MT.Net

There are 151 posts filed in MT.Net (this is page 1 of 16).

A look back at 2025, part 1

I see I have a blog here and think it might be fun to add something to it every now and then.

The page has now turned on 2025 and many are saying “good riddance!” This year, I don’t know if I share that sentiment. Sure, a lot of undesired stuff happened but there are some moments that deserve to be celebrated.

Twenty-twenty five was the year I threw caution to the wind and went on a grand adventure by sailing to Cuba. It’s notable that I did it without Kelly, with whom I travel nearly everywhere. It was a Guy Trip, organized my friend Ken Thomas and a small circle of his friends. None of us knew anything about Cuba and only I had any real sailing experience. The great thing is that it didn’t matter as we were all willing to dive into the unknown and trust that we would figure things out. And we did, beautifully. It was a huge confidence-builder to take a leap and learn that I have the skills to succeed. More blog posts on this to come.

Politically, America’s rot is now out in the open for all to see. Congress has abdicated its role as a check on the executive, with the Supreme Court siding with the billionaire class nearly every time. There is naked corruption everywhere. The government services we all need to keep a functioning society have been deliberately thrown into chaos. Republicans are doing their damnmedest to codify racism. All in all, things look pretty bleak.

But do they? People everywhere are finally waking up. Democrats are winning landslide elections in formerly Republican-safe districts. The President’s approval rating is far underwater. Yes, lawless thugs are running roughshod over Constitutional protections in our immigrant neighborhoods, but the people are having none of it and fighting back. Folks are getting organized, fast! While it would be nice if our institutions would stand up for everyone, it is heartening to see so many people willing to step up to fill the gaps. The American experiment is not quite dead yet.

Along these lines, I attended a few very large demonstrations in 2025 that really hit home. Never before have I felt so emotional at a protest than I did this past year. It gives me so much hope. So, though the oligarch-controlled media does its best to keep it hidden, there is significant pushback against the folks trying to shred our Constitution.

Thirty years with a web presence

My blogging mentor, Wil Wheaton, noted his 24 years of blogging today so naturally I had to check where I stand on these metrics.

It’s been 23 years since I began actual blogging (or as I called it back then “web logging”), using a dynamic, database-backed site rather than static pages. Here’s my first post. I looked for the prior software I’d been using, “bpblog,” but it seems it has completely vanished from the Internet. Which might be a good thing, actually.

More interestingly, last month marked THIRTY YEARS of a web presence! That would be the “Flea Forum” hosted on the servers of a long-gone local Triangle web hosting and internet company, Cybernetics. Check out this mirror in all of its 1995 glorious, hand-crafted HTML glory.

I kept a digital journal even before this though as far as I know I never posted it online. I recall posting an excerpt or two here on MT.Net. But private journaling doesn’t count.

I’m still committed to growing my blog reading and writing as nearly every commercial online media company does more pissing me off than entertaining me lately. Either its incessant ads, shadowbanning, patently stupid fake AI photos and videos or the million other ways they annoy me. It’s time to get back to real, y’all.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to be a keyboard warrior from now on. I dabbled with video posts earlier and I would like to bring this back. I will probably write what I want to say, read it on camera, and post both. If you have the ability to post video why not do it, right?

Thanks for sticking around. I hope our conversation can continue.

Sweet memory lifts me today

I was working my way through the blog this morning when I found this post of a touching walk I took with Travis fifteen years ago when he was six.

A special walk home

I met Kelly and the kids at Hallie’s school to hear an update from the teacher on Hallie’s progress. I left smiling when her teacher called her “phenomenal,” but little did I know I wasn’t done with hearing good things. I decided to forgo hitching a ride home with Kelly in the van in keeping with my carpooling experiment today and opted instead to walk the 1/2 mile home. Travis decided to join me, so together we walked up the hill back to our house.

As we walked, we chatted about lots of things. He wanted to hold my hand and so we walked up the hill hand-in-hand. As the conversation continued, he said something that made me remark “that wouldn’t be my favorite thing.”

“You know what’s my favorite thing?” he asked as we kept walking. “My love for you.”

All I could say was “awwww” and returned the compliment. It was so sweet to hear but as I thought about it later I only appreciated it more. Travis will often tell someone he loves them but it’s rare that he offers it the way that he did.

His hand in mine, the pleasant walk, and words that would make any father proud: it doesn’t get much better than this.

This day came in the immediate aftermath of my friend Gerry dying. For many weeks at work, I would stuff earbuds into my ears and listen to yearning music as I worked alone in the aisles of the NetApp datacenter, sorting through my grief.

Wow, what a special day that was, lifting me at a time I really needed it. I’m still so thankful.

Still not Blaugusting like I wanted

Back when I posted about Blaugust, I submitted this blog’s info to the official Blaugust list, hoping to let people know that I’m still here. So far I’ve gotten no response and my blog is still not part of the Blaugust OPML list. Sad.

I’ll have to rely on posting more cat photos if I want to gin up traffic to this blog, I guess. And I suppose I need to get a cat for that.

Putting my posting money where my mouth is

I had to leave Twitter when Twitter became X (motto: we put the X in Toxic!). I first hopped over to Mastodon but found it too technically challenging even for me. Then Bluesky opened to public use and I set up an account there, happy that posts weren’t being throttled/algorithmized, etc.

Lately, though, even BlueSky isn’t scratching my itch. I am just done with 300-byte conversations. This world absolutely needs context. It needs depth! You can’t explain anything reliably in 300 characters; you can talk past people but you can’t make a point with any reliability. Trite sound bites are what has gotten us the distracted world we now find ourselves in.

So last week, I posted to BlueSky how I was going to dust off my RSS Feed Reader and start consuming news again without any billionaire nor algorithm telling me what to read.
BlueSky post from markturner.net, saying 'I am dusting off my RSS feed reader to take back control of what stories I see. What are your favorite RSS news feeds?'
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Hello and Goodbye to Google Fiber


As y’all may know, I’ve been a booster of Google Fiber for a while. I signed us up for it the first day it became available. This week, I switched us back to AT&T. Let me explain why.

The server that hosts this website, my neighborhood mailing list, and other Internet stuff lives in a datacenter in Atlanta. I don’t really notice this, though, because the AT&T Fiber’s routing is excellent! I get super-low latency of 16 ms for my round-trip pings. I can’t reach many cross-town servers much faster than that. When I switched us over to Google Fiber, that round-trip time jumped to 60-100 ms. I researched whether my hosting provider’s datacenters in other cities were any better but it turns out Google Fiber is not nearly as good as AT&T’s. The city with the fastest server Google Fiber could get me to was Dallas which – as you geography buffs will note – is significantly farther from Raleigh than Atlanta. Go figure.

Please note that I’m a network nerd and my tech needs are, um, … unique. Normal people would probably not notice this stuff.

Being temporarily “dual-homed” with Google and AT&T meant I could negotiate rates. When I called to cancel AT&T, they offered me my same package at 30% off for 1 year (i.e., cheaper than Google and I can renew the deal next year). We now get for $60 what before we got for $90. Praise competition!

Google Fiber is still connected to our house (their fiber is still “lit.”) We’re not locked into AT&T with any contract so if AT&T pisses me off we can switch back without any trouble. Google just wants their WiFi Access Points back, which I didn’t use anyway.

There is also part of me that feels that a little bait-and-switch took place with Google Fiber. When Google Fiber was announced, I was under the impression that Google would devote its massive resources to making it a success. Instead, the company changed focus almost immediately, drastically putting on the brakes to its deployments. It was clear Google was not willing to make the investments necessary to make Google Fiber a healthy concern for the next fifty years. Google’s obsessively focused on its short-term stock market performance. It does not make investments the way railroads do, or like providers that expect to be relevant in 50 years, like AT&T.

Google Fiber switched to micro-trenching for its network installations. It also outsourced its installs to companies like Prime Telecom. I had multiple crews try to put in fiber, only to have me interrupt their installations because they were either bringing the fiber to the wrong side of our house or they were digging without doing utility locating. In hindsight, I suppose they usually skip the locating because it’s time-consuming and their shallow trenches rarely affect other buried utilities. They’d rather take the chance of busting something else than wait for lines to be marked. I don’t think this is a very professional game plan, personally.

Google Fiber does offer something unique, and that’s 2 Gbps service, twice as fast as our current service. This would be appealing to me but it is asymmetrical and the upload speed is still limited to 1 Gbps. I’d also have to upgrade all of our home networking gear to the new 2.5 Gbps standard. Well, technically I could use Google’s Wifi6 Access Points to go 2 Gbps but I want to use all the copper I’ve put into our house, rather than rely on WiFi. So, until Google makes the 2 Gbps service symmetrical I’ll stick with single-gigabit speeds.

All that being said, gigabit internet rocks! Saying goodbye to Spectrum forever rocks! Competition rocks! If you can get gigabit fiber, either through Google or AT&T, I recommend you do it. You will be happy you did!

One more thing I learned is the value of my blog

One important takeaway from this week’s social media dust-up is the value of having my blog. I liked to pretend that Twitter was more open then Facebook and thus I favored posting there. Yet, when someone falsely accused me there, blocked me, and went on to spread this lie to all of her followers, Twitter left me few, if any, options for getting my response out. It was maddening to watch the rumors spread and have no way of countering them with the truth.

Here, I own my own bits. Here, I decide what gets said. Here, I may solicit discussion or … not. Here, my words live forever.

All that, and I have a goddamn edit button, too.

Writing has become harder

Writing tonight’s CAC op-ed was the first several-hundred-word piece I’ve written in a while. Looking through my blog shows that I used to do this on a regular basis. Used to do it with ease.

It’s difficult to pin down what has changed. Certainly I’m older and It’s harder than it used to be to string words together. My suspected Gulf War Illness could be another factor. Still, it’s also true that the nature of online communications has changed.

Many people started their Internet experience using America Online (AOL). Nothing wrong with that, of course, but my beef with AOL was the beautiful walled garden that it provided: people would log on and think there was no world beyond AOL.

Today the same could be said about Facebook. Facebook has captured much of the attention that used to be on blogs like mine, only now it’s also walled off and shot through with conniving advertisements. It’s all built to encourage short attention spans, while blogging can be as robust as I feel like making it.

Facebook (and to a lesser extent Twitter) has worked hard to try to turn me from a producer back into a consumer again. It is an easy trap to fall into – “there are so many voices out there, what can I add with mine?”

And yet, people still visit my site. I still have many gems I’ve written here and I can tell the story of my life exactly the way I want to tell it. This is more valuable than ever.

Maybe I still have it, maybe I don’t, but there’s no doubt of the value of my words here. Let me know if you want to see more.