Trip Report.

I felt we were able to get a good overview of Yosemite National Park by spreading out our hikes in each area. We spent our fifth day in the main valley collecting souvenirs and our sixth in Tuolumne Meadows hiking to Cathedral Lakes. We really only missed the most southern section with the Mariposa Grove. Though I hope the next time we get to visit the park will be via backpacking in their expansive backcountry. After our long travel day to the park at the start of our trip, I was happy we opted to take two nights to head back to Oregon. This broke up the drive and allotted us to make some exploratory stops along the way. I thought about trying to squeeze another short hike in before exiting Yosemite, but we both agreed we needed to make progress on our drive time. Especially since we opted to take the scenic route back via HWY-395.

Bald Mountain lookout is just south of where HWY-120 meets HWY-395, or where the eastern exit to Yosemite National Park spits you out. This is a unique stand alone mountain that rises up out of the valley to offer 365 views of the surrounding area. Though we passed on any additional hikes, we figured it made sense to make a small detour here before heading north. Especially since we do not make it down to this area often and this fire lookout stands out by itself from others. Heading south on HWY-395, we kept an eye out for the left turn since we would have to cross traffic and were not sure if it’d be obvious. The road was labeled as 1S05 on the map, but was Bald Mountain Road from the highway and on GPS. There was thankfully a turn lane to avoid blocking any traffic and allowed us to wait for a safe crossing. From there the road turns to a mix of gravel and sand – I was a bit worried about how our car would handle the sand. We followed the main use road and any signs that pointed us towards Bald Mountain. It felt pretty straight forward to us but there are junctions were one could get turned around if not careful.

The road was passible to our car up until we reached the gate. There were some squirrely sections in the sand prior, but if you keep your momentum and don’t get too close to the soft shoulders you will be fine. I’d recommend parking and walking from the gate if you are in a low clearance vehicle. Garnet was driving this time and wanted to see if we could drive the remaining distance. This would end up being one of our bigger mistakes visiting a fire lookout. The road started out fine, but it is rocky and narrow. It does not offer room to pass if you meet another vehicle except in an area right before the summit. Unfortunately before we reached that larger pull out the road got worse and I wanted to bail out. We probably would have been fine if we had committed to making it at this point, but instead we tried to turn around to avoid backing all the way down. This area was rockier than the rest of our drive, but it was still a mix of soft sand. Given those conditions, I’m sure it’s no surprise to read that we got ourselves stuck. Not majorly but enough to be concerned about how we were going to get ourselves out. Our wheels were having a hard time finding purchase and we tried adding rocks under the tires to help build traction without digging ourselves deeper. There was potential for high-lining our car or at least cause significant damage to the undercarriage. Eventually someone was driving down from visiting the summit and they stopped to help. They were able to assist Garnet in giving us a good push from the back, while directing us in the front areas we couldn’t see by ourselves. We were extremely thankful and embarrassed at the same time. Once we were back on the road we had to back down all the way to the gate to let them pass. We parked in a pull out just before the gate and walked the rest of the road, as we should have from the start.

It was only a 0.8 mile walk from the gate to the summit with 382′ of elevation gain. Strava calculated the total round trip distance at 1.77 miles, but the additional was due to walking around the lookout. We were greeted by a friendly attendant named Karen that invited us up to take a look around. She told us she was a volunteer from the San Bernadino area and that this lookout was staffed on a rotating basis of volunteers. It was cool to see a new program in action from the efforts of the FFLA to help keep this lookout in service. Karen used to work on Keller Peak LO and was the first woman to repel down El Capitan (so cool!). She told us how we just missed some other visitors that were worried about meeting cars on the road during their drive down and that she had seen a car heading up at the same time but was unsure what happened. We were too embarrassed to tell her that was us, or that we got stuck, or that they had to help us. I felt even worse to hear that we became their worst fear. There was not much we could do about it now except look back and laugh.

History.

Bald Mountain is one of only two fire lookouts still standing in the south-eastern Sierra and the only one left in operation on the Inyo National Forest. The original structure was built in 1943 by the Civilian Public Service (an agency that followed the CCC and was staffed by conscientious objectors of WWII). There is still a log cabin onsite that is believed to be part of the original buildings from this era and is still used as a warming hut for skiers in the winter. In 1963, the current 16′ x 40′ concrete block lookout with 10′ x 10′ steel cab was built. This unique structure includes living quarters, two garages, and a storage room. It was actively staffed by the Forest Service into the 1980s. It was not until recently, in 2024, that it was brought back into service via a volunteer partnership between the FFLA and the Mono Lake Ranger District.

Some public notes::::

How can one not appreciate AI as a teacher and problem-solver? ChatGPT just taught me how to make a .ics file to put on emails out to people who should attend an event. Here’s my first, for Helen Nissenbaum’s talk next Tuesday. Click on it if you’d like it in your calendar. It even has the Zoom link you’ll need.

nissenbaum

In The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon discusses “the shift from infrastructure that served everyone to technologies built around the mobile, private individual.” She concludes, “Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite – something that doesn’t need you to feel desperate in order to work.” It’s all over the place, but a worthwhile read.

This post on Antipodes is getting some action.

Algorhythms is going on here at Indiana University. If you’re here, be there.

My blog on infrastructure is getting a facelift soon: from an ancient WordPress theme to a modern one.

“Broadcast” still gets mentioned a lot. As far as I know, I am the only person in my town to watch broadcast (over-the-air) TV. You know, with an antenna.

A Reddit thread on the Canada Air flight crash at LaGuardia is frozen but interesting as it stands. It starts with a passenger who was on the plane.

Music streaming is a bad business.

Once an airport is gone, it doesn’t come back.

The Corporate BS Generator echoes BuzzPhraser, first published in the early ’90s and still there!

Somebody pointed me to this talk, which I gave back when I still had hair. Interesting how the exterior of one’s body ages while one’s voice does not. (So far.)

The four roads to the intention economy are still open.

Dr. Barkhuff‘s stoic approach to the Trump matter.

Hadn’t watched Parks and Recreation until last night. It’s funny, as promised. We were also charmed to find the show set (as are we) in Indiana.

A little reliving of a warm and fuzzy past of mine, with WQDR radio in Raleigh, in its rock years.

Now that we’ve left, Hawaii is looking great.

Please enjoy Eddie Dalton.

Remembering Kai Tak, Hong Kong’s amazing and scary waterfront airport in the heart of the city.

Is this wrong? I think so.

Overheard: “Does your body prove a concept?”

Despite my pushback, a search for “intention economy” is still thick with bad PR.

In an email response to this Wall Street Journal story about how much people hate seeing ads on their Samsung refrigerator screens, I wrote this:

Advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.

Samsung TVs come with Samsung’s own collection of channels. Two thousand of them, it seems. The UI prioritizes those, robo-subordinating the streaming services, over-the-air, cable, and your own HDMI-connected devices to places as far as possible away from the action on your screen, so you get dark-pattered into looking through those channels (old westerns, stations from Wichita and Fort Wayne, no-name news and weather services…) instead of what you want. Why? Because Samsung sells ads on those channels. Probably personalized, because they want to spy on you as well. If they go to that much trouble, and junk up their UI so much on their own TVs, why not do that on a full-screen fridge?

I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility.

Then Google bought it.

That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things it should have no business touching. It launches products without a plan. Its decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition.

I watched the service slowly get worse. More outages, stagnant speeds, the kind of indifference that sets in when a product becomes a line item rather than a mission. Like it was for Charles Barr, founder of WebPass. When Barr was running the show, the speeds went from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. All for less than $50 a month. Eventually the speed went to a gig per second. It was one of the fastest in the country.

Since then, as competitors like Sonic were pushing 10 Gbps across San Francisco, my WebPass connection sat frozen at 1 Gbps. The founder used to pick up the phone. Now I was just another entry in a spreadsheet at Alphabet, buried inside “Other Bets,” a division whose name tells you everything about how seriously Google took it.

Google is a company where nobody has real product conviction anymore, just bonus targets and quarterly metrics. It wears a veneer of innovation, but in reality it is a financially optimized extraction machine run the McKinsey way.

Anyway, now comes the news I didn’t want to hear, but knew was going to happen anyway.

Google has sold the whole thing, Google Fiber (including WebPass), to Astound Broadband, owned by Stonepeak, a private equity group. They are calling it a “merger.” It is not a merger. A merger implies two equals coming together to build something. This is a flip. Google wanted off the hook for a money-losing division, and they found a buyer. Customers are just assets in the transaction, transferred like furniture.

Here is the most telling detail. So far, Alphabet has not filed an 8-K with the SEC as part of the announcement. An 8-K is what public companies file when something material happens. Google’s lawyers apparently concluded that losing your internet provider did not rise to that level. GFiber sat inside “Other Bets,” a segment that in 2025 generated $1.54 billion in revenue across everything Alphabet deemed non-core, while losing $16.8 billion. GFiber itself was less than half a percent of Alphabet’s total sales. To their investors, this was a rounding error. To you, it’s your internet connection. That gap tells you everything about where you stood in the relationship.

Then there is Dinni Jain, the CEO of GFiber who will now lead the combined company. His story is presented as reassurance, a steady hand, a cable industry veteran, a man with a Vermont farm who talks about patience and humility. A banker turned cable guy turned Google, and humility. Lolz.

But look at the actual career. He started at NTL, a UK cable company that filed Chapter 11 in New York in 2002. At the time, its $10.6 billion bond default was the largest in US corporate history. He left a year before the collapse. Moved to Insight Communications, a cable operator largely owned by the Carlyle Group, which Time Warner Cable bought for $3 billion in 2012. He became COO of Time Warner Cable, which in turn was acquired by Charter. Every company he has run has been consolidated, absorbed, or flipped. He made enough money to retire to a farm in Vermont in search of humility. And pigs have wings too.

He was hired as Google’s third CEO “out of retirement” to run the fiber unit in 2018.

To stabilize a business in freefall.

He did real work. Under Jain, GFiber cut support calls in half and moved to ten-minute technician appointment windows. In 2024, he hired GFiber’s first-ever CFO. That tomTomed the real plan. You don’t hire a CFO to run an internet service. You hire a CFO when you are preparing to sell. He stabilized GFiber well enough to make it sellable. And now it is being sold.

Let me tell you what Astound actually is, because the name was invented to obscure it. And while we are on the subject of names, notice that Google rebranded “Google Fiber” to “GFiber” before this deal closed. Scrub the Google brand, hide the Astound connection, give customers nothing to search for. That is a classic private equity move. Polish the turd before you sell it.

The only reason I know about Astound is because when I lived in New York I signed up for an upstart called RCN. It wanted to take on Time Warner Cable. And Verizon. And AT&T. I like upstarts. My whole life is betting on the underdog. Monopolies suck, destroy innovation, and throttle progress. RCN convinced me that my apartment needed them just by existing. Sucker, that was me, because in a few months I found that what seemed like startup gold was spray tan on a tin can.

I moved to San Francisco. And because I am like a jilted lover, I kept tabs on that shit show. Being a broadband nerd made it simple. So now you know why I am not “astounded” by Astound. I know the genesis.

In February 2017, private equity firm TPG bought RCN, a cable operator in New York, Boston, Chicago, and DC, for $1.6 billion, and simultaneously bought Grande Communications in Texas for $650 million. A year later, TPG added Wave Broadband on the West Coast for $2.36 billion. Then came the bolt-ons. enTouch in Texas, Digital West in California, WOW!’s Chicago and Maryland markets for another $661 million, Harris Broadband in central Texas. In January 2022, they stapled all of it together under a new name, Astound. The name came from a small Bay Area provider Wave had previously acquired.

In August 2021, before the rebrand, Stonepeak bought the entire platform from TPG for $8.1 billion, $3.6 billion in equity plus $4.5 billion in assumed debt. That is a leveraged buyout. The debt sits on the balance sheet and has to be serviced from operating cash flow, which means it has to be extracted from customers.

Last July, Astound had to refinance. Stonepeak injected another $400 million, pushing debt maturities out to 2029 and 2030. They called it good news. What it actually was: a company under pressure, buying itself more time.

Now add GFiber and WebPass to that debt stack.

The playbook is not complicated. Low introductory pricing, step-function rate increases after twelve months, retention discounts for customers who call to cancel, and underinvestment in everything that doesn’t show up on a cash flow statement. The BBB and Trustpilot reviews are a graveyard of billing complaints and broken promises.

Astound makes the old Comcast look almost saintly. At least with Comcast you knew what you were getting. Astound is as dodgy as there are angles in a tapeworm. Google Fiber’s reviews on Yelp are already failing grades on billing, customer service, support, and performance. Under a PE regime, it is only going to get worse.

Game is the game.

And debt is the game PE plays. Stonepeak has billions in debt to service. That debt requires predictable and increasing cash flow. The easiest way to get more cash flow from a captive broadband customer is to raise prices. There is no mystery here.

What angers me most is the language. The GFiber email I received, and I suspect you got one too if you’re a customer, promised that “nothing is changing about your service.” Not the speed. Not the price. Not the “extraordinary customer experience.” This is the kind of sentence that only gets written when everything is about to change. Companies actually keeping their promises don’t need to make them this explicitly.

“Nothing is changing” is corporate for: we need you to stay through the deal close.

The regulatory picture offers little comfort. The FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr views consolidation favorably. The current commission is not going to save you. California’s Public Utilities Commission is the one real lever. The CPUC has actual teeth. It forced Verizon to make concrete commitments before approving the Frontier acquisition.

Citizens can engage that process. Advocacy groups can push for price locks, service standards, build-out requirements. It won’t block the deal, but it might constrain the worst impulses of a PE-owned operator trying to wring cash from a captive customer base. Given the demographic profile of WebPass customers, none of the consumers are going to complain. They will just pay-up.

Here is the worst part. There is a better option in San Francisco. Sonic.net. And no, it’s not available in my building. A lot of tech people are soon going to find out that Google has sold their internet experience to a terrible company, with a patchwork infrastructure and a poor customer track record.

Let me be specific about that infrastructure. Astound is not one network. It is five or six different networks, built at different times, by different operators, using different equipment, stitched together under a single brand with a management layer on top. As of today, 86% of Astound’s footprint is still HFC, the old hybrid fiber/coax cable architecture from the 1990s. Only 14% is genuine fiber-to-the-home.

Their broadband upgrade path runs through a Harmonic virtualized platform that can theoretically be migrated to fiber someday. Notice the word “theoretically.” Their mobile service rides T-Mobile’s network. Their TV runs on TiVo, distributed through a DirecTV streaming partnership. Their WiFi hardware is Amazon eero. None of these are bad choices individually. Together they describe a company that has outsourced every layer of its stack to someone else.

Google Fiber changes the mix somewhat. GFiber brings about 2.8 million locations passed across 15 states, approaching 1 million subscribers, all on genuine fiber. Markets include Kansas City, Austin, Atlanta, Nashville, Salt Lake City, and a recent expansion into Las Vegas. WebPass adds fixed wireless and ethernet connections in dense urban markets. That is a real fiber asset being dropped into a predominantly HFC platform. Whether the combined company upgrades the HFC side to match, or lets the GFiber advantage erode to fund debt service, is the question that determines what kind of company this becomes. History suggests the latter.

The founding promise of WebPass was simple. Fast internet, honest pricing, people who answer the phone. Google broke that promise through neglect. Astound will break it by design. These are two different kinds of failure, but the customer ends up in the same place.

In the shit.

March 27, 2026, San Francisco

Horror has never been a genre I have read a lot. For one, I don’t understand the desire to be scared. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with childhood little-t trauma about getting lost in a Halloween haunted house. For another, I can have an overactive imagination; I couldn’t finish the first season of The Walking Dead because the zombies were too realistic. (Though I never had that issue with reading the comics.)

Cosmic horror, as a genre, even less so. I’ve read a few Lovecraft stories here and there, but not enough that I would willingly read more, and I’ve avoided movies of the same, like Event Horizon. It’s just not my thing. Usually.

I made an exception with Yuval Kordov’s excellent The Shadow Over Psyche Station, and I’m so glad I did.

This is mostly because Yuval is one heck of a writer; his prose is so dense and deep, and it’s just a joy to read. There aren’t a lot of authors out there these days writing the way Yuval does; he hearkens back to science fiction and horror of decades past. Another reason is that I’ve become infatuated with the new-ish genre of incensepunk. While not Catholic or Orthodox, I did grow up in south Louisiana, where most of my friends were Catholic (or Catholic-adjacent). Thus, I know enough about Catholicism to get by, and nothing in this genre is a big surprise in terms of the denominational trappings.

Yuval is heavily involved with Incensepunk Magazine, and is a kindred spirit in that he, like me, is neither Catholic or Orthodox; though you wouldn’t know it to read his works, most of which fit in to incensepunk. We both have an outsider’s perspective we’re bringing to our enjoyment of the genre, and that mutual enjoyment is one reason why when he offered me the chance to read an advance copy of his next novella, I jumped right on it.

The Shadow Over Psyche Station is cosmic horror with incensepunk tones, a science-fiction tribute to Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Inssmouth. It follows the trip of Imperial Assessor Marcus O. as he investigates the various orbital stations around the solar system that provide the numerous minerals and other necessities required to keep the Martian Empire going, now that Earth isn’t much help. The last station on his list is the one farthest out, and the one that hasn’t been in contact with the others for some time, Psyche Station. The station is woefully behind on its ore shipments back to the other stations as well as the Red Planet, and Marcus’ superiors want answers as to why.

As for Marcus himself, despite his occupation and the setting, he is a very relatable character. An everyman who, while wanting to be devout to God and the Empire, is also a just trying to do a good job and secure that next promotion, preferably one that doesn’t require any more excursions in to the void of space. Who among us hasn’t wanted to impress the boss enough to get a cushier gig?

The void itself is a bit of a character, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

If the discomfort Yuval paints in the initial going about the cramped conditions of the shuttle rides between the stations isn’t enough for Marcus, what he finds on Psyche Station once he arrives only heightens how uncomfortable and out of his element he feels. He has contact with….no one. No one human, at least. The Psyche Station shuttle pilot is non-communicative, no one is there to greet him upon arrival, and the only “person” who appears to speak to him is a hologram AI. An AI which shouldn’t exist within the station. The tension only ratchets from there, as Marcus navigates to his assigned quarters and begins discovering more than he, or his superiors, bargained for.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot from here, other than to say the psychological intensity is constantly ratcheted up. With every discovery, with every encounter, Marcus realizes how far gone he, and the Station, are. Especially when he feels pulled, nay, called, in to the Void. Down to 16 Psyche itself, to where the Station’s inhabitants have also been called.

But in a place where the void of space stands in not only for itself, but the void of Good itself, there are lights in the darkness. Father James is one of those. At one point Marcus seeks out the chapel, to go to Mass, and Father James reluctantly lets him in. He has already seen the things Marcus is only beginning to suspect. And the priest’s reappearance later in the story is a moment of incensepunk glory.

Yuval’s writing is once again on prime display in this story. His pacing is tight, his descriptive language masterful, his ability to pull the reader in and make you feel what Marcus is going through impeccable. Touches such as how the reader learns the name of the sinisterly inhuman AI is an utterly masterful reveal by Kordov.

Needless to say, I was blown away by The Shadow Over Psyche Station, finishing it in less than 36 hours. (Hey, I had to sleep and work some where in there.) If cosmic horror and incensepunk are in your wheelhouse, you should definitely pick this one up. If those genres are not your bag, give it a chance anyway. Like me, you may find yourself appreciating it for the incredible prose it contains.

5/5 phins
Amazon: Paperback, ebook
Other retailers from the author’s site

If you’ve ever wondered what Indiana Jones might be like in the modern day, Alex Dekker may be giving us a glimpse in his debut thriller, Desert Heist.

Raised on history and archaelogy by his academic father, Nathan Wilde is a Green Beret who left the US Army after years of service in the Middle East, culminating in a fierce battle in Yemen which left several teammates dead. Throwing himself back in to his studies, Nathan is working on his PhD, and his dissertation proposal is to search for the lost city of Ubar in present-day Saudi Arabia. When the proposal is rejected by the Harvard doctoral committee, Wilde decides to pursue the search on his own, convinced of the possibility of his own research.

Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that the only way he can move on is to throw caution to the wind and seek out the city himself. With all legal means of entering Saudi Arabia blocked, Wilde decides to enter the country’s infamous Empty Quarter through a place he’d like to forget: Yemen. Doing so means he’ll need help, and he turns to former Special Forces teammates for that. Along the way they are joined by Ana Metry, a geologist searching for her missing father, whom Nathan was attempting to contact, given his research on underground water tables in Saudi Arabia could prove helpful in locating Ubar.

The entire group is hunted by a former Spetsnaz operative, now working for a private client, which wants the information the elder Metry had discovered to remain secret. Not to mention dealing with Al Qaeda terrorists using the border towns of Yemen and Saudi Arabia as staging posts, and the utter harshness of the Empty Quarter itself.

Dekker brings his own background as a member of the elite Green Berets, and his love of history, to bear in Desert Heist. His knowledge in both areas shines through, lending weight and credibility to the plot and characters without weighing the story down. Nathan is far from a unstoppable Jack Reacher-like character. He is very human, and Dekker allows all the emotions of frustration, anger, and love flow through him for the reader to take in as the story progresses.

All in all, a solid debut, and one thriller fans should love!

4/5 phins
Amazon: Hardcover, ebook
Bookshop: Hardcover, ebook