My loathing of the airline industry seems to increase every time the price of oil increases. Airlines continue to cancel flights, delay flights and overbook to extreme excess. Now, many routes that I like to take from my originating city, St. Louis, are being removed altogether. Ironically, I’m writing this on an MD-80 parked on the tarmac waiting for the ground stoppage in DFW to clear. This is getting ridiculous.

For our recent 10-year anniversary trip, I wanted to book our travel from St. Louis to Chicago by plane. It’s only a 5 1/2 drive, but the cost of parking in downtown Chicago added $30 – $40 per day to the already high cost of gas. Plus, I would end up driving and Melody would probably sleep and read.

Plane tickets with two weeks notice were in the $270 range (per person) even on discount carriers! Ouch. At that point I thought about the train. After pricing the trip from Chicago to St. Louis on Amtrak, I was pleasantly surprised. The round-trip tickets were $130 a piece. Nice! But, was this a “get what you pay for” situation?

I have never before traveled by train in the States. I guess there are a few exceptions to that statement if you count the monorail at Disney and the Baldknobber Train at Silver Dollar City. But seriously, it’s never occurred to me as a travel option before.

When I was in Europe, I had a different perspective altogether. Traveling via train was my first choice. My train excursions took me from Brussels to Amsterdam to Frankfurt and then to Munich. The Amsterdam to Frankfurt route was the high speed version. At one point were were moving along at 300 KPH (that’s about 185 MPH). To date, that is the fastest that I have ever traveled on the ground. Unfortunately, high speed trains require upgraded tracks. So not all routes in Europe offer this service.

According to Wikipedia, the only high-speed route in the United States is the Acela Express which services the Northeast Corridor. The Acela Express is operated by Amtrak.

There are a few efforts underway to get some high-speed tracks built in Texas and California. But, even if they are approved, they are years, if not decades away from offering service. If we could have accurately predicted the emerging energy crisis 20 years ago, work on track systems like Acela would have been a high priority item for voters. But America’s love-affair with their cars and the cheap price of gas slowed and in some cases stopped the track upgrade efforts around the country.

Disney vacationers from the Washington DC area have an interesting option. Amtrak offers an Auto Train between Lorton, Virginia and Sanford, Florida (near Orlando). You actually park your car or van on the train and then ride in the passenger cars to Orlando. That way you don’t have to rent a car in Florida. I wish we had that option from St. Louis. Renting a van for a week at Disney costs $500 or more.

We boarded the train at the St. Louis station at 6:30AM. Our coach seats were quite comfortable. In fact, on the train back from Chicago, the coach seats were nicer than the typical First Class seats on my domestic American Airlines flights. They reclined well, there was plenty of leg room and the seats included a leg-rest.

The best part: my Verizon EVDO data card worked almost the whole way. And each seat had a “regular” power jack. So I was able to surf the web and watch movies without battery drain.

Amtrak offers sleeper cars for long trips. Our 6 hour trip to Chicago was enjoyable, but even in a sleeper car, I can’t imagine a 30+ hour ride. Many on board were booked for that or longer. So you probably won’t see me traveling to Dallas or San Francisco by Amtrak any time soon. But I will choose them again for short trips.

By now the storms have passed through DFW and we’re about to take off. Adding together the 1.5 hour flight, tarmac time and airport time, my trip to Dallas will take almost 5 hours. Maybe the train to Dallas is an option after all.

(Flickr: Aaronyx)

This is a chilling image. As a parent of three young boys it actually scares me. It scares me to think about the amount of time they spend in front of the TV. Television is our modern-day hypnotist. It is often a pacifier for parents too stressed to address a hyperactive child.

I’m not suggesting that families go radical and throw away their TVs. But most likely we could all cut our children’s TV-time at least in half. The long-term effects of being “plugged into the Matrix” are probably different for each child, but I doubt anyone would argue that a reduction in its use won’t have a positive impact on their development.

So here’s a place to start. NFLrush.com has a promotion on their site called NFL Play 60. The idea is to suggest outdoor activities that kids can do for 60 minutes a day. I think 60 minutes a day is a great starting point. I’ll bet the average is much lower than that.

I’m going to give it a try, and I hope you will too.

Nortel just launched their Voice Security Technology Blog.

The focus here will be on voice systems with an appropriate level of security to meet business needs and reducing risk to an acceptable level.

This charter, in many ways, dilutes the very reason for starting a voice security blog in the first place. What is an “acceptable level” of security for unified communications? This is defined differently by each customer’s security policies (or lack thereof). In fact, many customers feel that no security is an “acceptable level” and that the risk isn’t worth any cost.

The truth is, there will never be a “business need” for security until it impacts the business. This is the natural order of security in the enterprise and it is no different with voice and unified communications.

Interestingly, Nortel’s first real post on their Voice Security Technology Blog is about risk management, not voice security. Assessing risk is not new to enterprise companies. But, risk can come in many forms. “Business needs” often disregard the risk in the communications architecture over much more obvious competitive, market and economic risks. I argue that the traditional way to assess business risk (as recommended by Nortel on their blog) doesn’t apply to the speed of technology change today.

If you do not have the data on which to judge the impact of the vulnerability consider adopting a suitable risk management framework – and then you can manage your risk exposures appropriately.

So, while the risk management committee is meeting to determine the risk of a vulnerability in your enterprise network, hackers all around the world are running, not walking, to release into the wild the first tools that exploit that vulnerability. And in some cases the tools may exists before the exploit is announced. Is this really an effective way to address voice security? Isn’t it better to err on the side of caution instead of trust?

Customers today still believe that their data, their networks and their communications systems are not important to hackers. In all honesty, they are largely correct. However, they completely underestimate the modern hacker and script kiddie’s insatiable desire to conquer and brag.

Traditional voice vendors continue to ignore the white elephant in the corner of the room. They put too much trust in their signaling and media encryption and not enough emphasis good security design practices. Security experts agree that a multi-layered approach is the best method for designing a secure system. Never should you depend on a single point product in your infrastructure to keep your systems safe.

In network design, a single point of failure is bad design. In security, redundant appliances running the same code-base is also bad design if it’s the only protection between you and your business-critical systems.

Many would have you believe that all vulnerabilities have to be fixed now — when in reality their assessment through a risk management process will categorize them for a particular organization appropriately – and direct the needed level of response and risk mitigation.

Understanding risk is important, but why does it have to be a manual process driven by a committee and paperwork? Integrated security must evolve to mitigate vulnerabilities in realtime through software intelligence. A multi-layered security strategy can and will buy you time, but it doesn’t mitigate the need to fix the issue that needs mitigation. The more holes you leave in the dam will impact the structural integrity of the dam. And before you know it, you’ll have a flood on your hands.

Nortel seems to be working from the Microsoft playbook on security. Microsoft chose to ignore the security of their flagship operating system for many years. They finally addressed it with Windows Vista, but it was too-little-to-late. This didn’t work too well for Microsoft and it won’t work for Nortel. In the long run, this strategy will hurt the very customers Nortel is trying to support.

My first Nokia phone was the 6160. I remember sitting in a restaurant and the server looks at my Nokia and says, “That’s a cell phone?? It’s so small!”. The only other phone that ever got a response like that was my iPhone.

But Nokia has lost touch with the formula that made them such a success (quality and style). Here’s a letter that a good friend of mine recently wrote to Nokia Customer Care.

Dear Nokia customer care,

Please find attached a picture of my 6300. It just met it’s demise when it met my patio at full force after yet another reboot as I tried in vane to merely answer a call. That pretty well sums up what I think of Nokia’s new product line, their standard OS and Symbian. Oh and did I mention the “customer service”? (note the quotes)

I purchased a new shiny 6300 in Singapore almost a year ago to replace my aging 6230i and was initially impressed with it’s looks and features; I could even cope with the lousy battery life. However it soon started randomly rebooting during calls, when receiving SMS and almost without fail, every time I accessed the web. It would hum, vibrate (sometimes until the battery was removed) and always white screen, before returning to “normal”. Even yesterday after yet another firmware upgrade, it rebooted 4 times in a row as I tried to search for a word using google – imagine my friends amusement as their 4 year old Nokia’s, Sony’s etc still respond instantly, get decent battery life and never reboot when they are tired of having to actually do something useful.

So several months ago I took it to Nokia “customer care” in Chatswood (yes that’s in Australia) who kindly informed me that I needed to take it back to Singapore so Nokia could take a look at it there, as it did not have an international warranty. Excuse me but which century is this? Sure I’ll jump on a plane and fly to Singapore for what – A firmware upgrade? HELLO wake-up call, people travel around quite a lot these days. International business and travel require international warranties. These are offered by every company worth their salt these days and many that aren’t. Why not Nokia?

Which brings me onto my current phone, an E61i. On paper this phone sounds like a dream, in reality to use it is to know the true meaning of suffering. Symbian…. How long do you have to wait before hitting a key has any effect? I usually start mine up each am (I figured out early on that a reboot a day saves the lives of those unfortunate enough to be around when me or a colleague is experiencing Nokia rage – a very common site unfortunately), then I go for a cup of tea, come back and it may be just about ready to use. Navigating through the features is so slow and illogical that I have reverted back to my 6310i unless I absolutely need mobile mail.

So Nokia, here ends my relationship with you and your once fine products. I remember when your phones were instantaneous and way ahead of the competition. Now look…. Unfortunately it is time for me to accept defeat and join all my colleagues who ditched their E61i’s and brought iPhones. Long live Apple!

Incidentally I don’t expect a response to this but it would be nice to know someone is there and possibly even cares about why Nokia is so out of touch with once loyal customers and is driving them away. If you would like a chance to redeem yourselves and give me a working product, feel free to contact me at the above e-mail address.

The default overscan settings in Mac OS X did not work correctly for my Sony Wega HD TV (KD-34XBR970). Too much of the display was missing in overscan mode. When not using overscan, you could see the uneven edge of the display on each side, which was almost as annoying.

My friend Jason sent along this link that described how another guy got his Sony HDTV display to overscan properly with DisplayConfigX. I used DisplayConfigX back in the 10.3 and 10.4 days when I couldn’t get my Powerbook to display properly on some LCD projectors. I don’t seem to have that issue with Leopard (10.5) on my Macbook.

After literally hours of tweaking, I now have 8 pixels of overscan on each side. Here are my settings:

One tip that I found while troubleshooting: After reboot, the new DisplayConfigX configuration wouldn’t always take. Switching to a different resolution and then back to the DisplayConfigX setting seemed to work.