That 90% number gets thrown around a lot but nobody ever stops to think about what that 10% actually costs you. Missing out on the last 10% of performance or features means you're gonna replace it way sooner than you planned, so you end up spending more money in the long run anyway. Plus that 10% is usually the stuff that separates a frustrating device from one that actually feels good to use every single day. You're basically paying for a product that's already outdated the moment you buy it. The math only works out if you're okay with settling for something that works okay right now but will feel like junk next year.

I was 150 pages into The Goldfinch and the whole drugstore scene just dragged on forever. I kept waiting for something to pop off but it felt like watching paint dry. @the_logan I think for me it was the characters, especially Theo who just seemed to mope around. My buddy Dave read the whole thing and said the same thing, he only finished it because he'd already paid for the book. Have you given up on it completely or are you still thinking about pushing through?

My buddy over at a state university has been running MPLS on campus for around 5 years now. He told me last month their network team got pressured by a vendor to switch to EVPN-VXLAN. They spent a whole summer migrating one building and it honestly turned into a nightmare. Lots of weird routing issues, some staff couldn't connect to certain servers for weeks. He said they ended up rolling half of it back because the new setup just wasn't as stable for their old gear. Take that with a grain of salt since every environment is different, but I'd be real careful thinking MPLS is dead just because some sales guy says so.

Flipped my lid when I read about that napkin sketch! I had a guy in Scottsdale once pull out a college-ruled notebook and ask me to diagram how his whole house electrical ties into the main. He asked about bonding jumpers and everything. I spent an hour on that driveway drawing it out with a sharpie. He tipped me $50 and said he was framing the napkin. I still can't believe people like that exist!

Yeah that "cheating" thing is exactly what I felt at first too. But then I realized if it makes you stop and stare for five minutes, who cares what it's printed on or how it was made.