I’ve got neighbors. And my neighbors have trouble communicating like adults. Who don’t hate each other. And know how to construct sentences both below 70db and without using the word “fuck” or some subtle conjugation thereof… And that means that I’ve got neighbor trouble.

While I could get into fairly extreme detail about everything that happens upstairs, as they broadcast it loudly to everyone within earshot, please allow me to instead explain through a letter I wrote to my landlord after tonight’s unscheduled grudge match. Items in curly brackets are of course substitutions for data I don’t feel like sharing.

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Behold, a startling tale of awful tech support staff, too little too late management strategies, and verbose tirades of daring do that was supposedly done did! Since January, my virtual private server account with Tektonic has gone down more than a freshman sorority pledge. Every time, I have had to play this two-step swinging game with them to get any sort of response as to why my server was behaving in a way that could only be referred to as “wonky”. After the jump, you will read the transcript of the camels back breaking.

If you don’t want to read 36 hours worth of support ticket transcripts, the cliff notes version is that Tektonic basically went out of their way to lose my business.

So, I’ve moved into an account with Linode and while it’s still our honeymoon, it’s moving along pretty sweet right now. In the roughly 48 hours since the move from Old Busted to New Hotness, the traffic has spiked to approximately 5x the load due to my friend Rick, an editor involved in the news side of the comic book industry, parting ways with his now-former employer for the second time in a year. His site, a Wordpress powered site with only mild (read: not aggressive) caching is singlehandedly responsible for said 5x increase in incoming traffic. The new server has not even shrugged under the new load. No sweat has been broken. I might turn up available Apache processes to compensate but seriously, it just doesn’t seem to care.

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Matt Ball has posted a sizable write-up which neatly sums up the rising tide of backlash against the so-called “Delicious Generation” of software developers currently bilking milking abandoning their installed base every 6-to-8 months.

I had been working on something similar, though admittedly much, much less details when this dropped. My interest in this was strictly personal, as I’ve been bitten by Austin Motherfucking Sarner twice now: I am a recovering license holder for Catalog and Disco.

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I no longer define my class standing in terms of the money I’ve made or the things I own. It’s not even something as pedestrian as the neighborhood I live in or the car I drive.

I now define it in terms of how much time I have to spend in laundromats.

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In the last month and a half since I touched this, apparently there was a major religious holiday (Kwanzaa, duh), the Patriots cemented their place in Final Jeopardy history for the next decade, and the doesn’t-mean-a-god-damned-thing elections in Iowa and New Hampshire can’t decide between six of one or a half dozen of the other.

I’ve got a lot of things that I want to write about, but right now I’ve just popped in to mention the following snippets while I expand other ideas into proper paragraphs

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