Fur, Fiber and Christmas

 "Sometimes even to live is an act of courage." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The PC in the office recently shut itself down and would not re-start.  My daughter was in tears, because she had been in a World of Warcraft raid group, trying to kill a big monster and get its loot.  She woke me up at around 9:30 PM, and said the computer smelled bad and that I needed to come look at it.  I told her to play on the laptop and let me sleep...  By the time she stopped trying to get the desktop computer working and moved over to the laptop - about 20 minutes - the raid group had kicked her out of the group and moved on.  Better luck next week, kid!

I placed an order for a new and larger power supply for the computer without even having looked at it, because she said that nothing was working at all - not the hard drive light, not the internal case lighting, none of the fans, etc.  I assumed between the burning odor and lack of activity that the power supply had likely failed.  That assumption turned out not to be the case.

After I took the cover off the case, the problem became very apparent.  The issue was Siberian Husky fur clogging up a couple of intake vents on the PC.  The power supply was covered in fur, as was the inlet to the case.  The power supply had overheated and preemptively shut itself off to avoid damaging the components.  Nice feature.  Damn Russian computer hacker dogs! :) 

It's nice to not have to replace the PC power supply just yet.  I'll keep the recently-delivered 750 Watt computer power supply on hand for the next PC build.  It's a very nice power supply, because (and this is a new thing to me) it has modular cables - you don't just get a bundle of snakes, some of which you don't need.  With this new modular cable arrangement, you plug in only those cables you need to run the PC and drives.  I like dual optical and storage drives, so I'll probably use most of the cables, but it will be nice to be able to have each one take its own path.

There was a flurry of activity on our street recently - flaggers stopping vehicles in one direction, and forcing traffic in to the oncoming lane.  While this was going on, utility trucks with man-lifts were stringing cables roughly halfway up the electrical utility poles.  I assumed they were pulling fiber-optic wire for data, since they weren't up where the conductors were.

After running the gauntlet past the utility trucks and getting home, I took the dog for a walk, and had a chat with one of the fellows doing the work.  He informed me that yes, they are running fiber-optic cable in the neighborhood.  I told him that it's nice that the neighborhood will finally enter the 21st century - now that it's 1/4 over with.

My initial thought was that Ziply, our previous terrible internet provider, was installing the fiber cable.  Maybe they were trying to win back they rural customers they had lost to Starlink by investing in local infrastructure and providing true broadband internet service.  I should have known better, because customer service is not their priority - raking in monthly service fees is.  

The company behind the fiber-optic installation is Intermax, a local company that previously built out a line-of-sight internet system.  With this arrangement, a residence needs line-of-sight to a mountaintop tower that is connected to fiber.  The home-owner purchases an encrypted transceiver that would gets aligned to the tower to send internet signals back and forth.  

I love Starlink, because they were there for us, launching million-dollar satellites into orbit to provide broadband internet - back when Ziply Fiber was sitting on their ass collecting our money for low-speed internet, while charging high-speed broadband prices - and yes, I filed a complaint against them to the FCC for that dismal performance.  However, Intermax is doing what Ziply would not - providing rural broadband to the neighborhood - and it will be less expensive than Starlink. 

Starlink has increased its pricing from $99 to $119 per month, and has implemented data caps - caps that we are well below, as we don't stream (or pirate) movies.  Intermax says their base rate is $83 per month.  That means our internet bill will drop from about 1400/yr to 1000/yr - about 30% savings.

I wrote most of this post on December 23.  It is now December 26 and the Starlink WiFi router failed yesterday.  I put a new one on order so as to get back online... meanwhile it's phone and cell-towers for internet.  Sigh.

In any event, Merry Christmas to all, and Happy New Year as well :)