning a real enterprise class Compaq Proliant was no small thing and it was quite an impressive line item on my youthful resume.  Even though I had started my IT career in June, 1994 – six years before – and had been the Director of Information Services for Nicklin Associates now since June, 1999 I was still building up my resume and laying the groundwork for my career and every little bit helped.

Additionally I had several desktop machines that I kept as “learning” machines – mostly running Caldera OpenLinux or Windows NT 4.  This list included by 1995 Digital Starion Pentium 75 computer that I bought to take with me to my second year at GMI (now Kettering University), a PentiumPro 200 Compaq DeskPro that we loving called “Oscar” and ran Windows NT 4 Server, three old Intel 486 machines (all Compaq DeskPros) that all ran Linux and a Gateway 2000 Intel 386 desktop that attempted to run Linux but did so very poorly.  I also, of course, had my Compaq Presario Pentium II 350 128MB which was my primary desktop that ran Windows 98.  I had received that computer and my main colour inkjet printer from Paul Binderman for whom I had done some consulting and he paid me by giving me the computer.  It was a fair deal at the time.  We were both very happy.

So there were many computers in the apartment and no Internet connection other than our AltaVista dial-up connection that was “free” dial-up Internet access that displayed ads to pay for itself.  I had my two paprika coloured leather Natuzzi couches which by this time had already become a bit famous amongst all of our friends. Nate had the big “Emily” couch so named because it came from Emily’s house in Perry.  We had my stereo which, at the time, consisted of a Rotel pre-amp and processor, two Marantz MA-500 monoblock amplifiers, an Adcom line controller and a pair of massive Paradigm Studio Reference 80 speakers.  Nate also had his own stereo system which included a pair of B&W 250 mini-shelf speakers and an Adcom integrated amplifier.  We both had laserdisc players as well.  My laserdisc collection took up no small amount of space either with about 350 titles amassed by this time.  (The collection was roughly at its peak here.)

Nate put his old television/VCR combo unit into his “master” bedroom and we put my Sony Trinitron into the living room.  The apartment had a nice deck too that we stored some stuff on.  We had NO space at all.

I remember very clearly how awful the shower was there.  It had some sort of “high efficiency” shower head that totally atomized the water and created a very dry feeling mist that shot out at you when you attempted to shower.  The mist had so much forced that it swirled as it came out but no actual water ever hit you.  It was very annoying.  I have never seen its like again.

The apartment, I also remember,  was an absolute cleanliness disaster.  Nate’s cousin Mandy had moved out from it some weeks or months before (his cousin Becky had lived there before Mandy did) but food that she had cooked (pasta) was still sitting on the rangetop and the fridge still had her old food in it.  We ate what we could and over several weeks the place improved slightly.

The main pastime was watching the extensive laserdisc collection.  Nate owned a few of his own but having my 350 titles there was a big deal.  People came over all of the time to watch them.