The Next

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I guess for those people if their spouse wants season tickets for football games and their child wants to play a sport, but there's only enough money for one, then daddy gets the season tickets. How nice.

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Hot take: you have shitty examples of what a marriage is supposed to be.

I wouldn't say you HAVE to replace your ST Hub. Samsung is a stable company but the Smart Home industry can be fickle. There's always the possibility of Samsung just pulling the plug on everything without warning.

If you are looking at anything else, your 2 main options are Hubitat and Home Assistant. I personally have been running Home Assistant for over 6 years now and it has been rock solid. I don't know much about Hubitat but it appears to be a solid choice as well. HA is open source with an absolutely huge developer and support community. That means faster implementation of new integrations but it also has a bit of a learning curve. Hubitat, while not open source, looks to be very user friendly and is preferred for anyone wanting simple automations.

Some of the more useful automations I've built (with a high wife-approval-factor):

- All family members have geo-location enabled through the HA app.
---- When no one is home, it turns off any lights left on, arms the alarm if it was forgotten, and sets the thermostat into "unoccupied" mode
---- When anyone arrives home, it opens the garage door automatically (this is great for the kids being brough home by anyone else)
- If the garage is opened and the alarm is armed "Away", and if it is after sunset, all the lights turn on so we don't walk into a dark home
- The garage door and lights are on a timer to automatically close/turn off after 10 minutes. A "hold" option is available in the app to keep them open/on if needed.
- Alarm automatically arms "home" in the evening at bedtime
- Morning routines turn all the lights on, turn tv's on, begin playing music in kids rooms to wake them up, and disarm alarm (wireless button on my bedside table to activate)
- Cameras with AI object detection
----- At night, if the front yard camera recognizes a dog or cat, it will turn on the front flood lights (stops pooping pets and ignores people and cars)
----- Again at night, if the front door detects a person, it will turn on the porch lights
----- All cameras alert my phone if a person is detected anywhere other than the front yard if we are not home
- Thermostat (not a "smart" thermostat like a Nest) has better scheduling in HA and automatically switches between Cool and Heat based on inside temp and outside temp
- Washer and Dryer audibly alert our Echo devices when they are finished.
- motion detectors turn on lights on dim at night and turn off on a timer


My next projects are to set up fully local voice control to get rid of my Echos and set up room-by-room presence detection.

The actual town of Broken Bow isn’t much so I assume you mean the reservoir and Hochatown area. Lots of fun stuff to do around there. It’s a hidden gem if you ask me. Nice quiet area but people are starting to find out about it. Lots of flies.

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Tookie Johnson

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Solid coach but not really what I would call top-tier to take over a 5A school. At least not as of now. I think he’s not used to having so many kids wanting to play. Each team had nearly 30 kids last year when he was having to beg for kids just to field a team at Runnels. That just takes away valuable reps from the players that need it most. He finally gave in and made some deep cuts for next year.

They still don’t have the dudes yet to compete with the big boys but they will have a senior-laden team next year that should make some noise come playoff time. They have some legit players coming over the next few seasons so don’t be surprised to see some hardware being added to the trophy case soon.

Think of him more as a “slow burn” than a “win now” type of coach.

The market for old premise-based PBXs has taken a sharp downturn since Covid. It was already dying but WFH was the death knell when companies moved to cloud-based in droves. Larger companies that would fit in an Option11 have since moved to Teams or another alternative. Even companies that specialize in reselling refurb premise equipment have stopped looking for most equipment and are trying to unload their inventory.

You can try eBay but a cursory glance shows the cards going for $20-$30 each and controllers and cabinets around $100-$125. Wouldn't be worth the trouble to me but you may get some decent beer money. You'd still probably get left with a good bit of hardware.

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We need a men's CSAA league. Let the youngins have their fun but give me a St. Aloysius vs St. George game with a bunch of white fellas in their 40's.

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Baton Rouge's Ortho doctors and PT's.

Orchestral music has been around for centuries but it continues to have wide-reaching impacts in our modern culture. In no place is this more apparent in modern pop culture than in movie scores and soundtracks.

While time will tell if cinematic composers will garner the same historical notoriety as their more classical counterparts, the talent, creativity, and genius of these musical behemoths have carved a place at least in cinematic history. Their ability to not only create exceptionally beautiful music on its own but to then integrate into part of a larger work of art, invoking the full range of emotions, is nothing short of masterful. In many cases, the music becomes its own character and being within a movie. Orchestral music has been shown to increase brainwave activity and enhance learning and memory and without the men and women adding their amazing talents to a movie, many films would not have received the acclaim that they have or hold that special place in our hearts.

So, who are some of your favorite composers from film? Not looking for any kind of ranking. Just want to bring attention to these deserving individuals.

My nominations (notable films NOT all-inclusive):

John Williams
Absolute GOAT. I don't think anyone else has produced so many memorable pieces for the biggest movies.

Notable films - Star Wars, Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and too many others to list here


Hans Zimmer
Hans definitely has a style and it's a style that fits perfectly into action, suspense, and high-drama.

Notable films - Gladiator, Inception, Interstellar, Dune, Planet Earth, Top Gun: Maverick


James Horner
James has scored some of the most iconic and memorable films ever made.

Notable films - Titanic, Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Willow, Aliens, Star Trek, Apocalypto, Apollo 13, Avatar


Alan Silvestri
Not quite the household name as others on my list but Alan has been a part of some absolutely monster films.

Notable films - Forrest Gump, Avengers, Polar Express, Back to the Future, Cosmos (TV)


Danny Elfman
Yet another composer with a unique style all his own making his own place in cinematic history.

Notable films - Batman, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Wednesday, Fifty Shades, Good Will Hunting


Michael Giacchino
Michael has been tapped to score quite a few animated films but has demonstrated the chops to score blockbuster live-action as well.

Notable films - The Incredibles, Coco, Mission Impossible, Jurassic World, Rouge One


Other notables
Howard Shore's work on the LotR/Hobbit Trilogies deserves recognition on its own.

Ramin Djawadi has gained fame more for his television work on GoT and HotD but has quite a few films to his credit as well. He is a "young" up-and-comer.

Check out Mint. It has budgeting tools and may be able to connect to your bank. Free but there’s a ton of ads.

I re-read your OP and have some additional thoughts.

Whenever I see problems like what you describe, 9/10 times I find SIP ALG enabled. Most of the time it is a setting in the firewall and each manufacture may call it something different. It may be called SIP Inspection or SIP Transformations, but in any case it needs to be disabled. Sometimes, especially depending on your ISP, it may also need to be disabled through their equipment as well. Google for "SIP ALG Detector" and run it. It is a small utility and will tell you if it detects it on your connection.

Even if you self-host and if you are going to have SIP trunks for your service, you will still need to check for SIP ALG.

A less-likely problem is your ISP. A lot of carriers, and especially Cox, are no longer dedicating a connection, even on fiber. So, your connection may show that it is fine through your firewall but on the rest of their network, it's the Wild West. There may even be a problem at the point where they hand off to the rest of the Internet, but that would be one of the last things to check.

If you do self-host, I would lean more towards the 3CX if you have it. They are more established in the VoIP community and have much better support. I don't know much about Unifi Voice because I haven't really heard much about them. To me, it seems more like it was something they wanted to try that halfway worked but isn't really their core competency. But I haven't really heard anything bad about them either. In either case, make sure you have a quality SIP trunk provider. 3CX lists a bunch of compatible providers on their website.