This picture was taken about a week ago before our rose bush was hit with “the drought”. It was quite healthy and had several blooms. Now it is thin and has no flowers at all. I expect that it will be quite some time before it attempts to actually have a rose blossom again. Things have been going so well this week, however, that Dominica has decided to hit Home Depot today and see what new plants she can convince to follow her home.

I decided that I really needed to do some serious apartment cleaning today. I can only handle so much mess before it drives me insane. So I started tearing the place apart today so that I could clean up a bit of the mess that has accumulated. I even cleaned off Dominica’s desk and disinfected it. Her desk is like our apartment’s equivalent to Genoese rats.

We recently discovered, through some advertising with Netflix, that HBO is producing a “epic seven part mini-series” based on the incredible book “John Adams” by David McCullough. The series will be starring Paul Giamatti who is a truly incredible actor. I am really excited and can’t wait for the series to be made available. The two part premiere will be this Sunday, March 16th, at eight o’clock in the evening for those with access to HBO.

My plans for the week changed and I am going to be working from home tomorrow covering the early shift (starting at six thirty in the morning) and I will be going out to Warren, New Jersey on Thursday instead of going out tomorrow. We can’t do our Dungeons and Dragons group tonight anyway because of other conflicts so it worked out well that I wouldn’t really be able to do it tonight anyway.

Dominica came home with two palm trees and some potted ivy. We put one palm behind the recliner in the living room by the northern most window. The other palm we decided to actually put into the living room window directly above the heater. It was too short to put onto the floor so the windowsill was about the only option. The ivy is going to hang in the living room but the hook that we have is too short so Dominica is planning to find a longer one tomorrow.

I realized today that my two HP dx5150 Small Form Factor desktops are designed to be stacked with rubberized feet that fit into convenient troughs in the lids. So instead of having two desktop units taking up space I just stacked one on top of the other behind my monitors and now my desk looks much better and has quite a bit more space. By putting all of the cabling into one single location it makes it a lot easier to get at stuff too. I can’t believe that I hadn’t thought of this previously. It is strange that HP decided to design these units in this way as I imagine that the number of people who actually stack them is relatively few. But if you need multiple desktop units for some reason (for testing or for multiple operating systems like me, for example) then these are definitely the units to have.

We ordered in dinner from Nino’s. I had planned to order dinner so that it would arrive shortly after Dominica got home but I ended up being stuck on a conference call for the office until almost seven. So not only did I not get to order the food but couldn’t help her to unload the Mazda either and Ralph, our doorman, had to help her move everything up to the apartment.

We spent the evening watching the Bollywood classic Hum Tum from 2004. It was very good and we both really enjoyed it. We had borrowed the DVD from a coworker of Dominica’s. It was a really long movie though – approaching two and a half hours. So it took up the entire evening.

Dominica played a little MySims and then went to bed. Oreo was exhausted as well. He just slept and slept all evening.

I returned to the living room to keep working on the mess that I had made while cleaning. I tore out all of our networking so that I could move all of the equipment from the wire-frame printer stand to the far side of my desk where it will be easier to access and will definitely look a lot better. I am also taking the opportunity to put the Apple AirPort Extreme into the network. The AirPort is now my “main” router connecting directly to the Internet and providing my wireless to the apartment. The Netgear FVG318 then sits behind that. I am hoping that it doesn’t have any problem passing the IPSec firewall through the AirPort.

I decided to do some more work on the FVG318 now that I have the AirPort in place in case anything goes wrong. When you do as much networking as I do it is vitally important to always have everything be redundant especially your workstation and networking hardware. I used to have a redundant Internet connection and I really appreciated that when I had it. My current Cablevision Internet access is good enough that I am not concerned about having a second line but it is something that I would definitely do again if my connection was any less stable.

I have been having a horrible track record with the FVG318. I had one unit die completely during a firmware upgrade and since it does not have a “fall back” firmware feature it totally burned the unit. It was really upsetting because the unit was not working and the firmware upgrade was necessary to get it to be useful. But there was a bug (that has since been fixed) that caused the unit to crash or freeze during a firmware upgrade which, of course, is simply the end of your firewall.

The unit that I am working on now has been flaky for over a year but has mostly continued to function. The wireless functionality had always been nearly useless because it was so unstable. But I used wireless so rarely that I didn’t worry about it. But recently with the addition of the Nintendo Wii, AppleTV and my Linksys WiFi phone I felt that I really needed it to work reliably. So I checked and there were several firmware updates since I had last updated and the last version had “fixed” the firmware crashing issue. So I went ahead and updated to the very latest version. Now there is no wireless at all and many features of the administration screen are completely broken. It is in really sorry shape now. The setup wizard doesn’t even work properly and the “test” light on the front of the unit flashes forever no matter how many times I reset and try every possible setting. The unit works, more or less, but is leaning heavily towards the “less”. I am definitely not very happy with this particular model nor Netgear’s support of it.

Es ist ein Ros entsprugen is German for Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming.

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.

I got some maintenance work done on SGL today. The biggest change is that I am tracking the site using Google Analytics now. So I am quite excited to see how that works. I think that we will find that my traffic profile is a lot better than Word Press Stats suggest. I am also quite interested to see more historical data and geographic data.

Today I finished “reading” “Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science–from the Babylonians to the Maya” by Dick Teresi. It is a fascinating book and covers a lot of interesting ground. A great read although, like most things that I enjoy, rather dry.

I began “reading” Simon Winchester’s “Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire” which is an interesting look at the remains of Britain’s once vast empire now reduced to mostly tiny islands scattered to the four corners of the world. Winchester is one of my favourite authors and always has great insight no matter what he is working on. Unfortunately “Outposts” had to be abridged for the audio version and the parts on Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands were left “on the cutting room floor” so to speak. Although Hong Kong is no longer a relic of the empire it was at the time of the original writing.

Today was busy and I was stuck in the office a little late again. But not too bad. I had my now usual falafel lunch from the little Halal truck one block west of here and got through the day.

On the way home I swung into Borders on Broadway and found a book on Ruby that I was looking for: “Practical Ruby for System Administration” by Andre Ben Hamou and APress.  I prefer Ruby to Perl for system administration tasks (and most everything else) and was interested to see what this book might have to offer.  It had a warm reception in some online reviews that I read so I decided that as a full time system administrator who uses Ruby it just seemed appropriate that I should have this book if for no other purposes than knowing whether or not to recommend it to others.

I did some work on my Ruby script for reading in Netgear firewall logs via IMAP and parsing them into a MySQL Database.  My script is working pretty well now.  I updated it so that it now logs to the system event log which is very handy for trouble shooting.  I also set it to run every hour on the hour so that my email mailbox stays clean.  Now I don’t have to worry about manually running it all of the time.

Tonight I started the project of taking all of my old, archived Netgear firewall logs that were downloaded to Thunderbird and saved as an offline folder and put onto my home SAN – my Netgear SC101.  I remounted the offline folder to Thunderbird and began the process of reloading the data onto the email server for processing.  There are scores of thousands of emails to be uploaded.  This is going to be quite a project that will definitely take a few days at the least.  I moved as many as I could tonight before going to bed.

Dominica was in the mood for makizushi sushi and so decided to have some delivered.  I wasn’t very hungry and sushi didn’t really do it for me.  The food was good but I really don’t enjoy sushi all that much.  We don’t get sashimi very often.  It is the seaweed and rice rolls (makizushi) that Dominica really enjoys.  I don’t mind it but it doesn’t get me very excited and I just wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.

We watched a few episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and tried to call it an early night.  We haven’t been getting enough sleep and are starting to get tired.