Just Do It Over

BGP peering being described as something "even friends can do" is the networking equivalent of saying "even friends can perform open-heart surgery together." Sure, technically possible, but someone's definitely getting hurt. For the uninitiated: BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is how the entire internet routes traffic between autonomous systems. It's the protocol that literally holds the internet together, and misconfiguring it can take down chunks of the web (looking at you, Facebook 2021 outage). Setting up BGP peering between networks requires trust, technical competency, and usually involves at least three conference calls where nobody's mic works properly. The idea that you'd casually BGP peer with your buddy like you're sharing Netflix passwords is both adorable and terrifying. "Hey bro, wanna exchange routing tables?" is not normal friend behavior. That's enterprise-level commitment right there.

The ultimate DIY server solution: slap a threatening note on a laptop and call it enterprise-grade infrastructure. That poor laptop has been conscripted into 24/7 service against its will, now living in perpetual fear someone might actually try to use it as... a laptop. This is the tech equivalent of putting a "BEWARE OF DOG" sign on a fence when you actually own a hamster. Welcome to homelab economics: where repurposing old hardware as servers saves you money but costs your family their sanity when everything crashes because someone closed the sacred lid.

The eternal IT paradox: "Trust but verify" taken to its logical extreme. Poor Eric drove two hours just to press a power button that three people swore was already on. This is why we develop trust issues and insist on seeing error logs ourselves. Nothing quite builds character like a 4-hour round trip to flip a switch that takes 2 seconds. The server was probably running perfectly... in someone's imagination.

Remember when 720p was the gold standard of video quality? Fast forward to 2025, and streaming platforms are like "here's your 720p content that looks like it was filmed through a potato during an earthquake." Somehow we've gone full circle where bandwidth throttling and compression algorithms have turned "HD" into "Hardly Distinguishable." The irony of having 8K-capable devices to watch videos that look like they were encoded by a hamster running on a wheel is just *chef's kiss*. Progress!

The technical pedant has entered the chat! Nothing screams "I'm fun at parties" like correcting people about character encoding standards at an ASCII art gathering. That person standing in the corner made of slashes and asterisks is silently judging everyone who casually calls it "ASCII art" when it should be "ISO-8859 art" — because obviously that's what keeps them up at night. It's the digital equivalent of being the guy who corrects people saying "Frankenstein" when they mean "Frankenstein's monster." Congratulations on being technically correct — the most insufferable kind of correct!

Grandma's out here reminiscing about the golden age of web development when all you needed was a basic HTML file and FileZilla to upload it via FTP. No JavaScript frameworks, no CI/CD pipelines, no containerization - just pure HTML and a prayer that your connection wouldn't drop mid-upload. The younger generation can't comprehend how we used to build websites by basically throwing files at a server like digital confetti. Those were simpler times... before we decided every website needed 300MB of node_modules to display "Hello World".