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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I sort of wind up handling goof-ball technical issues for Jon at Adam Riff™. We butt heads a lot but he means well, in this really warped West Coast way.

Jon is on vacation this week, and he “creatively massaged” some of a conversation we once had regarding his trip and how to obtain wireless access while away. I did what any upstanding administrator would do… I made myself a login for his site and corrected him.

It was that or building an entire joke site and uploading it in place of his existing one. If it was six hours earlier, that’s the way I would have gone.

Opinionation

n. opin·ion·at·ion

A country of people, all absoloutely positive that they’re positive that they’re always right, so you must obviously be both wrong, and an idiot.

Example: The gentleman in fatigues who was at the counter spent all afternoon pontificating upon the nature of modern civilizations dependency on oil. At the end of his bully-pulpit tirade, he pronounced that Democrats are all liars, and that they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear about energy to steal your vote. I wonder what color the sky is in his opinionation.

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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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