The *real* amazing race

I simply had to write about the absolutely amazing race that occurred last night at the Olympic 4x100m Freestyle Relay Final. At this point, you've probably heard what happened. If you haven't seen it, you need to watch it. It was an amazing finish for a race and you haven't really experienced it till you see it yourself.
To setup:
France is favored to win the Men's 4x100 Freestyle Relay. The race consists of four swimmers in a relay. Each of them swims 100 meters (1 lap). As with most relays, when one racer touches the wall, the next guy can go. The United States had a series of different swimmers that could be members of the relay team. To conserve strength, they qualified for the final race using a set of 'B' team swimmers (they were a little slower than their best, but were good enough to get them to the final). That put the team in the final. The final relay line-up wasn't decided until very close to the race (something that isn't too unusual in team swim meets). The 'A' team for the Americans for the final was to be: Michael Phelps (lead-off), Garrett Weber-Gale (2nd), Cullen Jones (3rd) and Jason Lezak (anchor). Seventy minutes before, Phelps swam and won a gold medal in the 400m Individual Medley (IM) and Cullen Jones swam as part of the qualifying relay team earlier. Building a prediction for the relay's outcome on the career best times for the American's and the French results in the French winning the gold and the Americans trailing close behind for the silver medal. That was the favored prediction at least and the French were boasting about it to the media by saying, "the Americans? We're going to smash them. That's what we came here for."

In the end, the race resulted in an amazing finish even if the race hadn't been so close because they beat the world record by FOUR FULL SECONDS!

Completely, totally, unbelievable... Check out the streaming video of the race on NBC's olympic website. There's also a decent story that they have written about the race.

Resource FOUND: Generate OpenOffice Documents

I just found a tool that will allow me to create OpenOffice documents from within PHP. A few days ago, when I began the hunt, I located PHP DocWriter which seemed to fit the bill from the instructions... but the files that it generated in the example were noted as corrupted when I tried to read the files from OpenOffice. That doesn't give me much hope. So, I kept looking around... and today found tbsOOo. 'tbs' stands for TinyButStrong, a template engine that is as the name describes. tbsOOo is a plugin for the engine that was released nearly 2 years ago and allows you to create a file from a template. Since the companies I work with are usually working from stationary, I can create a template and have the text from a PHP form drop into it. This will make quotes (and other documents like faxes) much easier to create! Yeah for Olivier Loynot! Yeah for Olivier for releasing it via the LGPL as well!

...Now to actually try it locally!

A present for me?

If you're looking for something to get me as a present (whatever occasion)... the best thing for me right now is money: the United States of America's designated currency, the American dollar. I thought long and hard about posting this because I feared people would think poorly of me for presuming that I in any way deserved a present. So, let me say this... if you don't think I deserve a present and/or you weren't thinking of getting me a present... ignore this post from the perspective of me. Instead, think of it from the perspective of some other person with young kids that you may have been thinking of giving a present to in the near future.

Presents, traditionally, have been given as a way to reflect how much you know about the person. That is the purpose of measuring whether something is a "good" gift for someone else... because it is typically seen as a reflection of how much you do, or don't, know about the person.

Warning: this paragraph is very me specific. I will save you some heartache over the situation. First, if you feel compelled to give me a present, that is enough for me. I don't care how "well" you know me. The fact that you want to give me a present says enough about our relationship. Additionally, I am a difficult person to comprehend what I'm "into" at any given time. My topics of interest vary broadly from day to day. One day I may be totally immersed in CSS while the next I might be reading everything I can about new circuit board industrial design techniques. The next day I might be trying to figure out how to build a solar cooker. This is further complicated by the notion that I get whatever I can for free. That means that if I can find it for free (legally) on the Internet, I'm probably consuming it there first. That said, there are definitely some things that just can't be obtained for free. For example, I can't find any sweaters, polo shirts or khakis (the style of pants, not necessarily the color) for free. If you know where to find them for free, please, tell me. Now, with that said, I have a wardrobe that is too large right now. I don't need clothes (so don't buy me any!).

Right now I need two things that are in the shortest supply: money and time. You might say, "well, that's not fair! I want to give you something that you'll hold onto and cherish for the rest of your life!" The simple fact is that there are very few things that are likely to do that for me that I can hold in my hand. Quite frankly, none of them are anything that you can give me. That might sound snobbish and/or harsh... but stick with me.

I have two young boys. Dr. Randy Pausch put it best when he said this (or something like this, I'm paraphrasing): "when you're young, trade money for time so you get more when its most valuable. When you're young, your kids are young. Pay someone to mow the lawn so you can do something fun with your kids." I hold the time that I spend with my kids very dearly. While I might use the money to pay off debt rather than pay somebody to mow my lawn (our neighbor mows our lawn for us with his riding lawn mower for free), I'm still trading money for time. I will use it to earn more time with my kids by paying down debt. Paying down debt moves me closer to being able to take extra days off from work for camping vacations and so many of the other things that I want to do with my boys.

So, if you're thinking of giving me a present, give me time by giving me money.

Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

It took me three evenings of casually watching this to gradually get through this amazing work. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) used to have a lecture series where they encouraged professors to produce a lecture that would reflect what they would talk about if they were giving their last lecture. Dr. Randy Pausch, professor of Computer Science at CMU provided his contribution to that lecture series after the series had ended. His last lecture, in some ways, really was his last lecture. Randy had pancreatic cancer when he have his "last lecture." He didn't talk about his kids or his family. Those, he said, were too obviously important and he knew he wouldn't make it through a lecture about them. Instead, he talked about "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." If that draws you in even a little a bit, dive in and take a look. Dr. Pausch's words offer more than the title initially reveals and it truly is something that everybody should watch. It is long, clocking in at precisely 76.45 minutes. Find the time. This is worth the lessons that this man has to share in his final months.

Without further ado, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

On Google and Free Speech SeattlePI scores a glancing blow

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has an interesting article about Google's track record on "curbing free speech."

I could go on for hours about this particular topic; it suffices to say this:
Google is operating in a multinational environment. We've seen in many cases (Iraq is a prime example) that a free-speech democratic environment isn't suitable for all societies. Perhaps, someday, our world might see a day where that case exists, however, that day is not today. I'm a firm believer that the reason why the United States of America has flourished with free speech is because of the strong educational background that most Americans enjoy as part of growing up. Is it perfect? Far from it... but it gives us a starting point. With that knowledge, we're able to learn and grow as our careers and lives progress.

While Google is, in fact, suppressing important historical information in these countries, the larger good of providing the 98% of the world's information is far more important than giving up on 1/5th or more of the world's population because the government wants a tight grip on 2% (this is likely way too high of a number, but we'll throw it out there for a number to hold on to) of the information.

I believe there will come a day for an ideals show-down between Google and the nations of the world, however, that time has not yet arrived.

CPL is Dead: LANParties & E-Sports?

It's official that the CPL has ceased operations. In fact, this has been the case for about two months now. The big question in my mind is this: "What is next for E-Sports and how does it affect LANParties?"

In case you haven't been in on this, I ran LANParty.com for almost five years. In that time, there were good times and bad times. But the thing that ran true throughout the entire time is the possibility that LANParties may become a social hub for gamers. Its true that LANParties were a primary cause for me to come out of my shell after a tough transition from high school to college. The entire time, however, I was left with the goal that I wanted others to be able to do the same thing. That is why I helped LANParty.com to run for five+ years. Unfortunately, the powers that be decided that LANParty.com didn't need the support that I was requesting. As such, it has eventually fallen into disrepair. The LANParty organization and announcement tools released to the community in August 1998 are simply not up to the task in today's world.

So, what does that have to do with the demise of the CPL? Well, the CPL always had a tenuous relationship with many of the hosts on the LANParty scene. The CPL served to commercialize what the grassroots LANParty community had been doing on a non-commercial basis. Why is that a problem? Well, it isn't really, but it left a bad taste in the mouths of many of the hosts on the scene. Most wanted nothing to do with the CPL and it left the community hushed about who was or was not a 'cyber-athlete.' (Did I mention that I hate the use of the term cyber? I do.) This wasn't the case everywhere, but it definitely was the case in the geographic pockets that I talked to in the United States. What really needed to happen was an open system of ranking players similar to the way that chess titans are ranked. Several attempts were made at doing just that, unfortunately, they were all mired in making the system seemingly cheater proof.

Again, what does this have to do with the CPL? Unfortunately, as my career has moved forward and I've started a family... I'm not longer as deep in the gaming community as I used to be, however, I'll expound on that for a moment. I think we need a new league that isn't run by a commercial organization. Think Wikimedia (operator of Wikipedia) for gaming. The system could operate relatively simply and on donations from corporations and gamers alike. There would need to be a clear bend towards ensuring that commercialism didn't end up taking over the new league, but that could be done with a careful eye of an attentive board of directors (even if they had to be paid or perked to serve). So, why don't we have this now? Lack of willingness to compromise. Angel Munoz was right when he wrote the announcement that the CPL was finished saying, "the current fragmentation of the sport, a crowded field of competing leagues, and the current economic climate." The last one has an impact on the commercialization aspect of the CPL, however, the first two items fragmentation and competing leagues would crumble any effort to combine the community. What needs to happen is for the leagues to recognize that there isn't any way into the future except through collaboration. Each league that crumbles is a nail in the coffin for any sort of global ranking system that could be used as a basis for creating leagues.
To really see the potential and how close the CPL was, you simply need to look at the history of the NFL. Mogols owned the teams and faced them off with other teams in city leagues until the eventually they all got together, agreed on rules of how they would compete. The CPL was starting to do that. Unfortunately, they still were doing it on their rules and their turf. The sanctioning of a tournament to make it legal for ranking was a complicated process that most LANParty hosts found daunting at best with applications to be a host location. Even then, there was question about who would really be running the show (a question most LANParty hosts don't like to have asked).
In the New Era
So, in the new era, we need to have cooperation and collaboration. Just like everything else on the Internet. Methods need to be determined to create solid profiles of players to support a ranking system. Any ranking system that doesn't do this will suffer the same fate of the CPL because there just won't be enough financial support to keep it going. Think of the sheer financial support that the NFL draft system has for operations. Now consider if on top of being forced to draft players through the draft system, there was no consistent method of determining statistics for players. I digress... let's boil it down to a list:

• A player listing system
• A player ranking system with self reporting and methods for contesting an entry by the opponent
• An event listing system with easy player and event management tools
• The ability for any site to draw on and report any information in the system
  

If those three simple goals could be achieved, we would have a chance at creating an open electronic gaming league. There are some easy ways of doing these things now with relatively new web based technologies. Somebody just needs to do it. If you're interested in pursuing this idea, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Status of my WISP

Ahhh... So,... to report back in to the millions that are waiting with baited breath to find out how my wireless Internet service provider network is working... well... it isn't. At least not consistently. I put it up and take it down as I have the time to test it. This week will begin a new round of testing with the Oregon firmware.

The problem? Well, its been a combination of a few things, let's start with the most complicated first.

Software Complications
A deployment to allow for folks to pay for access is not available at this point because the software isn't ready. Two large hurdles still need to be overcome. First, access control using FreeRADIUS. Second, an open source billing system built on FreeRADIUS with the options I want (daily, three day, weekly, monthly, annual, bi-annual, biennial/EOY billing with a set payment schedule for the service period).

Hardware Complications
The hardware necessary to operate the wireless mesh network isn't 100% decided. I've had a bit of trouble with the Accton hardware originally distributed through "them." The devices seem to reboot unexpectedly if the power is the least bit unstable. For instance, I plugged in my outdoor unit at my in-law's house... ran it for nearly 3 hours and saw a constant reboot cycle. The only thing I can think to do on this is to build a very-mini UPS/power conditioner that I could have on hand for selected access points that have this sort of problem. If its a problem at my in-law's house... it is likely to be a problem elsewhere in the same power grid. Another option is that I select different hardware. Currently, my test units are old wireless units that were sourced from that one company that crapped on their customers last October.

Solutions Considered
I'm considering using Ubiquiti Networks equipment, but haven't yet decided that they would be a better bet at almost twice the cost. Ubiquiti seems like a very large company from their marketing. However, based upon their support and sales departments... my best guess is that they are a company of very few employees (<15). That isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm a CIO at a company that is a scant few 7 employees. The only catch with a small company is that features are slower to come out. Since the hardware that I'm using needs to be flashed with different software to be mesh capable... the question is what about the hardware gets "lost in translation." Unfortunately for Ubiquiti, the four internal omni-directional antennas are the sacrificial lambs that head for the slaughter in the name of open source firmware to support a BATMAN mesh. That means an external antenna and sends the unit towards $100/node. Boo. If the Ubiquiti equipment had a driver that would work with OpenWRT for its automatic antenna switching... the UbNt equipment would be first on my list regardless of the $49 - $79 shift from the Accton to Ubiquiti. Another flaw with the Ubiquiti equipment is the shortage of flash and RAM. This is something, apparently, that some of the guys down in Argentina from LUGRo-Mesh have figured out... sort-of. Their firmware is fitting on the 4mb-flash/16mb-RAM configurations... but they don't have a central dashboard and they don't have user restrictions (splash page click-through only). D'oh! If only the LUGRo-Mesh group would coordinate with Vacouver and Oregon/Italy! This is something that I'm going to be pushing in the coming weeks is a solid effort to push these three groups together and hopefully combine efforts.

Range Tests
My initial range tests with my stock antennas on my old equipment was actually quite promising. I was counting out 4-5 city lots. Most of the city lots in my area are easily 120ft wide. That means an initial range of about 600 ft. Add to that the fact that I was not exactly line of sight (several cars, mailboxes, shrubs etc) and I was terribly impressed. I think it may have actually hit somewhere in the range of 800-1000 feet if I hadn't goofed up the experiment by accidentally rebooting one of the nodes with a power cycle. Whoops. I'll be testing more this week (hopefully the weather will improve again... I don't want to have to rain-shield my test equipment).

Conclusion
As you can see, its been a busy time. My initial goal of having paying customers by "this summer" is still on track. However, my hope that my first customers would be in June is quickly fading with the passing days of May. Its still a possibility, but is fading.

This afternoon, after a rainstorm passed through, Isaac and Elijah were insisting that they wanted to go outside. Since everything was still SOAKED in the grass... there wasn't much space for them to do anything (plus, it was still lightly drizzling). So, I popped up the baby-gate on the back porch and cleared it off so there was space for them to wander around. Mind you, there wasn't anything to do there, but they wanted to go out! The back porch, while small, is covered... so we put sweatshirts on and stood around on the porch for about 10 minutes. Elijah got bored first. He demanded that he be allowed inside.

Isaac didn't want to go inside yet though. So, we stayed outside. I was able to grab the lawn chairs that have sat outside all winter and clean them up a bit. While wet, they were clean enough to sit in. After I finished, Isaac wanted to sit in one with a cup of milk. So, I grabbed a cup of milk for him and a cup of water for me. I sat in the second chair which was quite wet. It was worth it though. While we sat there, Isaac proclaimed that there were two chairs that there were birds in the trees saying tweet, tweet... and that they were flying in the sky. We also talked about the cars in the driveway and that they weren't crashing because, "we don't crash cars." A lesson that we've been working with on his toy cars that I hope sticks with him through life.

Sitting there with my first little boy, watching the world around us and seeing him with the capability to express what he saw was priceless... I saw more than ever that he's not just my first little boy anymore... he's my first big boy.

A ridiculous patent

US Patent 6816878 - A system for providing a warning signal to a plurality of persons and/or locations on a geographic basis comprising...

Okay. I understand the spirit in which this patent was awarded. However, the awarded language is too general. I'm looking at this and I can't imagine how a whole slew of systems don't infringe on this patent! It is, in fact, stifling innovation. I cannot, in effect, do any of the following:

• use Asterisk (an open source Private Branch Exchange suite used to control office phone systems) to create a call list of any kind. The call list must be manually entered to prevent infringement.
• use any mailing list for distribution of information on an alert basis. I can remember using Lyris ListManager in about 1998 to sub-divide groups of individuals for sending information about events in a particular geographic area.

Let's think of a few things:

• How does the national amber alert system work? Probably infringing.
• How does the "Reverse 9-1-1" system work that was used to warn (with a call) those that were threatened by California wild fires in October 2007? Probably infringing.
• The systems for sending cell phone alerts to college students if something bad is happening on the campus (think Virginia Tech April 2007)
  

Never mind the suggestion of prior art ... Do we really want such necessary items to be "protected" from use without licensing to these two guys?

Call to Action
Let's get this thrown out based on prior art. The patent was filed February 11, 2000 and issued November 9, 2004. If you can think of anything else that can be evidence of prior art (in other words, it had provable existence prior to the filing date) write about it in the comments below. Thanks.

Google Jumped the Shark? No.

Profy.com today posited the notion that Google has jumped the shark in the post "Is Google App Engine a Sign that Google's Jumped the Shark?"

I'd like to respond here to that notion. You see, proposing that a group has jumped the shark is a truly sinister accusation. Essentially, it alludes to the idea that the group (company, tv show, organization) has strayed from its roots and is moving into territory wildly in an effort to keep an audience and survive. Jumping the Shark is bad. But the question is, has Google jumped the shark?

Let's take a look at what Profy is putting forward as evidence, shall we?

1. Google chose Python for the launch of Google App Engine which, Profy suggests, indicates Google has lost touch with the Web 2.0 space because Ruby on Rails is the "It" framework.
2. Google's innovation ("copy another company's idea, make it bigger if we can, and give it away") won't survive in the face of already slowing ad revenue dollars.

Let's tackle (1) first. Sure, maybe Python isn't the darling of the Web 2.0 world, but perhaps that's because it doesn't have the backing that Ruby has enjoyed from major hosting providers and Web 2.0 fan-boys. I don't currently program in Ruby OR Python, so I can't evaluate this. However, Google has consistently followed the RAD format of development. The fact that they've thrown their hat into the ring for application hosting is ... for sure ... something of note. But, Amazon (and company) are in a different boat than GAE. GAE does more. Amazon's Web Services are just distributed hosting (no different than Media Temple's services). But, like all of Google's services, it is starting as a "it's nice... but" tool. There's always a gotcha with their services... when they start. In the end, however, Google's services usually end up shining relatively brightly.

Now, let's take a look at (2). Yes, Google seems to have fallen into the "copy another company's idea, make it bigger if we can, and give it away" model. However, I don't think that they've jumped the shark on this one. They've stayed true to their original ideal of freeing the world's information. What better way to index the world's information than to have direct access to the applications that operate on the data? What better way to encourage the growth of hosted data applications than to foster their development with free services and tools to jump-start development?

A characteristic element of "jumping the shark" is the clear deviation from an original concept. Fonzie in a bathing suit jumping over a shark was not what Happy Days was about. Happy Days was not an action show. Google is an information company. They need the world's information. Why have massive farms for crawling pages when you can simply index local information instead? If you want information, make it easier for the information to get to you - host it.

The Workstation Debate

You know, its really nice to see that others are going through the same types of consternation that I am!

Trent@TheSimpleDollar talks about his personal debate over the type of workstation to get now that he is writing full-time.

Personally, I'm running into a similar situation. For years, both my wife and I have had workstations at home. About two years ago, Vikki's workstation went away as she started to share mine (saying she didn't need to spend so much time on the computer). Then, as I've worked with various companies, I've simply used their computing resources at home. My old workstation had been limping along with a bad motherboard for about two years... and finally, we replaced it when we moved to Saint Marys with a decent, low-price computer with a PentiumD processor. I'm now getting to the point where I'm going to need the processing power for photo editing... and the laptop that I'm using at home isn't going to cut the mustard. Couple that with the want for more screen real estate (I got used to using three monitors for a while) and I really want a nice desktop workstation. There are two problems with that though. (1) The "technology" money that I have set aside is currently earmarked for starting a small business (2) I don't have anyplace to put a multi-monitor (even LCD) workstation in our house without expensive mounts and tricky "hiding" techniques that would add hundreds of dollars to the cost of the setup. Bleh. Guess I'll keep thinking about it for the time being.

Merging meshes isn't something you do

I loathe reading/watching/listening to mainstream media report on technology. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know what you're watching is going to be a gruesome disaster. You know there's nothing you can do to stop it from happening. You know that you can't stop watching.
In large part, this can be avoided by keeping most of your eyeball time in the "blogosphere" for information and trends. Of course, since the people int he blogosphere are my peers, there's always a bit of peer revue that should happen. So, when I find a new trend/idea... I don't immediately buy in... but research it first. I also don't release a blog post until I've firmly decided that either the opinion is worth flying against fact or that I have significant sources to post on fact alone.
In my search for information on the wireless industry, I had one particular writer, who's name I won't mention, that I was really starting to enjoy reading. The guy seemed to really know what was going on, but had a 'easy-on-the-eyes' writing style that was a pleasure to read. Today I'm back to having to rehash all of what I read from him. True, the entire spectrum of Wireless technology can be difficult to keep up with, but certain statements can red-flag an individual as not being "with-it." Imagine somebody showing up to a social group of physicists and giving a talk about the true existence of "centrifugal force" that "throws" objects from a spinning merry-go-round. The guy would be laughed out of the room.
Today, not only does this member of the blogosphere take unnecessary pot-shots at a fellow blogger (for being "heavy with AdSense ads, and thus suspect"), but before that says:
"One potential crossover is that both the OLPC XO and Open-Mesh use open
software to achieve their meshing function... potentially, both
systems' meshing technique could be brought together and made
interoperable. Well, we can at least hope that those capable of doing
this would see the wisdom, fun, and utility of that."
Okay, let's pick this apart...

• "those capable of doing this": At least he's identifying himself as not one of "those" that can deal with the underlying protocols of mesh discovery and routing.
• "both the OLPC XO and Open-Mesh use open software to achieve their meshing function": Um, no. Yes, OLPC XO uses an open source operating system. However, not everything is open source. What isn't open source? Well, the meshing protocol for one (it's proprietary). This makes interoperability with other meshes highly unlikely. Even if the source was open, to change the discovery and routing protocols to "meet" with another is all but impossible. That isn't to say that the open-mesh routers (running on an Accton platform) couldn't be re-programmed to use the same meshing techniques as the OLPC XO IF OLPC XO released their meshing protocol... but that's a pretty big if. Likely, after that, the nerd debate would ensue over which meshing protocol was the better meshing protocol. Not to sound negative, but there isn't a shortage of opinions on what the best mesh routing protocol is to use on an ad-hoc wireless mesh network.
  
• "potentially, both systems' meshing technique could be brought together and made interoperable." Danger Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!

There is one caviat: there could be bridges between the networks, but they couldn't be made to interoperate directly without OLPC XO opening their mesh protocol.
So... no. This won't work. And... no, you can't just trust people that what they say is possible... is. The lesson? Double check what you read and believe everything you see on TV.

Regarding BusinessWeek's: "Public Wi-Fi: Be Very Paranoid"

Okay people... Just because a wireless network is encrypted, does not mean it is secure.

Long story short: use public wi-fi, but use it with the security technologies that you should be using on the Internet anyway.

If you are on a network and not using encryption for your communications (SSL/HTTPS for web browsing or a VPN to your corporate network... or SSH to communicate with a server), everybody on that same network can view every one of your packets. NONE of it is secure with your network neighbors!

In the column Public Wi-Fi: Be Very Paranoid on BusinessWeek.com, Mr. Wildstrom points out that many public networks use no encryption methods. They don't use WEP, they don't use WPA, they don't use WPA2. He points this out as a liability in using these networks, saying that if you're using an unencrypted network that you shouldn't use any unsecured service (don't use HTTP for instance, but you can use HTTPS). Let's break this down... What is the point of encrypting a network connection? The idea behind WEP and its brethren is to prevent prying eyes that don't have access to the network from viewing the traffic. This is the extent that it protects you. If you are able to stroll into an airport and get encrypted access to the network, so can a thief. Encryption on a wireless network is no more secure than agreeing with a friend that you're going to write emails in double pig-latin (okay, its a bit more secure than that... but not much more).

Mr. Wildstrom then goes on to say, "So don't send or even read messages unless you are prepared to share them with the world." Truth be told ... Email is insecure regardless of the type of network that you are on because all of the transit of messages between SMTP servers is done with unencrypted plain-text transactions. So if you have private information in your email, that you haven't encrypted, you're open for a heap of trouble anyway.

When you share information on a public network (whether it is "encrypted" with WEP/WPA/WPA2 or not) you share it with everyone else who is on the network at that time. That's because your information is encrypted with the same key that everyone else's information is encrypted with.

To say that a public network with encryption is secure is like saying that as long as you have a deadbolt on your front door you're secure. You may say, "well, sure, I'd say that." Simple fact is that, in this analogy, everybody has the same deadbolt key. Feel safe still?

If you want security, you need to use security tools (VPN, SSL/HTTPS, SSH, etc). If you don't use these tools, you're not secure, regardless of whether the network is unencrypted or using WPA2.

Why is February 19th, 2009 important?

Unlike prior February 19ths... the one that is less than one year away will be a very important one in the United States. In case you don't know, on 2/19/2009... we'll be losing analog television and only digital television will be allowed to be broadcast in the United States. This should increase the quality of most television signals. That is not why its important though.

Because of the switch to digital, a significant chunk of the wireless spectrum will be made available to the winner of a currently operating auction (the highest bidder wins). The expected use for the spectrum will be high-speed Internet access. That is why this day will be an important one. Not because you can download pornography faster... or because you can get iTunes clips faster. Instead, it will be because the sheer universality of access will accelerate the drops in prices of technology and facilitate even more of an open world. Everyone will be able to be a publisher, not just the owners of the newspapers, not just the licensees of the radio waves, not just the licensees of the television waves. Instead, we will all be able to use the Internet to express ourselves and communicate events as never before.

How it Works
If you have a hard time grasping this, think similarly to the way that you choose a station on your radio dial. You pick the frequency (for example, FM 93.9) on which you want to "listen." The radio then tunes to that frequency and "reads" the radio waves and turns it into the content produced by the radio station. Now, imagine if instead of tuning to 93.9 and getting one station... you could instead tune to 93.9 and be given the option of choosing from 1,000 stations. That is what has been done by switching from analog to digital in the frequency range that television used to use. But the FCC did not change it so we could have more television stations. Instead, all the old television stations will be squished together on one end of the spectrum (like taking all of the radio stations and putting them on 88.1, 88.3 and 88.5). The left over spectrum will be used (returning to our analogy... 88.7-107.9) for... high-speed Internet access.


The FreePress network has a good blog post about this in the posting entitled Will You Be Ready on February 19, 2009? | Free Press Action Network. Give it a good read and think about what you will be doing to help push the media revolution in 2009.

God to MK: "Stop rushing."

Had a reminder from God this morning. He said, "stop rushing and do things right."

This morning was a typical one, got the boys ready at 7:15am, got them into their clothes and coats and out to the car around 7:30am. I started the car... and it had a bit of a hard time. It's cold this morning... right around 10 degrees... so I figured it was due to the cold and the battery that hasn't been terribly happy with us since we let it die in the parking lot at the Airport while we were in California over Christmas. When Vikki and Elijah came out, the car started to sputter... and stalled. Our car hasn't ever stalled.

I tried to start the car again... and it said, guess what, Low Fuel. Seems that the fuel gauge wasn't working... and had indicated a full tank yesterday when Vikki was driving about. We have a gas station at the end of our road, so I knew that it wasn't far... but I loathed the idea of pushing our 2000 Pontiac Montana the 0.2 miles to the gas station. Then... I had an idea: the lawnmower gas can! I grabbed it... and it felt like the 2 gallon container was a little less than half full... perhaps 1/4 full. I thought, "if its enough to re-prime the space between the engine and the tank... we're good... otherwise... we're pushing... but its definitely not much to get us around!" I "filled up", got in, turned the key and after 3-4 turns... the engine started. I knew we potentially didn't have much time before we ran out of gas... again. I threw the car in gear and began to back-up. We have a driveway that is about 5-6 car lengths long from where we park. So... I backed up... and took a quick glance down the road both ways. I saw a car coming from the side where the gas station was (my left side), but decided that I might run out of gas if I waited for them. So, I pulled out. I had plenty of room to get out in front of them and get turned around.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough room to get around the car that was coming from the other direction that I hadn't seen. They did a great job of defensive driving and managed to only allow our two back bumpers to collide.

The damage to our car was minuscule... some paint from their vehicle. It will be doubtful that it will be worth claiming with our deductible. The damage to their vehicle was more severe with an 8-12" portion of their fiberglass bumper breaking off. Nobody was hurt except the cars.

The lesson? Slow down and do things the right way.