A now sane individual who escaped the world of selling technology, now living in the rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont. I have been at one time or another, a farmer, a director for Apple, and a vice president at Wideopen Networks. I continue to pursue my love of photography and writing. I have great memories of boating, fishing, kayaking, swimming, and hiking the beaches along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where we lived for fifteen years.
Streaming your choice of video channels is what the future holds. I spend a good chunk of my day job looking at the prices of Internet services across the county.
I studied cable, DSL, and fiber services in dozens of counties and communities last year. That along with my personal experience with prices and as an early streamer starting several years ago has helped our family to continue to save money after switching from cable and its expensive packages to fiber and streaming services.
However, it is easy to go overboard with streaming. The grandchildren show up and their favorite shows are on Disney+, so you subscribe. An older child comes home and wants some Apple TV channels. It only takes three or four spur of moment decisions added to your regular streaming services and you will be paying more than you would be for a cable package.
The way we handle our streaming services is to keep them on a budget. We budget $40 monthly for streaming services. We are Amazon Prime members so I am not sure we would allocate the full $8.99 (stand-alone cost) for Prime video but as you will see, even when we do that, we are still well under budget.
Our four current services for a fee are Prime Video at $8.99 monthly, Paramount+ $5.99 monthly, Britbox $6.99 monthly, and PBS Masterpiece $5.99 monthly for a total of $32.96 for all our streaming services. We also subscribe to the free version of Peacock. I recently canceled Netflix and Acorn while adding Masterpiece and Britbox.
We stream so much that it is easy to run out of new, watchable programs in two to three months. I manage all but one of our channels on Amazon prime so it is easy to see them and the costs all in one place. You also have the advantage of being able to snare some Amazon specials like HBO Maxx or Starx for $1.99 a month for two months. You just have to remember to cancel them. The picture at the top of the post is what you see in Amazonās Video channels management console.
My studies across the country along the current Hulu and YouTube pricing I see tell me that about $70 a month will get you full range of video services. So if you are paying $70 or more for your streaming services, you are not saving money and it is time to go on a streaming budget.
Fiber connectivity can make a huge difference in your life. When we started planning our move, my first requirement was that we find a home with fiber connectivity. It was not a snap decision. My work career in technology will hit four decades in 2022, and all of those years have revolved around a home office. Recent changes in what is expected from home office workers have reinforced the lessons learned from years of trying to stay connected enough to do my job.
Like many people who have been on a cable modem for decades, my experience has been a roller-coaster with some very frustrating experiences. Our most recent home before the move was in a new subdivision serviced by a national cable company. By the time we moved in February 2021, our speeds had increased to 488 Mbps down and 24 Mbps up. Because of bundling our phone service also was delivered by cable modem. The numbers looked impressive on the surface.
However, with a job that involves clients in over twenty states and a home office over seven hours driving away from our corporate office, experience had taught me that I could still expect problems with video conferencing which had become critical to meeting the needs of our clients since the pandemic.
Video conferencing with our cable modem, even with the best speeds that my cable modem company could deliver, involved using both the phone and my computer to establish a video conference link. Other collaborative tools like Slack were not consistently reliable when making phone calls or sharing screens. Even worse, sharing files was anything but instant since many of the proposals I prepared often reached sizes that were unimaginable just a few years ago. I depended on tools like Box for sharing files and an unreliable Internet connection is a nightmare when sharing files or screens in real time.
When we got to the point of making an offer on a new home, we had two homes with fiber connectivity and one with DSL. We quickly discarded the DSL home and bought one of the fiber homes. Having a symmetric 500 Mbps fiber connection provided by our local telephone company has taken connectivity worries out of my life and office. Now when I am joining a video conference whether through Zoom, Teams, or GoToMeeting, all I do is click a link for crystal clear voice and video. I no longer tie up our home phone line for audio in what can only be described as often frustrating video conferences where my participation was often flaky because of connectivity problems.
My biggest worry beyond office connectivity in making the switch to fiber was my wife and how she would take to streaming. What we could get through streaming turned out to be far more flexible and entertaining than I expected. While my wife cannot see all of her favorite shows live, she has not had to give up any shows and and she has found a far broader choice of shows. We get local live television through Paramount+. We rotate through a number of streaming services, cancelling them sometimes for several months until their content has been refreshed. My wife who is somewhat reluctant with technology changes has learned how to stream the shows that she wants without help from me.
In our previous home, our cable service had the most basic TV service, the best Internet, and nationwide phone service. It took constant vigilance and regular arguments with the cable company to keep our bills under $180 per month. By the time we moved, our efforts to stay within the $180 meant we not longer had PBS, and saw only a very few sports events. Even the Weather Channel had disappeared from our service.
In addition to the monthly expense, an average of once a month, I went through an often frustrating reset of my cable modem due to loss of connectivity. I also had to switch out my cable modem every few years. At least twice during those switches, I lost connectivity for a day or more due to problems getting the new modems configured.
I do not miss my cable bills or the headaches. I love our fiber connection.
Our current costs with symmetric 500 Mbps (which not everyone needs- we have 29 connected devices in our home), nationwide/Canadian VOIP telephone service and a monthly budget of $40 in rotating streaming services is $140. Every service that we have now is better than what we had before. The almost $500 in annual savings is certainly a welcome bonus. We experimented with streaming while we were on cable, and there is no doubt in my mind that streaming is far better with the fiber than what we had in our previous house. We just don’t have buffering issues now. I have also found that a simple large battery backup allows me to run our fiber network during power outages. There have been NO connectivity battles and I have not even talked to our Internet service provider since I signed up for service ten months ago.
With all that and what fiber to the home can provide now and in the future, I do not see us ever buying another home without fiber.
David Sobotta is a VP and Senior Broadband Analyst with WideOpen Networks which is currently building fiber to the home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He and his wife live in a very rural subdivision in Davie County near Mocksville, NC.
I have invited Jessie, one our four marsh cats to be the guest writer for post number fifteen hundred. I think she has a talent for writing. She certainly campaigned hard for the opportunity during the last seven days. Each morning I have awakened to Jessie curled up on my chest and looking down on me. As you can see from the picture above, Jessie is exhausted from all the typing. I did help her with the editing, but the thoughts are hers. This is Jessie’s first effort at writing, but I am sure it will not be her last. She is always first to the office and last to leave. Here are her words.
I am one of four kittens that were born under a shed by Raymond’s Gut on the North Carolina coast. My name is Jessie, but I am sometimes called Jester by our friend, David. I spend most days curled up near his desks which are covered in computers. That is how I learned how to type.
I have three siblings, my two sisters, Merlin and Maverick and one big brother, Goose. Our mother, Elsie, has lived by Raymond’s Gut since before Hurricane Florence. We were very lucky. Our mother brought us to David’s garage to eat. It was there that his wife, Glenda, saw us. We didn’t understand but one night our mom told us to stay in the garage after we finished eating.
When the big door went down, we were stuck inside the garage. The next thing we knew it was dark but we could smell something delicious. Merlin crawled out from behind the cabinet where we were hiding but she did not come back. Then Goose went looking for her and he did not come back. Next I went out and I found the food that smelled so good. Then before I knew what was happening a door shut behind me and I was trapped in a wire box.
It wasn’t long before the human that I now know as David came and carried the wire box inside. Next I was put in a bigger wire box with my brother and sister. It was really scary at first but there was a soft towel. We did a lot of hissing and spitting but none of it kept the humans away. We kept waiting for Maverick to show up, but it was seven days before she let herself get caught. She was really mad that she was caught. She tried biting and scratching, but David had these great big gloves that he would use to catch her. She was so mean that she got thrown into solitary confinement for a week.
Eventually we figured out that they were feeding us and making sure that we were okay. It was much better than living on the dirt under the shed or behind the cabinets in the garage. The first strange thing that happened was when they gave us a bath. We got all wet but then they dried us with a towel and cuddled us until we got warm. It wasn’t too bad after we had a chance to work on our fur ourselves.
It wasn’t long before we got to go live in our bedroom. It was much nicer than living in a cage. It had a big queen-sized bed. It was perfect for hiding under. For a long time we spent all of our time in our bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. David would come play with us. He taught us how to play a game he called kitten fishing. He took one of his fishing rods and tied a string to it and some feathers to the end of the string. We would chase it and jump on it. Sometimes the only way we could get it was to jump high in the air. For a long time Goose was the best at jumping, then he got so big it was hard for him to jump as high. Maverick, who is a little bit of a loner, eventually could jump better than any us. For a long time we played kitten fishing at least once a day.
Then came the big day when we got the run of most of the house. It was really exciting. There were so many things to smell and places to explore. We found out pretty quickly that there were places that we were not allowed to visit but it is so hard if something needs investigating. Our favorite place is David’s office. Not much is off limits there and he pretty well lets us do as we please. It is also the place that we started learning about the real world. Learning about the real world made us realize how lucky we are.
A few months ago things got really exciting at our house. Some people from California bought our home and we had to move. It was really scary and we spent a lot of time in our big cage as David, Glenda, and their son Michael got everything ready to be moved. We did not understand what moving meant at first, then we learned that we would no longer get to see our mom, Elsie outside the glass door of our play room. We were sad, but knew that we had become house kittens and should go with our humans.
The move was actually scary. We had to ride in our cage in the back of a car for four hours. Then we ended up in a hotel for two days. We were allowed out of our cage, but the second day somehow Maverick got inside one of the beds. It took a long time to find her, but finally we took another ride and ended up at our new house. After a really busy day, lots of the furniture from our old house ended up in our new home. The next day we finally got to explore the new house and found that it has a screened porch where we are allowed to go smell the fresh air.
We really love our new house. The new house has our favorite shreds cat food and from the upstairs we can no longer see water, but we can see woods and fields. Most important our humans are still with us. We have even met their grandchildren and we were so excited that Michael has come back to pet us. He doesn’t like us to get on counters but he is really nice to us. He even rescued Goose once when he fell through the ceiling of the attic onto the porch.
We hope everyone has as nice a Thanksgiving as we are going to have.Ā We have lots to be thankful for this year and we don’t have to go up to the office for a few days. Maybe we will get to play some games.
By the time I found the first trail that really meant something to my life, I had graduated from college and was living in an old farm house on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Behind the house was a large field which sloped upwards to a spruce forest. At the top of the field there was a trail that wound through the woods. As much as I loved the rocky shore that was part of the property, the trail at the head of the field seemed to be more personal.
My two Labrador Retrievers, Tok and Fundy, often accompanied me on my hikes. There was nothing spectacular about much of the trail but it finally opened into a clearing that actually was on my neighbor Joe’s property. The view from the clearing was spectacular. I was living in the Village of St. Croix Cove and you could see the actual St. Croix Cove. I loved the view so much that I eventually traded some land for it.
There were times that I thought that Nova Scotia was the greenest place that I had ever seen. We sometimes were able to find baskets of chanterelle mushrooms just off the trail. No mushrooms since then have ever tasted like those.
With the trail being inNova Scotia, it sometimes took on a winter look and often stayed that way for a month or two. While it was hard to walk up the hill, getting up to the trail on cross country skis was even more challenging.
With each move, we managed to find new trails, some of them memorable.
I eventually got some snow shoes but the snow and and my schedule never managed to really coordinate before we moved off to New Brunswick which was the land of real snow as opposed to rain, snow, rain, and more snow like Nova Scotia.
Still the Nova Scotia trail was beautiful when it did snow. It was a little challenge skiing through the trees without getting covered with snow but that was just part of the charm. That and freezing your tail off were just part of cross country skiing in Nova Scotia in its normal thirty mile per hour breeze.
When we finally moved to New Brunswick, it snowed a lot and we eventually got a tractor-mounted snow blower which coincidentally allowed me to groom a very nice cross country ski trail. Obviously, my wife breaking trail on snowshoes like she did the first winter was not a sustainable solution especially once we had three children.
That first winter on snowshoes helped me to find my next favorite trail which was about a mile and a half and took me to a ridge at the back of our home farm. At the top of the ridge you seemed to surrounded by endless woods. It felt like true wilderness.
The next ten years were spent farming and there was scant time for pleasure hiking. Every trip to the top of the ridge was precious. I did spend lots of time leading cows through the woods from summer to fall pasture and making the long walk to the barn during calving season.
If we fast forward about twenty years, we have moved from New Brunswick to Halifax and back to the states, first finding some temporary roots in Columbia, Maryland. While Columbia, a planned community, was full of trails, none of them were wild enough for me. Barely two years after getting to Maryland, we moved south to Virginia and found a wonderful place on the side of the foothills of Twelve O’Clock Knob Mountain. Up on the mountain behind our home there was nothing for miles. It was a good place for the next trail that provided a respite from the pressures of civilization.
In the early nineties while still living on the mountain, we went to look at a Labrador puppy. It was no surprise that we came home with Chester. Chester, a wonderful pal, like all Labradors grew quickly and needed lots of exercise.
One winter Chester and I were doing our normal two to three mile hike around our subdivision and we saw an old woods road. We walked up it and managed to find our way home through the woods. It was not too long afterwards that I ran into the owner and got his permission to work on the trail.
It was a beginning of a decade of walking that trail, but it took a lot of work to make the trail usable during the summer. The old logging road had filled up with poison ivy. It took me months of work and spraying to kill the poison ivy so Chester and I could enjoy the trail together. Then we often spent Saturdays doing trail maintenance. Chester sleeping in a shady spot while I worked.
The trail rose high above all the houses and looked down on the city of Roanoke. Once on the trail, you felt like civilization was far away. Eventually I discovered an old homestead and the grave of a confederate soldier. It was easy to imagine living on the ridge and trying to scratch out a life from the small fields on the mountainside. A couple of times I made it to parts of the mountain where I found an old road that was knee deep in pine needles. It appeared the road had been unused for decades. At the very top of the ridge even the type trees started to change from hardwoods to firs. It was not unusual to hike the trail in the morning and the evening. We all loved it. We kept a kiddie pool so Chester could cool off after his hikes. Only when Chester began to get old did the trail fall into disuse.
It was always Chester’s Trail to us even as we moved from Roanoke in 2006 two years after he passed away. It was perhaps time to go because the old road that I cleared had been graded and paved. Someone from the valley had bought the land along the ridge and was building a home near the old homestead.
After moving from the mountains, we spent almost sixteen years at the beach. I found a favorite trail on the beach to the end of the Point at Emerald Isle. It was a wonderful hike and once again it was easy to feel like civilization had slipped away. Still it was not the same since I had to share it with lots of others in the summer and people could even get to the end of the trail by boat. I did fall in love with the salt marshes where you could lose the pretense of civilization a lot easier than on the beaches.
Now we are back in the hardwood hills not far where I grew up playing in the deep woods. I think that I might have found another trail that looks like it will be a big part of my life. It runs through what can only be called a cathedral of leaves. The beauty of their colors have left me speechless at times. I am happy to have found it early enough in life to still be able to enjoy walking it.
When I was around three years old, my single mother and I moved to Lewisville, North Carolina from just across the Yadkin River in Yadkin County. It was where my mother had been born on a mill pond.
Sometime before I was very old, a black and white stray cat found its way to the porch that connected mother’s beauty shop with the rest of the house. My bedroom, the former breezeway, also opened onto the same porch. Mother told me in no uncertain terms, that I could feed Whiskers but that I could not bring her into the house.
I slid open the screen on the aluminum screen door to my room. It did not take much convincing with food for Whiskers to jump into the house by herself. Technically, i was innocent. I don’t think I got punished. Whiskers was with us until my freshman year in college. When my mother, Whiskers, and I moved to Mount Airy in 1963, my dad fell in love with her. He decreed that she should enjoy a canned salmon and canned milk diet.
There were a lot of changes in those ten years before I headed off to military school.
I was five years old before there was a television in our neighborhood. I was in grade school before we had a black and white set in our home in Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem. It was a very different time. Unlike the children of today, we were free-range children, showing up at mealtimes and just in time to fall exhausted into bed on summer evenings
Our doctor made house calls. We walked to school or rode our bikes. After school, we played pick-up football or baseball. We built forts in the woods and dammed whatever creeks we could find. Getting to go fishing in a farm pond was a huge treat.
Towns are magnets and they suck people from the countryside, especially the young and talented. We noticed this happening when we returned to New Brunswick in 2012.We farmed there in the seventies and early eighties. Since our trip, what remained of the three churches in our old town disappeared. The community store closed. Yet the provincial capital, Fredericton, is thriving as the small towns wither. It is a story repeated time and again in Canada and the United States.
I still worry that some of those wild places like the North Carolina coast will become too populated. I sometimes think that what we call the Northern Outer Banks from Corolla to Cape Hatteras will sink into the seas just from the weight of all those beach castles. I offer up my profound thanks for those who created the National Seashores. Beyond nourishing our souls places like coastal Carteret County and hilly Davie County where we now live grow a lot of food that North Carolina cities need.
No Paper in the Driveway and An Empty Newspaper Box
I don’t want to be the old guy complaining about other people trying to earn a living. I would like to provide some constructive criticism that might make all of our lives easier.
I spent nearly twenty years at Apple and anyone who knows me will quickly tell you that I am no Steve Jobs fan. I saw him do things that were nothing but mean and contributed nothing to the great products that came out of the company.
However, the one thing that I learned of value from time within the Steve Job’s orbit is that the hardest thing is to say no to things that you might like to do but aren’t in your sweet spot. I would add that if you cannot do something with passion and precision, find something else to do.
Obviously sometimes you really need money and I understand those pressures because I have had my back to the wall with a payment or bill due. I have been lucky that I have always found ways, one time I sold our bulldozer, to keep going until better times. Those better times have always taken me to opportunities where I was proud to work and more importantly eager to do my best.
So here is the problem today. People take jobs and commit to doing the work, then they don’t do the job. Some never master what it takes to do the job. Some pretend to do the job. Others do not even bother to show up. We have been amazed when trying to hire students to do data entry as part time jobs. It is not hard work, yet continually people commit to working x-number of hours but only work half that. Then there are those who promise but never show.
An overlooked challenge of the pandemic is that it has been very hard on clothing, specifically shirts. I have never been easy on clothing. I have a long history of getting dirty.Ā When we lived on the farm, my wife, Glenda, was known to sometimes hose me down and make me take my dirty clothes off in the woodshed before I could come into the house. Back in my lawn mowing days on the North Carolina coast, not only did I come in encrusted in dirt from a yard that was more dust than grass at times but I also ended up fishing, walking on the beach, gardening and working at my desk. It all required a lot of different clothes, but I am not sure that I ever had a five shirt day.
The pandemic has made it more challenging to do almost everything except work from home. The statement that clothes make the man or woman has changed to shirts make the man or woman. With Zoom and Team conference calls, how you look on video is what matters these days and our video cameras only show us from us from the face down to our desks. So we pay attention to the shirts that we wear.
I remember well the Sunday afternoons under the shade trees enjoying watermelon or homemade peach ice cream. As children, we played like there was no tomorrow. It was a simpler time when people could actually talk politics without getting angry. There was nothing like an old fashioned chicken stew to bring families together in North Carolina’s rolling hills.
There were no chicken stews that I got to attend during my college years. Those were the especially turbulent late sixties and early seventies and I was far away from North Carolina in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ā As I finished my degree in the summer of 1971, I needed to get away from those strange-hued city-night skies where it was impossible to see the stars.
Just as people used to gather under shade trees in North Carolina, friends used to just drop by on Sunday afternoons at our farm for visit. It was a great excuse to stop working and spend some time catching up on the neighborhood news. It was the way people built relationships, established trust and found common ground.Ā I cannot ever remember discussing politics.
Beyond the impromptu visits, there were community picnics, shared meals, church services (even burials) and work done for the good of the community. All these things made for richer shared lives. When we were on the farm, I never doubted that the community and friends helped us be successful. The support of their communities was essential to success of farming when we had our farm.
That was back in the seventies. The fifty years since then have not been kind to under the shade tree gatherings or any of the other ways that we connected and established relationships.
You cannot have a ghost story without a spooky, somewhat mysterious house and where I grew up in rural Forsyth County was nothing like that but things change.
A little mystery also helps with ghosts and there was plenty of mystery in my life in the fifties.Ā The house also had a lot of history, some of it gruesome which is certainly helpfully when looking for ghosts. Many of stories that the house’s four walls could tell never got fully explained to me before everyone who could explain died. Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one wanted to talk about them.
Upstairs above the floor with the bedrooms was a full stick-framed attic complete with walnut banisters. If ever there was an area that could house ghosts along with mysterious steamer trunks,Ā this attic was it.Ā
Our technological infirmity 
