Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1401
Florence & The Machine, A long saga about a broken ethernet cable, Enshittification/Rot Economy, the perils of writing think-pieces
Hello hello hello. Tuesday. Got to sleep in an extra hour, Jane has a dentist appointment. I cannot say the extra hour makes me feel more awake, but I am grateful for it nonetheless. Another decade of this shit. Getting up for school sucks. It sucked as a kid, sucked as an adult. Giant societal scam. Do not recommend.
Some housekeeping and follow-up items:
Last call for holiday cards. Fill out this form!
My wok induction cooker just died! Out of the blue! It powers up but the buttons don’t do anything. They are physical buttons, they click! I do not know what to do. I consulted the manual for a “reset” but it does not mention a method though that is clearly what needs to happen. Gonna let it sit in a drawer for a month to see if some capacitor drains and it resets? I am at a loss. Anyway, I must remove this item from Rick’s holiday list. Banned until further notice.
Listening to the “To Investigate” playlist today. We did not make much progress yesterday, owing to the Saga of the Broken Internet, which we will get to momentarily. We have 35 hours left, and only three days of work before the holiday. I am not confident I will clean it out, but never say never.
This morning we are listening to Florence and the Machine’s recent live album, Symphony of Lungs - BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. It is the entiretly of the Lungs album live, with a symphony. Aptly named. I am not a huge Lungs fan, more of a Ceremonials fan, which I consider one of the best albums of all time, but all of the other Florence albums I think are just good. I did recently learn that “The Machine” is a person, a woman, and she wrote a lot of the FATM songs and does a lot of soundtrack work. Her name is Isabella.
Yesterday as I finished up GMHHAY the Neurodivergent-affirming Pediatric Speech Therapist Tenant at Chore House texted me to inform me that the internet wasn’t working. This cased me some consternation because, as we discussed in depth yesterday, I did do a lot of work on the internet connnection to Chore House this weekend. BUT, also, I did not touch their internet? I did not go near it. I did not jostle it or move it or do anything to it. And everything I did to the internet connection was all working exactly as it should.
So, like, what is going on here? Did I mess something up and not realize? Like did my giant lump of a body just whack something? Was it tenant user error? Was it coincidence? Can’t be coincidence, I mean, come on. You were right there, maaan. Clearly you messed something up and your addled brain cannot properly process the flow of electrons through fiber optics and copper.
So I went over and started poking around. Restarted the router, same error: not connected. The ethernet cord didn’t light up when I plugged one end into the router and one end into the switch. Really does seem like a cabling problem here.
Now, since I have started doing all this IT work around the house, I have developed a really great toolbox of IT tools, I kind of love it. I feel like an IT worker on campus or something, like my old friend Chris (hi Chris) as I roam the property and fix ethernet connections. But one thing I now have that I never have before is an ethernet cable tester. So I stuck one end on the cable in the server room, snuck into the Neurodivergent-affirming Pediatric Speech Therapy office and plugged the other end into the cable going into the router.
Normally these little testers light up a series of lights: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and 8, as they check each of the eight individual wires in a cable. Any of the lights don’t light up in sequence, the cable is bad. I have had this happen a lot as I get better at making Ethernet cables (fun fact! It’s not that hard! Just tedious! But you can learn it! Then you can brag about it! Learn new things! It is great! Someone teach me how to weld!).
But, reader, out of the eight lights on this cable, only three lit up.
What the hell!
How does a cable go bad just sitting in a wall?
How does it go bad catastrophically?
Was it always bad? Like… I have not run around testing actual, installed, pre-existing cables since I got this thing. Maybe a ton of are shit! Are, like, most ethernet cables always kinda fucked up?
Does this happen? Does it happen all the time? Are a ton of all of our in-wall ethernet cables just.. bad?
Plus! This cable has only been in the wall for a year! Like, right now, I am writing this on my computer, which is connected to an ethernet cable, which is connected to a switch, then an ethernet cable in the wall to my server room. That cable has been in the wall for ten years and it is fucking fine! How does one go bad in ONE year?
And on the very weekend I just happened to be doing work near it.
I do not like them gremlins.
I have zero doubt that any IT professionals reading this right now are, like, “yeah, that shit just happens. There’s an element of voodoo.” But it is disturbing! When I lay infrastructure, I like to think it will last? WTF!
Anyway, I built a new cable, tested it, and tried to run it through the wall following the route of the old cable. But I forgot that the route is super tight and circuitous and I only ever got it to work by tearing up the wall in the Neurodivergent-affirming Pediatric Speech Therapy office, and I cannot realistically do that again. It is all patched up.
So, right now the cable is running out of the server closet in a Chore House kids bedroom (which I hate, I hate having my server room in a random cramped, dark closet) through the bedroom, out into the living room, down the stairs and into the Neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapist office. It is ugly and I am annoyed.
But it works.
Now I just gotta think of a new way to get into that office, which is basically a cinderblock cube. Without making a huge mess, and needing to patch the walls, and without it looking ugly.
WHY DID THIS CABLE DIE I AM SO CONFUSED>
If you are feeling like you want to read like 5,000 words about how and why the internet has gotten so shitty, might I recommend this glorious screed of a polemic from one Ed Zitron, published yestersay. I agree with about… 70-80% of it? But I think at the heart of it he is absolutely correct: the internet is getting worse, and it is not a giant plot so much as a bunch of sad, amoral, stupid individuals responding to herd mentality or outside stimuli.
Anyway, it’s a good one-stop piece for a comprehensive, coherent laying out of a worldview. This is something I do not have the patience to write anymore. It was a pretty relieving epiphany in my life that even though I love writing, and even though I have lots of thoughts, I am under no obligation to present words in a unified, coherent order. I do not need to be a “thought leader.”
I suspect I am going to have to do one soon if I am serious about this anti-AI religion (I am indeed serious), and it’s not a bad thing, per se, to write a comprehensive, all-encompassing think piece about a specific topic. But it is kinda boring? Both to read and to write. They need to exist, but, yeah. No fun. And once you start writing them, you feel like you have to keep writing them and the easiest think piece to write, after you have written a think piece, is to write the exact same think piece again, and then, suddenly, you’re that guy who writes think pieces about enshittification and no fucking thank you I do not owe these bastards my entire life.
And then eventually you own your livelihood to it and then you are well and truly fucked.
And you tell yourself, you know, you are influencing culture and changing things, and, sure, you are, but also: how much of our world has been fucked up by well-meaning think-piece writers? A non-zero amount!
I don’t know if any of that is 100% true, but those are my feelings, maaan. Oh yeah, that too: you write a think piece, you have to act 100% confident of every word of it. You have to have a coherent worldview, even when — and this may come as a surprise — the world is not coherent. We’re all such suckers for a simple, compelling story, it is a disservice by writers to write one out when there isn’t really one.
I do this all the time! It is bad! I keep saying the internet sucks now, even as, here I am, writing to you on this lovely little indie newsletter site, connecting with hundreds of like-minded friends around the world. That is fucking amazing!
Youtube has gotten BETTER in the last few years isn’t that crazy? What is up with that?
Wikipedia is still more or less a miracle. Tumblr, Flickr, Livejournal, all still more or less as good as they ever were, even if we ignore them and complain about how shitty the internet is.
Yes it’s all getting worse daily, but it’s not dead yet.
Having not received a phone call in the last 30 minutes that I need to threateningly go to the dentist, I would like to extend a hearty congratulations to my daughter Jane for no longer throwing giant, hysterical-ass fits whenever she has to go to the dentist. This is a big life moment. I should get her a plaque.
Moody and quiet playlist for you this wintry Tuesday morning. I threw on a couple oldies to fill it out - Spacemen 3 and Mazzy Star man I miss Mazzy Star. I am glad they did that reunion. I wish I could see them again, god, there was a time in my life I’d see them, like, every year. Everything else is new, more or less. JFDR is an Icelandic artist I have slowly getting more into over the last… five years? Dot Allison is not new but the album is, ish, at least to me. Ditto Montgolfier Brothers which I am only learning about thanks to Dave Gilmour. Gave the new Underworld a re-listen yesterday and man that album is so good.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.