There. Was that at hard?

It’s apparently easier than you not being a jackass, at least.

The big issue is that your network provider is also the physical provider, and there’s no real competition as a result.

When most people got their Internet service over telephone lines, your ISP didn’t need to also own the telephone lines, they just needed some telephone numbers.

When the telcos themselves got into the business of providing internet access, they pushed out the competition.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act, written by a Republican Congress, and signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton) is largely responsible for the current state of affairs.

The “Information Superhighway” is a toll road, built by taxes, but owned by private corporations.

What’s crazy is that the government paid these corporations to build this infrastructure.

When your government pays, say, a road building company to build roads, one doesn’t then grant the ownership of those roads to that company.

But that is EXACTLY what we did with our communications infrastructure.

Good. That’s what I was aiming for.

It is painful.

What was worse for me? I began suffering from a kidney stone when I was parked at a New Jersey turnpike rest area/service area.

In a semi truck.

Almost 1000 miles from home or anyone I know

With my dog in the truck.

Obligatory pic. Gina, the dog in the story, is no longer with us, but she is the golden/husky mix, while Zeus, the bigger black and white mutt still is.

https://tinypic.host/image/Snapchat-1486115008.3dlaJ4

A dog that had horrible separation anxiety and would chew her way out of said truck if I left her in it with the climate controls on, for more than a few minutes.

I wound up calling 911, since obviously I’m not getting a semi truck into a hospital parking lot, and explaining the situation to the dispatcher. By the time the ambulance got to me, I was doubled over, dry heaving in the parking lot, with my dog freaking out thinking I’m about to die.

In her defense, by then, so did I. I still didn’t know it was a kidney stone, and my mind was going immediately to “burst appendix”, and me dying a thousand miles from home, in the middle of the night, leaving a wife and a daughter behind…

Ambulance crew loaded up me AND my dog, and one of the EMTs called the hospital, and got that handled.

The hospital security team babysat her, while the nurses and doctors fussed over me.

When it was time to get back to the truck, I tried to call a cab. None would take me back because of the dog. She wasn’t a big dog, but not a lapdog either.

Needless to say when the head ER nurse found out, she flipped her shit in perfect, foul-mouthed, Jersey attitude, and this southern boy loved her for it.

She said “I’ll take you myself if this guy doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, his fuckin whole company will be banned from this whole muthafuckin hospital!”

As an aside, that’s when it clicked that New Englanders ain’t rude or unfriendly. They just express love differently. 😂

Damn. I rambled like hell, but. It all needed to be said anyway

Know what else is like pinball?

Kidney stones. Definitely feels like you’re getting your balls thrown into a lot of shit.

My work provided phone is, sadly, an iPhone.

But the case they provided for it (OtterBox) actually doesn’t have the window.

Meanwhile, my personal phone, a Pixel, has a case is 100% clear.

I bought a white phone, so dammit I want to see the white phone! 😂

laughs in C64 BASIC

If he doesn’t want it, I’ll take it! 🤣

Prebuilt is almost always the wrong answer. That holds true in way more fields than just technology as well.

The phrase “bought versus built” comes to mind.

You can almost always build exactly what you need for less money or headache than you think.

Will you maybe spend a little more than buying some cheap one-off? Possibly. However, the best part of building it yourself is that you’ll also typically know exactly what you’ve got, and if you use off-the-shelf parts, replacements and upgrades are easier in the long run.

TCO. Total Cost of Ownership.

I wasn’t specifically planning to. And yeah, proxmox is a VM management system. I’ve never used it myself, but it’s apparently the “new hotness” and I’ve been meaning to do a VM/container build for a while.

I’m more familiar with FreeBSD jails, but not everything lends itself to that well. Bhyve was also something I looked at, but proxmox seems to leverage qemu and ZFS together.

Plus, since I’ve never actually used it, it gets me out of my comfort zone and I’ll maybe learn something neat.

That won’t do anything about Bluetooth audio compression.

I’m about to drop a supermicro Xeon board plus an E3-1275 and 32G of ECC ram into the guts of this old Optiplex 790 mini tower I have. (i3 2100, so a generation newer, and a Xeon instead of an i3)

I plan to eventually get a better case but for now this is fine. Right now it’s running Plex media server on FreeBSD on bare metal, but I’m planning to swap to proxmox once I get the new board installed.

Unfortunately that won’t be for another week. While the board will be here today, it is a little more power hungry than the old system, and I’m already pushing the OEM 375W PSU with 5 drives (SATA SSD and 4 7200rpm SAS drives) so I also have a PSU coming. But that is not expected until middle of next week.

Last week isn’t really that long ago. Going through my mom’s old things and found a PC she bought new back in 2013. A Dell Optiplex 790 with a dvdrw in it.

I just happened to have a couple of blanks so I verified that it worked before pulling it out and using it as an external drive. Works that way as well on my much newer Ryzen 5800x build in a case with no 5.25" bays. (Or externally accessed 3.5s for that matter. No external bays of any sort other than some USB ports on the front.)

My 2006 Honda also has a 6 disc changer and it sounds better than the Bluetooth adapter I connected to it. (It is wired to the back of the factory sound system, but Bluetooth audio just sounds flat to me, even on the best speakers)

+1 For hass.

Interesting, sadly I no longer remember my old number, nor do I have access to the email I used 25+ years ago.

Bring back icq.

The dominant failure mode of an SSD is to become read-only. There’s no data loss there…