Last week 20.17% of my web traffic came from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Apparently, the authorities in control of the PRC and the great firewall of China have allowed the people access to my principle domain. Any website allowed past the great firewall has a potential audience of 718 million Chinese people who have internet access.

I checked my great firewall status

This is my first weekend flying solo with John Paul. My request to hire weekend help was denied by Joni a couple of weeks ago. Consider for a moment, at the age of 31 I held a baby for the first time. Learning how to be a parent is really about the science of muddling through — it’s a process. John Paul mostly seems to sleep, play, and eat. I’m supposed to be coding, but all I can think about is whether or not I should go get tacos or if I should just warm up some soup. After a few days of trying to code using my Asus Eee netbook I gave up in favor of using my old Dell Studio 1535 laptop. Beyond my coding efforts: for the first time in years, I started looking around at freelance coding services this weekend.

In order to reduce my fixed entertainment costs I have elected to transition to the streaming only version of Netflix service.  Joni and I now have access to Amazon Prime streaming, Hulu, Netflix, and Vudu via the channels services on my PS3. Ponder for a moment the following situation, even with access to thousands of streaming titles selecting something to watch can be challenging. Yesterday Joni and I watched two classic movies via my newly discovered PS3 driven access to Amazon Prime video content. We watched “Mr. Baseball” and “The Man with One Red Shoe.”

I had to ask a question, “When did Hollywood screen writers devolve into the current batch of swill producing re-launch, re-boot, re-cycle driven derivative content produces?”  The answer is simple enough – Hollywood follows a set of carefully testing formulas. The formulas help to reduce risk, but they do ultimately restrict creativity. Consider for a moment how fantastically different “The Man with One Red Shoe” is from every film released this year. If you were already attaching my previous argument about the derivative nature of Hollywood films, then you are right that Francis Veber did rewrite the original 1972 film for an American audience with Yves Robert and Robert Klane in 1985. While the French version and the American version are substantially different the principle plot device remained unchanged. The original author certainly has the rights to develop adaptations. Some adaptations are not by definition derivative. What even happened to classic screenplay writers like Robinson, Walter F. Parkes, and Lawrence Lasker who penned the 1992 classic, “Sneakers”?

*** You may have noticed that I now have a rotating panorama header at the top of this weblog. Stitching together obscenely larger panorama images using digital photographs has been a passion of mine for years. I took built two great panoramas while visiting Chicago. ***

Open Question: Will I be happy with this starter camera kit or should I wait to get a Nikon D3200 camera kit?

Nikon D5100 DSLR Camera with 18-55 & 55-300mm VR Lenses

My two year contract with Sprint will be up later this summer. I’m probably going to sign another two year contract with Sprint, but I am torn between the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC One X. I have truly enjoyed owning an HTC EVO 4G. Sure I live in Colorado Springs where Sprint never bothered to build out any 4G towers. Did Sprint still charge me premium data services? Yes. Were the company executives sorry? No. Both devices come with Google Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). However, the Nexus can be easily upgraded. HTC is fairly good about upgrades, but the 6 month timetable for an operation system upgrade is rather ridiculous. The HTC One X happens to be a beautiful device and is definitely worth consideration.

Thanks to some cost saving derived from using a popular auction site my first netbook is in transit with the United Parcel Service (UPS). The slightly used netbook I purchased was originally located in Louisville, Kentucky. Earlier this morning UPS reported that the netbook had passed through Hodgkins, Indiana. Somebody actually wiped the hard drive and returned it to a retail store. I was not alarmed that the device does not have an operating system. A netbook could easily use a variety of operating systems including Windows 8, Ubuntu, or Fedora. I already downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 11.10 and loaded the ISO to a bootable USB stick. The netbook will be primarily used for writing. I really do prefer to write using Microsoft Word. That preference alone will probably drive my decision to install some flavor of Microsoft Windows. Recently, I have been overly enamored with the Windows 8 consumer preview and have been installing it all over the place.

I have been running the Windows 8 (W8) Consumer Preview for weeks. Every once in a while something quirky will happen. For example, this evening Netflix decided to display a sweet digital rights management (DRM) error. The error code: N8156-6013 was displayed in the middle of my screen with the text, “We’re sorry, but there is a problem playing protected (DRM) content.” Strangely enough the error indicates that the DRM could not function due to a date error. The date on my computer has been synchronized with the Windows time server. A quick search indicates that I am not the only person that has run into this error. At this point, I am too tired to try to resolve the issue this evening. The problem will have to linger until tomorrow morning.

Netflix error N8156-6013

[4/7/12 Update] The same error occurs when running Internet Explorer 10 (Consumer Preview version 10.0.8250.0) and Google Chrome (version 18.0.1025.151 m). I’m going to try opening Netflix using Firefox, but it looks like Netflix is not in love with my version of W8.

This post is a placeholder for a much larger think piece on why my professional and personal networks are separated into six distinct (but highly clustered) groupings.

Thanks to TWIG, I was listening to Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis talk about the nature of dead documents (traditional publications) versus building a dynamic (maybe unified/standardized) digital content presentation medium. At the same time, the hosts were talking about Walter Isaacson’s new book about Steve Jobs. The time honored publication of books in paper form is not dead. Economics happen. Industries change. Watershed events or ideas can inspire the public to share a common focus. For example, reading or talking about the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson will become a shared experience for millions of people around the globe. Depending on the quality of the book over time a degree of intergenerational conversation could be inspired by Isaacson’s words.

Outside the warmth of the house winter weather has blanked Colorado Springs with a mixture of snow flurries and generally gloominess. Normally, we have to wait until Halloween for snow in Colorado Springs. Even Peppercorn the dog has given up on going outside today. To make matters worse the University of Texas Longhorn football team is having a hard time competing against the Oklahoma Sooners on ABC today. One of the challenges of giving up cable involves being willing to watch whatever football games happen to be on broadcast television. From what I can tell from a few quick internet searches overall cable subscriptions are down. I was looking for a chart of the total number of cable subscribers by year, but was unable to find one that I liked. I built one from some data I found on the NCTA website mixed with some press release based Netflix data. Statistician based wizardry aside; the obvious conclusion that can be extracted from the data involves a trajectory of increased competition for content providers.

Today should be a pretty good college football day for broadcast television viewers:

• Texas vs. Oklahoma on ABC (Morning)
• Florida vs. LSU on CBS (Afternoon)
• Ohio State vs. Nebraska on ABC (Evening)

Some of my best thinking happens after ordering a pizza. Today’s bout of cold weather inspired me to purchase a pizza from Borriello Brothers. In other food related musings, I would hazard that the number of people making chili sometime this week in Colorado Springs is about to increase significantly.

A ton of pretty good cameras have flooded the market. Sony has developed a newer (better) version of the Sony Handycam camcorder I have had for the last few years. The Sony Handycam Camcorder Model number: HDR-XR160 has every feature you would want. It shots in 1080p at 60 frames per second and has enough hard drive space to last an entire vacation. It also has pretty good image stabilization. It also has a wind reduction feature (that is awesome for filing outdoors).

I would highly recommend purchasing a pocket video camera like the Sony Bloggie. I feel like shareable web video has trumped building DVDs or Blu-ray discs with a traditional camcorder. The Sony Bloggie records in web ready Mp4 clips that are easy to share and play. Keep in mind that with the camcorder you have to offload the video to a computer and edit it into a format that you can then export to a DVD (15 minutes) or a Blu-ray disc (the writer is like $125 and the discs are pretty expensive $3 each). You could always export to regular DVD by decoding the video on a computer from HD to SD. I just export our 1080p video to Flickr or our PS3 using a networked attached storage drive.

Qwest (now called CenturyLink) has been providing my household with internet service for several years now. Over the course of the last two weeks, the digital subscriber line (DSL) modem has been experiencing intermittent connectivity issues related to resolving domain name systems (DNS). Tomorrow morning a technician will be reviewing our internet systems. The modem has been running hotter than usual and restating the modem will normally restore service. An uninterruptable power supply (UPS) system both conditions the power being provided to the modem and ensures no internet service disruptions will occur.

I wonder what will be required to fix the situation…

Waiting for technicians can be tedious and annoying, instead of wasting the time I plan on focusing on studying for the Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT) exam.

The technician from CenturyLink was courteous and knowledgeable. Qwest had previously stipulated that we were on the edge of the DSL coverage range. To reduce degradation the technician installed a whole house filter and segmented the DSL service. Everything seems to be working.

Over the course of the last few days, I have started working on passing the Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT) certification exam. As part of my professional development path, I have decided to pursue a variety of Cisco voice and security related certifications.

My HTC EVO 4G Sprint phone running Android Gingerbread 2.3.3 started rebooting over and over again without any options. The infinite reboot was both annoying and troublesome. The solution to the infinite reboot problem on an HTC EVO involved holding the down volume button after hard reboot and pressing the power button intermittently to open the Android boot menu. I then selected the clear content option and reset the phone. The solution wiped the phone memory, but the phone has returned to normal operations.