[airspirit]

Everyone has the right to take care of themselves, Joe. I currently rule my neighborhood in terms of internet services with an iron fist, and sometimes get complaintes about my service. I'm running 2x cable uplinks and 1x DSL uplink through 3x WAP and four firewalls, feeding 2 PCs in my house (3 to come!!!), and 15 others throughout the neighborhood in 8 households. At the moment my rate spread is only $10 per machine, giving me $150 in income for about $90 in service outlay. That gives me $60 for machine maintenance, power consumption, and the hassle of being tech support for over a dozen people and knowing each individual system intimately for servicing and maintenance, not to mention troubleshooting. I have equipment covering 6 different brands in my extended network, and that is only including the WAPs and adapters ... with network adapters and such on top of that my job is ugly in terms of sheer knowledge required.

I have three channels in use (Jester, Maverick, and Iceman), and I have to monitor the directional output of each depending on weather conditions (snow makes things ugly for certain houses). People expect my time and effort on the drop of a hat (even in the middle of the night) if they have any issues, including things as trivial as "low" connection strengths/speeds on the channels. People don't understand sometimes that even though I'm providing them an absolute STEAL for broadband and access, not to mention the killer setting for LAN games and the world's grandest repository of warez and gamez along with other standard downloads and patches at up to 11Mbps, that I have a life too. I got questioned by one of them about my cooling project because I "should" be spending the money upgrading hardware so they could be on a "very high" signal strength all the time.

I told that person to piss off promptly, and asked if he was unhappy with his service, and if so, I'd be MORE THAN HAPPY to disconnect them and reimburse them the last two month's connection fee, and they dropped it immediately.

What people don't understand is that for us geeks, these pet projects (some more extravagant and public than others) are just hobbies. They don't pay the bills, and they serve no purpose except to fuel our techlust and egos (in some circumstances), but are usually not the center of our lives.

Would I be miffed if Pro/Cooling went down? You bet! Do I feel that you should live like a hermit in order to support it? Hell no! We have lives just like anyone else, and we want the same things as everyone else. People that expect us to do without for the privilege of helping them need to understand that we are doing them a favor, and should in no way be compelled to oblige them further. Everything we do for others in these respects are out of goodwill, and it is not something they deserve. Do I have a right to demand you keep the doors open on your sweat and tears? F*ck no! If I knew he was diverting funds from the site to pay for these things, I have the right to gripe, but that's about all I could do. In the end, Joe can do whatever he wants because IT IS HIS ENTERPRISE.

If I had the chance to redo history, I may not have started the mini-ISP I'm running. Honestly, the $60 a month "profit" is broken down into the following: $20 for power consumption (thirsty bastids), and $40 going toward the debt of over $500 I went into to buy the hardware to support this thing. In the end, I earn no support from it, but I end up spending about 10 hours a month doing "house calls" for people. The only reason I did it was to help people. I'm sure that's the only reason this site still exists, is because Joe understands how many people are helped, and it gives us a place to congregate and push for the common good (correct me if I'm wrong).

In short: why should those of us that bust our humps for others have to starve to do so, adding insult to injury? It's not right. If anyone has problems with how this site is run, they should just f*ck off, because they obviously don't understand what a blessing it is that Joe even bothers to give you this forum in the first place.

/rant mode off.