As a long time fan of Apple - I bought an Apple // in 1978 - I watch Apple’s storage efforts with special interest. The least talked about addition to the next version of Mac OS X, Leopard, is notable. Especially since Microsoft’s WinFS bit the dust.

Apple is doing something really cool with storage - not to discount their laudable RAID product - and that something is called ZFS. The bright side of the Leopard slip: more time to integrate ZFS is a Good Thing.

ZFS = non-acronym
ZFS is a very cool - and open source - file system that some smart guys at Sun built. Its tree structured checksums eliminates most of the bit rot that afflicts Macs and PCs. When ZFS retrieves your data, you can be sure it is your data, and not the misbegotten spawn of a driver burp.

Add a disk drive to ZFS and it simply joins the pool of blocks available for storage. You don’t have to manage another disk.

It is cheaper for ZFS to do a snapshot copy than it is to overwrite your data. While Time Machine doesn’t require ZFS - journaling HFS+ can do it, ZFS would make it easier and perform better.

Here’s some more cool stuff

Here are the highlights of some of the changes you’d see with ZFS on Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS.

No more Disk Warrior
Data corruption on PCs and Macs is a sad and stupid fact of life. Power failures, flaky RAM, poor grounding, (slowly) failing hard drives, driver glitches, phantom writes and more conspire to rot your data.

ZFS eliminates that. All blocks are checksummed and the checksum is stored in a parent block. ZFS always knows if the block is correct and/or corrupt. Every block has a parent block (with one obvious exception that gets special treatment), so the entire data store is self-validating. You’ll never have to wonder if all your data is correct again. It is.

No RAID cards or controllers
ZFS implements very fast RAID that fixes the performance knock-off against software RAID. In ZFS all writes are the fastest kind: full stripe writes. And the RAID is running on the fastest processor in your system (your Mac), rather than some 3-5 year old microcontroller.

Just add drives to your system and you have a fast RAID system. With Serial Attach SCSI and SATA drives you’ll pay for the drives (cheap and getting cheaper), cables and enclosures.

No more volumes
Every time you add a disk to your Mac you see another disk icon on the desktop. If you want to RAID some disks you use Disk Utility (or something) to create the volume. Slow, error-prone, confusing.

ZFS eliminates the whole volume concept. Add a disk or five to your system and it joins your storage pool. More capacity. Not more management.

Backup made easy
ZFS does something called snapshot copy, which creates a copy of all your data at whatever point in time you want. Copy the snapshot up to a disk, tape or NAS box and you are backed up.

Create a snapshot on every write if you want, so if your database barfs you can go back to just before it choked.

But that’s not all!
For in-depth treatment of ZFS see here and here. Includes links to more technical info and benchmarks.

Why does Apple care?
After all, journaled HFS+ isn’t perfect, but it is competitive with NTFS and the other common filesystems out there. My original thought was “here is this great free product so why wouldn’t you use it.”

Well, as others have noted, while plugging in a new file system isn’t that hard, it does take investment, such as migration, and creating the front ends for all the cool things you can do with ZFS. Steve may not care much about plumbing but he is all over user experience. Migration in particular is difficult for home users who don’t have empty external hard drives.

Now we know
The motive is clear: HDTV content to feed Apple TV. How does this impact storage?

Video downloads: big and getting bigger!
Here’s how. Imagine you’ve built the world’s largest and most successful online music store and sold billions of dollars of hardware to play that music. Each of those tracks cost $0.99 and is 3-5 MB each. People can easily back them up and even if they have a few hundred, it is maybe a GB or two. Easy to back up on a few CDs or DVDs. And they are on your iPod anyway. So HFS+ burps on your music and other than yelling at an underpaid Apple tech support guy, what are you going to do? If it wasn’t backed up, whose fault is that?

Enter the terabyte media collection
Now you want to build the world’s largest and most successful online video store, with DVD and HDTV quality content. You are a little ahead of the market, but that usually works out. You want people to buy movies as freely as they now do tracks. Yet there is the scale problem: movie files are 1000x the size of audio or photo files. Not only that, the studios don’t want you to back them up to DVD or anything else.

“Halfway through T3 the hard drive started clicking?”
iTunes music is automatically backed up if you have an iPod. Movies aren’t. Movies are large - 1 to 2 GB today - and much larger with HDTV and DTS sound. If you want people to store and play movies digitally, both purchased and home video, they need safety and capacity. No disk tools. No RAID set-up. No volume management. Suddenly storage quality and ease of use becomes a critical success factor for a new billion dollar business.

ZFS is the answer
Steve Jobs has two questions. First, how can I sell more online content and equipment to play it? Second, how can I kick Microsoft’s butt? By solving the high-capacity storage problem for HDTV content way better than Microsoft can, he’s got a great answer to both questions. He’ll never utter “ZFS” to a starstruck MacWorld audience. But he will wheel out a half dozen features, like Time Machine, based on ZFS, that will instantly become must-haves for the home digital media center.

Apple Computer had the means, ZFS; motive, a big market; and opportunity to murder the Media PC.

I expect they’ll introduce the way they did HFS+: on OS X server. After they’re confident, it will be the default file system. And the folks in Redmond will be scratching their heads once more..

Comments Welcome, As Always I’m off to NAB and SNW this week, so look for updates on cool new stuff.

Fibre Channel to costly? iSCSI too slow?
In a past life I was the product manager for the industry’s first full Fibre Channel array. We had great hopes for FC as a storage-optimized network that would bring the power of network economics to drive down storage costs. My bad.

Hijacked by vendors, FC has evolved into a costly and fragile mess. It is the fastest block-based storage interconnect, so it isn’t going to disappear tomorrow, but the FC market has peaked. iSCSI is coming on strong, but for smaller SANs that need performance the IP overhead can be a killer. TCP Offload Engines (TOEs) help, and add to the cost.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an open-source, low-cost, high-performance SAN?

Actually, there is
Far away from the big storage centers of Silicon Valley, Boston and Denver, a little company in Athens, Georgia named Coraid has seen the need and responded.

They’ve developed open protocol called ATA over Ethernet (AoE) that is simple and fast. And cheap.

Coraid sells a chassis that accepts standard SATA disks. Go out and make your best deal and populate the chassis. No paying several hundred percent markups for “qualified” disks. Attach it to standard gigabit ethernet. Mount it using the appropriate AoE driver - Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris - and it looks like a local disk.

Since AoE is a low-overhead protocol, it performs much like a local disk as well.

Some things you Don’t Get and some things you Don’t Need
The big Don’t Get is that the protocol isn’t routable - it is strictly local - no IP involved. The Don’t Needs include no TCP/IP overhead, no TCP/IP offload engines, no CPU-cycle sucking and latency-inducing TCP/IP stacks. AoE sits right on the data link layer - level two - of the ISO network model, so with a switched LAN you get very low latency and full network bandwidth across a low-cost, industry standard LAN.

How fast? With a 15 disk RAID 0 - a configuration suitable only for data you can afford to lose - they report 145 MB/sec write speed, using jumbo frames.

The Storage Bits take
When RAID was invented, almost 20 years ago, disks were frail, expensive and small. Ethernet was still 10 Mbit/sec, NFS still young, and the name “open source” hadn’t been coined. Today, the storage component economics are totally different, as are the trade-offs. Thanks to Moore’s Law, we can now build powerful storage systems out of commodity components. Coraid’s creative AoE protocol is just one such example.

Comments welcome, of course.

The good, the bad and the ugly
I’ve been a huge fan of flash ever since I plunked down $400 for a 10 MB compact flash card in the early ’90s for my brand-spanking new HP Omnibook 300. Light and built like a tank, the 300’s chiseled abs flash drive almost doubled battery life to over 10 hours. And the sleep mode actually worked - the only Windows notebook I’ve used that did.

I was finally forced to retire the 300 after using it daily for over five years due to software bloat. But the warm glow of a really tough, light and reliable notebook - I think it was designed by HP’s calculator division - how about an encore, Mark - has kept me hoping for a general return of flash drives.

It looks like my time has come. Almost. Starting later this year.

Despite announcements, few products
Flash vendors have been making plenty of announcements, but few show up at Fry’s. The OEM announcements are designed to entice notebook vendors, not you and me. With the Sony VAIO G1 flash version, that is finally starting to change.

What to expect?
The good:

• Faster boot times and app and document loads.
• Fast large-block writes.
• 2-4 ounces lighter.
• Wear-leveling works: the fact that SLC flash can only handle a couple of hundred thousand read/write cycles won’t be an issue for notebook users as the flash will last as long as hard drives. I’ve done the math.

.

The bad:

• Only 30-60 minutes more battery life. Why? In today’s laptops the drive is less than a quarter of the load, way less if you’ve got energy saving features turned on. Reducing drive load to zero buys something, but not as much as it did with my Omnibook.
• Lower capacity than hard drives - largest flash disk is 64 GB.

The ugly:

• Random write performance is so poor that vendors don’t quote numbers. And Windows and Mac OS turn most reads into a read and a write.
• Cost: even with flash prices dropping 70% a year, flash is still 10-40x disk. It will catch up, but not this decade.

The Storage Bits take
Flash drives will usher in a new era of long-life ultra-light notebooks, but only as part of a total system redesign. The rumored MacBook Nano will be such a clean sheet design, using a flash drive, LED backlighting, ultra low voltage Core Solo and the latest low-voltage wireless chip to create an ultralight notebook with well over 6 hour battery life.

Comments welcome, of course.

The question is why?
We’ve been so conditioned to think that various evils - malware, fragmentation, bad blocks, and general bit rot, among others - are hosing our disk performance that we forget that hard disks really do get slower with use. It is natural and unavoidable, but there are some things you can do to mitigate the effects.

Remember how snappy your new computer seemed?
It isn’t just the new computer smell. Even if your machine never installed a single virus or fragmented a single file, your disk performance does decrease with use. Here’s why.

Circles within circles within circles
Data is laid on disks in blocks called sectors which contain your data and other info, such as EDC, to keep it safe and available. The sectors are laid down in circular tracks.

Disk engineers saw a long time ago that they could put more sectors on the outside of a disk platter than on the inside. Once disk microcontrollers got fast enough, it became possible to implement something called Zoned Bit Recording (ZBR) to take advantage of geometry.

Track star
ZBR puts more sectors on outer tracks than inner tracks. Adjacent tracks are grouped in zones that all have the same number of sectors. As the zones move closer to the center of the disk, they have fewer sectors.

As bit densities increase, more sectors can fit on a track, and more tracks can fit on a disk. Over time, disks have also added more zones: 10 or so in the ’90s; 30 or more today.

ZBR giveth and ZBR taketh away
The outermost track on a disk has the fastest data rate. The outermost track is also the first place that gets loaded on the disk. So the most valuable disk real estate gets occupied first. As more stuff gets added, you are moving from Boardwalk and Park Place down to Baltic and Mediterranean, i.e. the low-rent district. As you use more disk capacity, the disk gets slower.

The slowdown varies by disk model, but figure the innermost zone is half the data rate of the outermost. Not a big deal for small files, but putting the latest version of Office on a nearly full disk ensures you’ll have a lifetime of slow Office booting.

Ashes to ashes, bits to bits
There is practical use for this info.

• On a new machine, delete all the demo-ware before installing applications you do use.
• Likewise, delete all the capacity hogging applications that you’ll use only occasionally, install the big apps you do use, and then re-install the capacity hogs you’ll rarely use.
• If you are an active consumer of new applications it could be worthwhile to backup your disk, zero it out, and then reinstall the OS and your new favorite apps and then everything else.

I have no idea how you’d do this on Windows - reader suggestions welcomed
The idea is the same for either OS.

On a Mac it is pretty easy (newbies, you should leave the room now). First, using something like the free Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper, create a bootable backup on an external drive. Then, using the free Omni DiskSweeper, figure out which are your largest applications - not forgetting the Application Support folder in the Library. Make a list.

Reboot using the external drive. Using Disk Utility, zero out your internal drive. Do a custom install of OS X, leaving out the three GB of printer drivers and the hundreds of megabytes of foreign language support.

Next, unless you use them often, don’t install iLife or the iWork 30 day demo package, which total about 7.5 GB, including the Garage Band instruments and the iLife audio loops. There, you’ve just saved 11 GB of your highest performance disk capacity for more important - to you - stuff.

Now, install the big important apps you do use, such as Office or Halo. Then the less used large apps and so on, which might include iLife and iWork. Save iTunes for last, since audio files don’t need much in the way of performance.

Over time as your disk fills it will still slow down. But your carefully installed important apps will continue to load as fast as they can.

Comments welcome, of course. And smart Windows guys: how would you do the equivalent?

Services Oriented Architecture is climbing the hype cycle. Amazon’s S3 and Elastic Computing Cloud are exemplars of a brave new world of SOA. Modest success stories are making the rounds. IT folks are getting excited and starting to make promises they won’t be able to keep.

This isn’t going to end well.

Remember ILM?
For several years storage vendors were beating the drum for Information Lifecycle Management. Simply classify data by its value over time to efficiently manage the data and its infrastructure. Who could argue with that? I did (see ILM is Bunk) and now, with SOA, here I go again.

ILM wasn’t even a solution in search of a problem. It was a marketing idea spawned by storage vendors desperate to justify their costly and underutilized enterprise storage arrays.

Like ILM, enterprise SOA’s business justification is theoretical, not practical
Call me a Mammon-worshipping MBA, but there is no way for enterprise IT to monetize the advantages of SOA. Without that, it is game over. Although most people won’t realize it for a couple of years.

Let me sketch it out why enterprise SOA is a hard sell:

• IT services are paid for by taxes, not prices, so users have little incentive to support SOA
• Since IT can’t relate costs to service prices, any SOA cost advantages are buried
• SOA means uncertain application execution, so users will hate and fear it

Bottom line: don’t bet your career on SOA.

The demand side of the equation
Enterprise IT is a tax-supported institution. The tax is paid by the Lines of Business or LOBs. The LOBs would like to pay less in taxes, but only if their service levels are unchanged. The chance to save a few bucks isn’t compelling.

If IT priced its services it could say to the LOBs “this new architecture is more efficient and will allows us to offer you more and better services at a lower cost. Interested?” Of course!

No way to show a return
SOA is about providing services for applications. So how do you measure success? When does enterprise IT start getting cheaper? Or better? Under a taxation-based revenue model, never. Why? Because there is no way to measure success.

You invest in SOA upfront while the payoff waits for other applications to use the service, spreading the cost. Just as Object Oriented Programming failed to make reusable code work, the idea that generic “services” will be reusable is just as unproven. OOP code reuse failed because code contains implicit assumptions that other applications didn’t share. Are services really so different?

SOA increases execution variability
SOA assumes a data-flow architecture. New inputs drive new outputs. But what happens when a service goes down?

If an application is relying on a dozen independent services whose timing and delivery are dependent on a dozen different infrastructures, that application can only be as fast as the slowest service. At the very least application response time variability will grow. Ask yourself, “do my users want less variability or more?” I think you know the answer.

“They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not cool.” Almost Famous
Enterprise IT is not cool. High volume, low variability workloads can’t be cool, because there is very little room for the playfulness - bopping iPod users! - that coolness requires. The internet data centers of Google, Amazon and MySpace are cool because they are pushing the computing envelope with radical architectures and clean-sheet designs.

In Amazon’s case they are also monetizing a public SOA by selling it. The services are priced so businesses can figure out an ROI. Conversely, enterprise data centers are centrally planned economies like the old Soviet Union. How well did that work? Without prices for their services IT can never align themselves with their customer’s needs.

The Storage Bits take
SOA is fundamentally about making enterprise IT cool like the web, which is a lost cause. If you really want to change the culture of IT, start competing for LOB dollars. Put very granular prices on IT services. Give lower prices for computes and network bandwidth on nights and weekends. Charge higher prices during the end of quarter crunch. Make users pay more for a Fibre Channel I/O than an iSCSI one. The technology is there and is implementable today.

Prices aren’t a perfect method of allocating resources, but they are the most effective tool we’ve got. SOA isn’t the answer, just as ILM, OOP, client server and all the other nostrums peddled through the years weren’t either.

Agree or not, let me know in the comments. I’ll try to respond.

Translation: protect Klaatu’s home videos!
Meet Drobo, what his inventors call the world’s first storage robot. It is an important step in the consumerization of IT: a storage array that manages storage protection and capacity so you don’t have to. Drobo is a USB black box that stores and protects your data about as effortlessly as possible.

Think Roomba for storage
The robot tag is a bit of a stretch if you are hoping for a sleek arm rummaging through a stack of hard drives. The only arm inserting drives is yours.

Drobo takes SATA drives of any size and automatically formats them and uses all their capacity.

The robot part is the automation: Drobo recognizes the new drive and automatically starts moving data around to protect it. The website video is a nice intro to what the product does. Very little info on *how* the product does it, though I can guess about some of it.

Not a RAID box
The Drobo community website specifically disavows the use of RAID. Which means, I assume, that all replication is block, not disk, based. I also suspect they have some persistent storage built into the box, perhaps a small disk or flash drive, to enable the rapid replacement of drives shown in their demo. If not, I’d guess they have very little data on the drives in the demo.

Consumerization of IT
For under a thousand dollars consumers can now buy a storage system whose automated management is more advanced than any commercial product. For IT professionals this means that your end-users won’t believe the management contortions you have to go through to *sorta-kinda* emulate the Drobo appliance.

The CFO will be thinking “if Drobo can do it, why not EMC?” Consumerization of IT brings a whole new dimension to the normal process of defending tech choices. Non-techies who don’t understand your problems today will turn into non-techies who don’t understand why you have problems tomorrow.

The Storage Bits take
Drobo is headed by Geoff Barrall, the smart guy who developed the enterprise-class Blue Arc NAS. So I’m sure it really is packed with cool technology. Yet this is tech in the service of simple, not fast or cheap.

While the product isn’t cheap today ($700 at the company store with no drives) I’ll be surprised if it isn’t a success, especially as volume ramps and distribution widens. Non-geeks don’t want to manage storage or drives. They just want to store their stuff, safely. Drobo gets that and makes it easy. It is the iPod of mass storage.

Comments welcome, of course.

Jon Bach, who runs Puget Custom Computers in Seattle, explains Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea in his blog.

Breaks way more often than disks do
Jon notes that for some reason many of his customers come to him convinced that they need RAID on their home or professional workstations, and he tries to talk them out of it, often with no success. I imagine the conversation goes like this:

CUSTOMER: I want to spend hundreds of dollars on RAID.

JON: Well, we build and service hundreds of computers each year and we don’t recommend it.

CUSTOMER: Are you a communist? I want RAID. I want to spend the money. I want the hassle. I want the false sense of security. Give me RAID!

JON: Just to prove I’m a capitalist running dog I’ll take your money. But I still don’t recommend RAID.

CUSTOMER: Fine. Since we’re on the subject, what is RAID?

OK, so why is a non-communist against RAID?
Maybe because he’s part of the reality-based world. As he notes in his post:

. . . I estimate that anywhere from 25% to 30% of our customers with RAID will call us at some point in the first year to report a degraded RAID array or problem directly resulting from their RAID configuration. Granted, a failed RAID1 array does not mean data loss, but it certainly means a long, frustrating hassle.

His judgement is that most customers are happier with regular backups and have way fewer problems. I’d amend that to better off with an automated offsite backup service like Carbonite or Mozy which are both set and forget.

What RAID doesn’t protect you from
Jon also notes that backups offer protection that RAID doesn’t. Specifically, RAID can’t help you with:

1. Accidental deletion or user error
2. Viruses or malware
3. Theft or catastrophic damage
4. Data corruption due to other failed hardware or power loss

Where will Jon recommend RAID?
For a desktop machine he allows that striping (RAID 0) may make sense if you know you are I/O bound in things like video editing. He also recommends that if you do go the RAID route, buy a quality RAID controller. He’s found that Windows-based RAID software is prone to problems.

Jon isn’t talking about server RAID
But I will. If smart engineers did a clean-sheet storage design today, they wouldn’t come up with today’s RAID systems. That, however, is a topic for another time.

Comments welcome. If I can get an account on ZDnet, I’ll even try to reply.

It ain’t just bits on your laptop, bucko
MIT’s Technology Review blogger David Ewing Duncan writes about Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA, James Watson.

DNA is, of course, a very compact biotech storage medium - pure information
Watson agreed a couple of years ago to have his DNA sequenced and publicly released by 454 Life Sciences. According to Duncan, he’s having second thoughts:

I have spent time with Watson and wrote about it in my latest book, and I can tell you that he can be impulsive and brash. Indeed, only after he made the project public did he realize that he might not want the world to know that he could have genes associated with diseases.

Early in the project, Watson asked 454 to delete his results for the apoE gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Now he may have more disease variants inked out to protect his and his sons’ privacy.

I wonder if he will stop there, since in the future, geneticists will refine their knowledge of DNA and might be able to parse out genes that influence everything from, say, neural disorders to behavior quirks such as arrogance or a quick temper–both of which Watson has been accused of.

A human is just DNA’s way of making more DNA
Here in America, with our hopelessly broken health care “system” - Motto: You can buy better but you can’t pay more! - insurance companies will happily shun you for much less than an Alzheimer’s gene. Indeed, medical privacy is a sick joke in this country, where by law even bill collectors have access to your medical records.

Massive data storage has many benefits - and some scary implications
I’d like to think that a world that preserves photos - or better yet, movies! with sound! - of one’s every youthful indiscretion on the web will force the world’s angry and judgmental people to lighten up and accept that we are all human and flawed. Eliminating tortured “I smoked but I didn’t inhale” circumlocutions in favor of honesty and transparency. Yep, even encouraging people to engage on the issues instead of personal attacks.

And maybe pigs will fly.

The Storage Bits take
It is within our grasp to make information immortal through massive, replicated and networked data storage. Yet human culture is largely based upon forgetting that which we’d rather not remember, and not learning what would be impossible to forget.

Genetic privacy isn’t written into the Constitution, so many lawyers and ideologues would argue you have no right to it. But isn’t America all about new beginnings? About who you are rather than where you came from? About what you can do rather than what your genes - or your college party habits - may say about your past?

James Watson is grappling with these issues today. Tomorrow, all of us will.

Comments welcome, of course.

The whole literacy thing is so-o-o second millennium
The New York Times has an article on cell-phone readable bar codes (irritating registration required).

Maybe this will cut down drunken party photos on Friendster
Already in use in Japan and Europe - the more technologically advanced parts of the world - the codes enable cell phones to read URLs and other info. So you don’t have to.

The NYT notes that in Japan:

One of the most popular uses in Japan has been paperless airline tickets. About 10 percent of the people who take domestic flights of All Nippon Airways now use the codes on their cellphones instead of printed tickets.

Yasuko Nishigai, 22, used her cellphone recently to buy a ticket from Tokyo to the Japanese tropical island of Okinawa. To board her flight, she waved the code on her cellphone screen over a scanner.

“I didn’t use a single piece of paper, just my phone,” she said.

I use my cell phone to make, you know, phone calls
I take enough blurry pictures with my digital camera that taking more with a cell phone doesn’t excite. I like my 22″ monitor too much to give it up for a 2″ mobile version. But this actually sounds like a tool I could, and would, use.

Barcodes the size of manhole covers everywhere - how ugly is that?
Normally we don’t care about how pretty storage is, although I do admit a tiny craving for titanium thumb drives and a larger one for the LaCie Porsche design drives. But giant barcodes on every billboard and street sign is just fugly.

Cheap public digital storage is a good thing
The next opportunity will be for the bar code that isn’t ugly, that can be used as a design element in the graphics we use every day. Victoria’s Secret won’t want its expensively produced ads defaced by digital acne. Neither will I.

The concept though, is good. Bits just want to be free and storage needs to be cheap. Tying cell phones to the web through optical storage is inspired. I might even get a camera phone just to use it.

If you have the right phone - Verizon customers forget it - you can download the software today - see below. Although where US folks will use it is another question.

More info - just wave your cell phone at the screen
If you are into open source, check out Semacode. If you want more on the technology try the QR Code site. Capitalist running dogs will like Qode.com for its emphasis on naked commercial exploitation and nifty flash graphics.

Comments welcome, as always.

Mash-up on steroids
It sure is nice to see the folks in Washington DC pick up on the latest technology and put it to good wholesome use. I refer, of course, to a pilot program here in Arizona run by the Department of Family Security.

With an inspired combination of GPS automobile speed and location tracking, cell phone GPS, credit card transaction monitoring, personal RFID and cheap massive storage, our benevolent and helpful government has created a useful tool. I had no idea how useful until I received this letter:

Department of Family Security
Behavioral Analysis Division
Prediction and Notification Program
Washington, DC

April 1, 2007

Dear Mr Harris,

Pursuant to the provisions of the Defense of Family Act, the Super-PATRIOT Act, the Safe Driving Act, the American Family Self-Reliance Act and the Personal RFID Security Act, we are pleased to send you a Notice of Significant Family Behavior Change (NSFBC).

The NSFBC is designed to alert you to changes in the behavior of family members. You are asked to use this information for a caring discussion with the affected family member(s).

Family Member Name: CHRISTINE FORD HARRIS
Family Member Relationship: Wife

Summary of Behavioral Change(s):

• Financial:
  • 6 instances of afternoon drinks at the Black Rock Bar and Grill
  • 5 charges at the Lazy Bear Motel 1/22/07, 2/07/07, 2/22/07, 3/11/17 and 3/29/07.
• Transportation:
  • 4 MPH Average Urban Speed Increase during afternoon drive times, resulting in $214 in Excess Speed Charges.
• Communications:
  • Afternoon cell phone calls received at the Lazy Bear Motel 1/22/07, 2/07/07, 2/22/07, 3/11/17 and 3/29/07.
• Association:
  • Mr. STEVEN D. CLARK, tennis pro at the Oak Valley Country Club, is the only individual whose financial, travel and communications patterns are known to match those of CHRISTINE FORD HARRIS at this time.
• Terrorist Plot Threat Rating:
  • LOW.

DFS/BAD reminds you that this information only suggests significant behavioral change(s). You are encouraged to open a respectful dialogue with the family member(s) to understand the the reasons for change(s). Work-related behavior changes are common and no cause for alarm. Please remember that it is highly unlikely your wife is a terrorist.

Based on DFS statistical profiling a Notice of Potential Domestic Dispute has been filed with local law enforcement. A list of faith-based and secular counseling services has been attached for your convenience.

Our goal at the Department of Family Security is to help you build a strong family unit. For more information please see our website at DEFSEC.GOV.

Sincerely,

(s)Elden Ebbish
Family Security Officer
“DFS - Helping Make America Strong - One Family At A Time”

I can’t tell you how pleased I am
Because I’m not sure if I’m pleased or not. But at least DFS “gets it” when it comes to creating a total information awareness web using every tool at their disposal to build a better America. If only every government program were as forward looking and technologically astute.

Comments welcome, of course. And a happy April 1st to you.