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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Within the past year I shopped around for a new home internet provider. The legacy companies encouraged if not required talking to a human being to find out anything about service availability and rates and then be subject to a hard sales pitch. Appointment availability for the install was 2+ weeks out. The new fiber companies had all the info I could want clearly online, appointments available within 2 days, with minimal fuss. The legacy company humans were also often incorrect about their own product, potentially lying to make a sale.

    If they act like a company from the 90s, they aren’t going to capture customers who came into adulthood after that.

    That’s not even touching on the speeds they offer are slower than their competitors for a steeper price.


  • When my brother’s brother-in-law passed, he gave all that to my brother. Both on the high end of tech/self-hosting capabilities. I’ve come to the conclusion much of it wasn’t worth it.

    I’ll be focusing on ensuring access to financial accounts is passed on cleanly. And I’m working on digitizing all remaining physical photo negatives, then planning how to share all digitally with family while still alive. Since I don’t expect any to be interested in maintaining a server after I’m gone, I’m thinking I’ll keep it simple and just give everyone an external hard drive with all the photos. It’s up to them to do what they want with the drive. A copy to each sibling is increases odds it’s survives for a generation.

    I’ll make project notes and plans available to anyone interested, but no hard feelings if no one is interested. And my music and movies can disappear for all I care. My tastes are pretty mainstream so I’m not thinking about archival value.





  • I had a college sports team reunion and several teammates asked for a copy of a championship game. I still had the digital file, so posted it in a Dropbox thinking that would be easy enough for people whose hobbies don’t involve computers.

    Nope, I was spending too much time on tech support so offered flash drives with video files.

    Nope, still too much for two teammates so after a phone call to understand what tech they had at home and were comfortable with, I burned them each DVDs.

    It didn’t get that far, but I was prepared to use my library’s digital-to-VHS-to-digital workstation to copy them an old-timey VHS tape if the DVDs didn’t work. The library even has a stash of never-unwrapped VHS tapes they’ll sell you.