I found out last night that my boss is traveling to Los Angeles today.  So I am covering a little more than I had been planning on this morning.  He is working from there so I am only covering extra while he is traveling, but it is a very busy morning.

I did everything that I could this morning to streamline the system upgrade process.  It is a rather manual process with a lot of steps, a lot of checks and a lot that can go wrong coupled with several reboots which, of course, cause the process to take forever as you wait for the machines to cycle through over and over again.

Dominica spent the morning cleaning after Liesl went down for a nap around a quarter after ten.  She got a ton of cleaning done in the upstairs.  The basement really cannot be helped much, though.

Susan arrived at half past noon.  She had been in the complex for a while but had a really hard time finding our house as the street is mismarked and the three people in the complex to whom she spoke had never heard of our road.  So she just drove around for a while looking for us.

We visited for a little while and she got to meet Liesl who was just waking up from a nice, long nap.  Then the five of us drove out to Grandma’s on Crompond for lunch.  I am still getting the bagel and lox platter almost every time that we go there.  I love it.  And, of course, we all got pie for dessert.  You are not allowed to eat at Grandma’s without getting pie.

Susan left Peekskill shortly after we returned from lunch.  Surprisingly it was around four thirty already by that point.  My how the day flew by!

I watched Liesl and Oreo while dad and Dominica went out to Home Depot to do shopping for the stuff that we need to do the painting tomorrow.  They picked up paint and paint supplies and a new, high-velocity fan to use in the living room.  Our living room gets almost no airflow and it gets very warm in there even when the house is below seventy degrees.  It is a real problem that the few areas of the house that we constantly use – the master bedroom and the living room – are always very, very warm and the parts that we seldom use – bathrooms, the kitchen, etc. – are really cold.  So the air conditioning works really hard just to keep the house livable even when it should not have to do so at all.

This evening we worked on running the CAT6 cabling from the wiring closet, which is located under our stairs, into the living room so that we can hook up our entertainment systems, the Sony PS3 and XBOX 360, directly to Gigabit Ethernet rather than having the PS3 connect over very slow 802.11b wireless and the XBOX be left with no connection at all as it is wired only.  Our original plan was to run this cable through the basement and drill through the floor to run it upstairs but after some research that dad did on the position of the walls we decided that it was far simpler and better, and required no modifications, to snake it directly from the cabling closet through existing holes in the floor and come out at the top of the stairs.  Doing it this way also cuts about eighteen feet of cable length off of the run making it more reliable and less costly as CAT6 cable is definitely not cheap.

Our original plan, back in April, was to run four or five long CAT6 runs up to the living room, but after much thought and discussion we realized how much better it would be to move the Apple AirPort Extreme wireless access point from the basement to the living room giving us better WiFi on the upper levels and out on the deck as well as providing three GigE ports in the living room directly next to the PS3 and XBOX 360.  It gives us one or two fewer physical connections that we would have had with the original plan but it saves money and a lot of effort and provides us with greatly improved wireless coverage.  It also moves more equipment out of the wiring closet which has no ventilation.  Right now the closet door is left open to allow it to cool but that is far from ideal.  Once the wireless is out, which generates more than its fair share of heat, the next big item to leave is the Netgear SC101 SAN device that we plan to have ready for dad to take with him this weekend.  That will leave nothing but the cable modem (bridge), firewall and switch in the wiring closet along with the associated battery unit – none of which generate very much heat at all.  So once we are down to just those we should be able to close the door there making the whole situation far less intrusive.

Running the cable proved to be really easy.  The hard part, that I was really dreading, was finishing the cable by putting the RJ45 ends onto it as we are building our own cables so that we can control the length and run them through the walls.  Dominica has always been good at building cables and got right to work on this.  She managed to get the cable right the first time.  We plugged it in and it just worked!  Awesome.

We moved the Apple AirPort Extreme up to the living room and plugged it in.  We got a GigE connection straight away.  Now the real tests – to see what will happen when we plug in the PS3 and the XBOX 360.

First we tried the PS3.  It connected and got its GigE connection via the wired interface.  We connected to MediaTomb and tried watching some movies.  It was awesome.  Our UPnP connected movies started instantly – none of the wait time that we had when using the wireless.  No buffering needed. Even really high bitrate media started instantly and played perfectly.  Movies looked awesome.  The movie list loaded instantly.  This is going to be awesome.  We will be watching everything this way for sure from now on.  People are going to love this.

We tried watching some PlayOn media from NetFlix and it did appear to work just slightly better than before but still has the same problems that it always did.  We are pretty sure that those problems are actually with the PS3 itself and not with PlayOn or NetFlix but it has been hard to tell.

After verifying that the PS3 would work wonderfully with the new setup we switched to the XBOX 360.  I ran the system updates as the box has not been turned on in quite some time.  We tested the PlayOn connection, which worked instantly, and discovered that almost all of the problems that we have been having with watching things on the PS3 were the PS3 and not the fault of PlayOn or NetFlix.  Suddenly everything just works!  We are very excited.  The unfortunate thing is that our MediaTomb server does not support the proprietary format of the XBOX 360 for streaming so we cannot use it for that yet.  So the PS3 will continue to handle our “in house” media and the XBOX 360 will handle the PlayOn stuff from NetFlix, Hulu, CBS and Amazon VOD.

We watched several episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place because Dominica and I have had to have been skipping episodes all over the place when they fail to play on the PS3.  Dad went to bed around ten.  Dominica stayed up until just before midnight.  I stayed up later and watched the first episode of Sonny with a Chance which Dominica has seen along with most of the first season watching it without me.  Now that it works on the 360 I can watch it comfortably on the big screen.

I took the time to download the latest expansion pack to Fable II while I was up and using the 360.  Now that is ready for me to play the moment that I have some spare time.  It is a short expansion, I am told.  I am still very excited to get back into the world of Fable II – that is still one of my favourite games ever.

I did some hunting around and discovered that The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition was not available for download to the XBOX 360.  Secret is the original title in the Monkey Island series that released from Lucas Arts in 1990.  It is almost twenty years old this year and Lucas Arts just made a complete remake of the game as a downloadable title for the 360.  What is really cool is that they completely updated the game including new music and voice acting using the same cast that they used for the fourth title in the series, Escape from Monkey Island, which we have for Windows as well as for the PlayStation 2.  Included with the remake is a faithful port of the original as well and by hitting the select button you can switch back and forth between the original and the remake. Very cool idea indeed.  So I downloaded Secret and played a few minutes of it to check it out.  I am quite excited to get to go back and play the original now.  It has been a very long time since I have seen it.

Earlier today while I had some time I also downloaded some titles for the Wii.  There was a big Wii update since the last time that we had it turned on and now you can run games directly from the SD card which is a big improvement and a rather obvious one that I cannot believe that they did not figure out before.  Nintendo has released The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Wii retro console which was a really good idea, I think.  I never played the original on the N64 even though I had bought it when it released and was interested in playing it now so was glad to see if on the Wii.  Many serious players claim that Majora’s Mask is the best title, although least appreciated, in the Zelda series so I need to try it out.

I also downloaded Tales of Monkey Island: Episode One which just released for the Wii.  Tales is the fifth installment in the Monkey Island series and the first to release in a very, very long time.  Very exciting indeed.  Tales is also the first completely three dimensional title in the series.  The others were pre-rendered two dimensional with a three dimensional perspective to make it feel 3D.  Tales is an original for the WiiWare platform.  I hope to get to play it very soon.  Dominica will be really excited about this one as well.

Having the living room hard wired to the basement is really going to change the way that we use our house.  This is a major breakthrough for us.  It will affect our television viewing, video game playing, music listening, etc.  This is a change that will impact our lives on a daily basis.  Now what we can see that we want is to get wires run to the upstairs bedrooms.  That, of course, will not be nearly as easy as wiring the living room.  I have no idea how we will manage to pull that off if we even can.  It would be great to get a wire up to our bedroom so that, eventually, we could have a television up there with a PS3 or something to watch the UPnP content on the network.  That would make the media server that much more valuable.

They claim that the Amiga is from 1987, the same year that my family bought a Commodore Amiga.  The machine that they show is obviously a Commodore Amiga 1200 (A1200) which was made from late 1992 through 1996.  Almost a full decade more modern than what they are stating.  (To put this in perspective, they say that they are showing a computer used for little more than video games that was made when I was in mid-elementary school but show a high-powered 32bit graphics workstation that was still on the market in my third year of college!!)  But this is just the beginning.

The Amiga machine that they show, the black A1200, is sitting, unplugged, atop an ancient IBM XT that is an entire generation older than the Amiga.  Both machines are so famous and amazingly recognizable at once that it is extremely confusing to watch because it looks like exactly what it is, a mid-90s Amiga 1200 unplugged and used as a dust cover for a worthless, early 80s IBM XT (I learned to program on an IBM XT when they were no longer current in 1985.)

Then, the actors, who apparently aren’t familiar with how computers work and that they need to be plugged in, talk about the specs of the Amiga (an incredibly powerful 32bit workstation worth many thousands of dollars in the mid-90s) but instead quoted the machine has being powered by the pathetic Motorola 6800 processor which was never used in any computer to my knowledge but the series included the 6809 which was used to power the Vectrex home video game system (that Dominica’s family has) and the Radio Shack sold TRS-80 computers of the late 1970s.

They, to add insult to injury, the product a floppy disk that supposedly was used on the Commodore Amiga.  Now the original Amiga came out in 1985 and one of its major selling points was that they had left the legacy world of 5.25″ floppies behind and moved ahead, along with Apple’s Mac and the Atari ST, into the world of 3.5″ floppies which were more stable and had higher storage denisty and better overall performance and capacity.  This was extremely well known at the time.  It was the first fact that anyone would know about any of these machines.  The 5.25″ world included the old IBM compatibles, when they were still called that, the Apple //e and other ancient 8bit machines.  The original Mac, Atari ST and Amiga were 16 bit (but remember that they actually showed a 32bit Amiga that was about seven generations into the series and actually had a hard drive installed.)

Since the Amiga didn’t have a 5.25″ floppy drive, they stuck the floppy into the IBM XT!  Watching the show without sound you can’t even tell that the Amiga is supposed to be being used.  It is only mentioned in the dialogue and the show actually uses the IBM.  Visually the show is completely about the IBM XT but audibly the show is a mismash of dialogue that sounds like a five year old attempting to sound like they know something by spewing gibberish with authority.

Then, they show this IBM XT (a device which normally came with a monochrome green screen) that displayed 80 character columns of text playing a modern, late 90s, 3D rendered video that had more colors in it than the IBM could display (which was like 16), higher resolution than the IBM could produce (by orders of magnitude) and all of that before having it do graphical rendering that was still out of reach of most home video game enthusiasts by 2000.  They made the implication that there has been no hardware advancements since 1984 (when the XT was popular) and that the only differences between then and now is that programmers are smarter now and know how to write 3D games!

What really amazes me is that all of the people involved in producing an expensive show like Bones from writers to producers to actors to stagehands, prop people, etc.  Not one single person figured out that the scene was so wrong as to be confusing to the most casual observer.  How can so little thought be put into a show so expensive to make?  How can so much work be involved in making a scene so inaccurate?  Just having the Amiga in front of them for ten seconds, even if they had never seen a computer before, would have filled them in on what cables to plug in and what type of floppy the would need for the scene.  And the year or manufacture is probably printed on the back.

An eight year old with Google who had never heard of Commodore, Amiga, IBM, floppies, etc. could have researched all of this for them in minutes.  Most of the people working on these shows are older than eight, I would venture to guess, and probably many of them older than me which means that they should be exceedingly aware of all this already without any need for any research at all.  They lived through these eras.  They watched the 5.25″ floppy fade away in 1984.  They should remember computers that only had green screens.  They should know that sitting one computer on top of another looks weird and that everyone would see two computers sitting there and notice that the one they mention isn’t even plugged in and that the floppy was placed into the wrong one.

Seriously people.  Hollywood is so sloppy, why do we watch this stuff?  Why not film Kindergarteners putting on shows at school?  At least then we have some guarantee that those kids at least attended half a year of Kindergarten.  I can’t be so sure about the people making these shows.

Dominica woke me up at ten because Oreo was laying in the middle of the upstairs hallway and was not willing to move.  He had not eaten his dinner and was very obviously extremely ill.  I tried taking him for a walk and he tried but was having a really hard time getting around.  So we decided that he needed to go to the emergency room at the hospital in Bedford Hills.

We were out the door before ten thirty having already called and prepped the hospital that we were coming.  It takes roughly half an hour to get out to Bedford Hills from Peekskill.  We arrived just before eleven.  Only Oreo and I went to the hospital as Dominica needed to stay home and take care of Liesl as well as to cook Oreo’s stew so that he would have good food again as soon as we needed it.

Oreo’s stay at the hospital ended up taking a pretty long time.  We didn’t get to leave the hospital until one thirty in the morning and boy were we tired.  Only a little less than three hours of sleep for me in two days and he has not had much sleep either.

The final verdict, after more blood work, was that Oreo is dehydrated now and has developed pancreatitis which is causing additional problems.  They have him a fluid treatment to help “jump start” his system but he is off food until tomorrow and then only light and bland food for several days.  He is not going to like this.  But, most importantly, they think that he is going to be okay.  He needs time to rest and to work the food out of his system.

So we got home around two in the morning.  Oreo seemed a little better even by the time that we got home.  The extra fluids must be helping already.

Oreo and I went straight to bed.  Dominica was up for a while longer taking care of Liesl and cooking for Oreo.  I have to be up before eight tomorrow morning which is going to be exceptionally painful.

I got up at a quarter till eight this morning.  I felt awful.  I didn’t fall asleep for a long time last night and my night was very restless.  I figure that I got a total of less than five hours if even more than four plus the slightly less than three that I got earlier.  So in two night’s I have gotten about seven to seven and a half hours of sleep.  Enough to function but not enough to feel good at all.

I got right to work by eight.  I ended up not getting the files from the team that I was supporting and was unable to do any work for a while.  Oreo got up just minutes after me and followed me down to the basement so that he could sleep on his Star Wars pillow by my side.  That is a good sign.  Previously he felt that he was unable to go up and down the stairs on his own.  A partial night’s sleep and the fluids must be helping.  I brought down a water dish for him so that he would have one down stairs too.  He has one on the main floor and in our bedroom but I wanted to make sure that he was encouraged to drink as much water as possible.

My morning work ended up being a much larger project than I had anticipated. I was working for about fifty minutes when my virtual desktop as well as my primary desktop got cut off from me due to a massive network outage on Wall Street.  So very quickly my morning turned from a small installation process and some routine patching into a pretty major endeavor just to be able to work let alone to do the scheduled work let alone to deal with the major outage.  Not that I deal directly with network outages but they do impact me and I need to be available when they happen.

I ended up working an entire day today making it a full six day week.  I can’t complain as we really need the money with Oreo’s surprise six hundred dollar day at the vet’s yesterday.  We really appreciate that I am able to get overtime.  It really makes a difference for us.

The new television set arrived mid-afternoon.  It was delivered via a minivan and it took two movers to bring it in to the house.  This thing is huge.  I didn’t get a chance to hook it up until pretty late in the evening.

The first thing that we popped in to test on the new 52″ Samsung LCD was Fable II on the XBOX 360.  We set the 360 to 1080p and were completely wowed by Fable II.  Having completed the game already going back and seeing it on this monitor at full resolution was really something.  It looked like a completely different game!  There is so much detail that we hadn’t seen before.  Very impressive both for the TV and for the game.  Now I am sorry that I played it before getting the new set.  The game is so much more gorgeous than I had realized.  At least when the Knothole Island downloadable content arrives in a week or two I will have this to play it on.

For the time being we have moved the Samsung on the floor in front of the fireplace below the Westinghouse 32″ that is mounted on the wall.  The Samsung is going to take its place at some point but I am not able to wall mount it by myself so we just have to wait until someone is here who can help me.  The TV is just too large for me to be able to lift like that all alone.

Oreo improved throughout the day.  He is definitely feeling much better today.  He is not happy at all about his bland food diet.  He can’t wait to be back on real food again later in the week.

I have a bunch of work that needed my attention today so I spent a lot of time in the basement catching up on Active Directory management issues and other problems.  My plan had been to go to bed quite early, maybe as early as seven, but that didn’t happen at all and I did not even quite make it by eleven.

Katie is coming up to Peekskill sometime tomorrow morning.  She has not had a chance to meet Liesl yet.  Katie has seen the new house but not since we moved any of our furniture in.  She came up to see the house during the time when we had first gotten it but had not moved in yet.

I have a bit of a migraine today so I am spending the morning relaxing and hoping that it will go away so that I can actually get some work done tonight. I hate losing so much of my precious work time to something so pointless I don’t have enough time to get things done as it is.

I picked up breakfast from the Market Cafe downstairs and Dominica took a break from her work so that we could watch the final three episodes of the final season of That 70s Show. It was only about an hour and ten minutes of shows so it wasn’t too much of a break and we ate while watching it so it wasn’t a horrible use of our time. I’ve been waiting for ten years to see how the show would end and I was really anxious to watch the final episodes. That 70s Show is one of those really great character driven shows where the writing and actors really came together and developed deep characters and relationships that continued to grow and evolve over the course of the shows eight years and by the end you are really attached to them. I think that the final “home stretch” episodes were really well done and that overall the story was really wrapped up nicely. Unlike a lot of sit-coms that kind of just wind down and fizzle out leaving the audience with no closure this show really made a concerted effort to wrap up storylines and leave the viewers satisfied, and it had a lot of opportunity to fail at that too. The end of That 70s Show was definitely planned and well thought out. I was quite happy even though I hated to see the show end. It is amazing how much work went into the over two hundred episodes that the team produced over the years.

We managed to finally get Dominica phone number ported over from the family share plan that she has had with everyone back up in Rochester and onto the family share plan with me. We have been procrastinating on that for forever. For the moment Dominica is now on my old Palm Treo 700p with voice and unlimited data (so she gets email and can surf the web) but we also ordered her a new phone. So on Wednesday she will be receiving a new BlackBerry Pearl 8130 in pink. The BlackBerry works just so much better as both an email device and as a phone than the Palm that it was well worth the extra money, and seeing as it is available in pink there really was not going to be any convincing Dominica that she wasn’t going to get it. So now, in theory, she will be “on email” all of the time like I am and will be communicating through it much, much more often.

I started reading “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” today as I have gotten ahead on my textbook reading for my Object Technologies class.

Dominica worked very hard all day on her homework. She also did laundry and cooked the week’s food for little Oreo. She didn’t really get any break all day. But by ten at night when she turned in for the night she had completely all of her homework both the backlog and what was due tonight. So she will feel much better heading off to sleep knowing that all of that is behind her now.

I didn’t have that much homework actually due today but it was enough to keep me pretty busy considering how crappy I felt and with all of the interruptions like taking Oreo out for his regular walks. I did get my homework done and turned it in a little before eleven. I was off to bed well before midnight.

Because of an “emergency” at the office I am going to be doing the early shift again this coming week. It is going to be a long week.

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.

Since it is a big deal, having a new and exciting show to see, we made plans with my friend Erin Ryan to all go to her house tonight to watch the show. It’s like a big movie night or something.

The four of us watched the show and were all totally hooked. For those of us born at just the time that this show is supposed to be taking place makes the show seem quite magical. It really did a great job of capturing the look and feel on the late 1970s. Those days in the late 70s are a swirling mist to me. I was born in early 1976 and I have a lot of memories from around 1978-1980 and I can still picture how everything looked. All of the browns and oranges and everything was stripped and polka dots. Wood panel wainscots were ubiquitous, cassettes and long play vinyl records ruled, televisions were tiny and generally black and white, cars were huge and gas was cheap. No one had computers then. I wouldn’t see my first computer until the summer of 1980.

Eric, Mark and I would wind up watching most of the first two seasons of That Seventies Show together. It was a regular event after that point. It remained throughout the first five years of its run to be one of the only, if not the only, television show that I watched with any regularity.