Only if you provide the materials and the painter provides only labour. Otherwise you're depriving the painter of his stock of paint.

Especially if your income is already tax free. I'd love to put a PV solar system in here, but there's no way I can foot the bill. All of the cushy 30% tax credits don't apply because I have zero taxable income.

I got written up once because my ticket stats were radically different than the other people on my team. 15% lower "total time on tickets" but 20% more tickets closed. I was apparently fudging numbers and closing unresolved tickets.

Fortunately, a trip to HR with a ream of printouts from closed tickets proved otherwise.

Still left the company a few months later.

No, my router routes. The closest thing to a service that it provides is NAT. I don't worry about it getting buried in connections because I bought a router (Cisco 881 at a surplus yard) that would stand up to the abuse I throw at it.

The chances of that are a million to one. But still....

Yeah, but what happens when you need support from Whizbang Application Widgets, Inc and you discover that they've closed up shop and gone under?

At least with an inhouse application, you've got the code and can see what needs to be done/fixed.

They're using Word for desktop publishing and (god help us) web page design. They're using Excel as a database application front end..

I tried it too. I may be one hell of a programmer/admin/network monkey/guru/whatever, but I am not a sales person. I failed miserably selling myself. I'd usally end up taking on shit projects that I underbid myself on to get the job and the worktime versus pay wasn't paying the bills. It put a hell of a strain on me and my wife & kid. After a year of being able to survive only by selling my stash on ebay, I went back to "work".

Nowadays would be even more of a joke. I retired on disability a few years ago but I still try to pick up a side job or two here & there to supplement income and those jobs end up being maybe one every other month. I simply can't compete with the "programmers" in India or Ukraine who will bid a project at $100 that I wouldn't touch for under $1000 despire the fact that the $100 project turns into $5000 after the overseas clusterfuck.

There's also been a shift in the mentality of how well computers operate. It went from not tolerating any kind of downtime to the Windows mentality of crashing and "That's just how computers are".

Most definitely. There was a surge when the FCC created the No-code Tech in 1991. That's when I got my license. I was a UHF-VHF monkey (mostly satellite) until I upgraded to Extra after the whole code requirement was dropped. Now I enjoy PSK-31 DX.

I'm teaching my 9 year old enough to pass her Tech license.

If you're in the piney parts of southeast Texas (Beaumont, Houston, Jasper, Vidor), you'll discover something interesting about 800Mhz. A pine needle is almost the same length as an 800Mhz radio wave and thus they make great RF absorbers. Get into a good dense grove of pine trees and you'll not be able to hear shit.

The folks where I used to live in the Texas hill country got a big hardon once for an 800Mhz trunked system until they discovered they'd have to put in 20ish separate repeater sites to cover the county.

Instead they invested their drug bust money in a system that you could hear all the way down to Corpus Christi but couldn't talk back into from 20 miles away without a 100W mobile.

FTA: Both the National Cancer Institute and several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research.

Of course they did. If you cure cancer with one shot, the cash cow of chemo drugs dries up for Big Pharma and the cash cow of donations dries up for the American Cancer Society and other 'non-profit' organization.

The county I grew up in went with this thinking. They scored about $350K in a drug bust and used that to buy a high powered (transmitter output was 350W) Motorola 150Mhz encrypted radio system. The transmitter was located in the Texas hill country northwest of San Antonio and you could hear it down in Corpus Christi, but you had to have a 100W mobile to be able to talk back into it from about 20 miles from the transmitter. As a comparison, my father and I put a 75W Amateur Radio 145Mhz repeater system with cheaper equipment and smaller antennas and could cover the entire eastern half of the county with a 5W hand-held.

Then they had to shitcan the whole encryption system about 5 years later when the radios started dying and they couldn't afford to buy new encryption-capable Motorola radios. The guy in charge of the county radio system was a Tait dealer, and oddly enough the county started buying Tait radios.

I have an iPhone, you insensitive clod! I can't just "remove the battery"!.

Better than the technical wizardry of my previous employer.

The main authentication server fell over one morning (as it did once a week due to heat in the server closet). Engineer called and said it had fallen over. I said "Okay, just go reset it. It'll live over it". Engineer couldn't find the reset button, so he just unplugged the rack.

In that rack was the file server, auth server, Asterisk server, and a personal server of mine. It took 4 hours to recover from that.

Why was there a heat issue in the server closet? Because I was not allowed to put those servers in the data center because management felt they needed to be closer to the end users for performance. Nevermind the fact the office and datacenter were 60 yards apart and tied together with GigE.