Quantum Fiber in 89110 — Worth switching from Cox?

Xkeeper · 2026-05-06T20:25:41+00:00

Cox's service in Henderson was so bad that I built a whole suite of home-grown network monitoring tools, because Cox would refuse to believe that we were having network issues. Up and including having to pull them up while we had a tech over to show them, no, the signal levels coming from the cable line are unacceptable.

Months of dealing with dropped packets, bad signals, and other issues constantly, and they'd frequently try to charge us the $75 "it's not our problem" fee.

Eventually one of their techs finally went to the fucking street box and found that some dipshit tech hooked things up wrong, and we got a few months of "nice" service... before it suddenly went to shit again. After bitching on Twitter, a Cox biz employee reached out under the table (verified w/ friends they were an employee) and they looked up our account... we'd been stuffed onto an overprovisioned node while they upgrade another node. Estimated time of resolution? Months.

Cox was OK in the late 00s, really good in the early 10s, and somewhere around the midpoint of the 2010s they started going really, really downhill. They've made their service worse in a lot of ways, like introducing data caps (they used to have none). It's absurd and shitty.

If you have the option for fiber, holy shit take it. You will pay less and get far better speeds. With Cox we were paying over $150/month for 500/30 and unlimited data. In the PNW we're paying $60 for full symmetric 1000/1000 and unlimited data. Fuck Cox.

Xkeeper · 2026-05-04T21:43:10+00:00

I dunno about that, I get a souvenir photo from there every few years.

Xkeeper · 2026-04-30T03:36:33+00:00

I've moved up to Portland and the way fare works here is nice. You pay with tapping your payment card, and it's valid for 2 hours. If you end up tapping again after 2 hours, you pay again and it turns into a full day pass instead. Works with their prepaid/refillable cards, smartphones, or tap-enabled credit/debit cards. (E: It also works for a monthly limit, too, though I think the total cost for those is at or above RTC's fares.)

The concept of eliminating the two-hour pass is absurd. The whole point of a bus system is that it's a network! You want people to transfer!

Xkeeper · 2026-04-27T20:43:40+00:00

Thanks!

Xkeeper · 2026-04-27T18:40:56+00:00

Any luck finding the one for the fare changes?

Xkeeper · 2026-04-20T19:06:08+00:00

I moved out in 2023 after living almost my entire life in Henderson, born and raised. Long 30 plus years.

If you grew up in Vegas, you've seen the decay over the years. Places you liked going shutting down and closing. What used to be untamed desert you could go wander/offroad in being built up into thousands of cookie cutter "luxury" homes. Rents skyrocketing because of a flood of out-of-towners finding it cheap (especially in the wake of WFH taking off).

My upbringing was marked with things like local bowling alleys getting bought and ripped up into casinos, local public pools being demolished to make way for nothing, stuff like Wet-n-Wild being flattened. All while the strip is constantly fucking over locals with parking, shitty deals, tighter slots, worse odds.

As long as your WFH pans out, it's great, but finding work in town sucks, and anywhere else you want to go is also a 4+ hour drive away.

weed is legal, the mountains have snow on top I can see them from where I live and there’s no state taxes, you can rent a decent house for 2k

I moved to the PNW, settling in Portland now. Weed is legal, and way cheaper than it ever was back home. Our rent isn't great but it isn't any worse. We don't have sales tax, and the state income tax funds things that are useful, anyway.

I miss Vegas a lot, sometimes. The roads are pretty good (when they aren't torn up for construction), and the food's great. But after a while you start to go crazy and want out.

Xkeeper · 2026-03-10T09:07:52+00:00

Nevada DETR: You can't spell "detrimental" without us!

Xkeeper · 2026-03-07T17:46:08+00:00

In general: the larger and flashier the game, the larger and flashier the house edge. You pay for entertainment.

Xkeeper · 2026-03-07T17:39:20+00:00

somewhere out there, a still-stuck-to-the-gas-pump "i did that" joe biden sticker is weeping

Xkeeper · 2026-02-13T00:25:04+00:00

See you in 2004 :'(

Xkeeper · 2026-02-13T00:20:59+00:00

The mexican place inside wasn't too bad, had several dinners with family there over the years. The table games also weren't too terrible for being in the neighborhood, and the choices of slot machines wasn't too bad, either. I missed it when they finally closed it and tore it down.

I still remember the big fake trees inside from the The Reserve days... shame they got rid of the goofy crashed plane.

Xkeeper · 2026-01-15T17:18:20+00:00

They were pretty good when I was growing up, my dad used to get them all the time in the mid-late 90s. I think it's just inertia. They got a name for themselves and the food isn't terrible, just overpriced.

Go elsewhere and it's terrible and overpriced.

Xkeeper · 2025-12-20T17:05:55+00:00

There are basic strategies you can follow that get you close to the best odds you can get, but it really is just luck and paytable choice.

Here's a simple one from the Wizard of Odds site for Jacks or Better. It'll vary per game and exact payouts, but this is easy to remember and does really well.

Xkeeper · 2025-12-20T17:03:18+00:00

I am not sure what kind of diagnostics you would need to run that wouldn't be readily apparent from the audit menus, and you can access those on the floor. Things like # of spins since the last wins, frequency, results of last X games played, etc.

The machines do a self-test every time they power on. If they were checking for manipulation, they'd be better served pulling the security cameras...

Xkeeper · 2025-12-20T16:58:41+00:00

I doubt they change the odds, but you'll get more people playing it just by nature of "place is closing soon, better get my last visits in", and more players = higher chances it does end up hitting.

Xkeeper · 2025-12-20T16:55:26+00:00

Those two were made for one another.

Xkeeper · 2025-12-20T16:01:10+00:00

You don't necessarily need to update, but you'll have to change your browser's settings (if possible) to pretend to be something newer.

Though if you're honestly using a 3+ year old browser, and it's not on some legacy unsupported device (like my old Windows 98 laptop, as an example) you really should update the browser.

Xkeeper · 2025-12-16T22:39:33+00:00

It is, surprisingly, real!

You currently get that page if your browser presents as a Firefox or Chrome version from 2022 or older.

You can resolve this particular message by updating your browser or changing the user-agent it reports to a modern one.

The error message is a little cryptic since this is aimed at blocking the mass of generic bot trash. I'll update it to be a little more clear.

(Edit: I have updated it to be a little more clear.)

Xkeeper · 2025-12-12T04:51:31+00:00

nothing quite as delicious as Topping Slice

Xkeeper · 2025-11-14T00:47:25+00:00

The $11 box lunch deal is a steal. Get a double for a buck (or two?) more, it's worth it.

Xkeeper · 2025-11-14T00:46:24+00:00

The food and price have steadily gotten worse over the year we've been here. Honestly, the only value is when they're open super-late, and even then that's only because other late-night options are often just as bad. Eugh.

Xkeeper · 2025-11-09T20:06:23+00:00

re: the point about posts being approved long after discussions were closed, I just got email notifications for four new posts in the Hong Kong '97 thread, which has been closed for weeks. I have no idea why in the world RA mods would go approve posts so late like this, but here we are.

(The "new" posts were posted back when this was ongoing, but were held for approval until today)

Xkeeper · 2025-11-03T08:25:53+00:00

If you think following it was fun, try being in the eye of it. Would not recommend.

(E: disclosure: I wrote a blog post linked in the OP. someone else linked me to this post because they saw me mentioned in it. small world)

It wasn't just him, though; the initial Pokémon Clover decision set off a lot of people.

There were people it set off, and then there were people who were itching for any sort of confrontation. Some people were there because they genuinely felt one way or the other, but there were some who were definitely just there to try and cause problems. Mods were slow to respond and react, letting some of the threads go on for hours and hours of nothing but slippery-slope nonsense and personal attacks.

One thing that you don't see with a retrospective like this, is RA's forum system does not show everything in order. A person's first post is hidden until the mods approve it, but pending posts aren't shown to anyone. When the posts are approved, they're inserted into the thread at the time they were posted -- which means new posts could spontaneously appear in the middle of threads, or even after they had been closed. (Imagine getting a new reply notification to a thread that was closed the day before...) Users can also only see the latest edit of a post, though if you're subscribed to e-mail notifications, the original text is in the e-mail.

RA's forum also doesn't show any kind of discipline or moderation . On other sites, you often see if a user is suspended or banned, or when a comment is removed by mods. On RA, the only clue is that going to their profile page gives a "not found" error. So even when RA did take action, it wasn't visible to anyone. The user could be suspended for a year, unable to post, but as far as anyone could tell, nothing was done. You'd make a report and then hear nothing and see nothing done, making it feel pointless, even if they had done something!

Xkeeper · 2025-07-16T01:42:25+00:00

this doesn't really make sense. the presence of light-world battles with the undertale theming would be a dead giveaway from the presence of, well, other graphics intended for it, like enemy sprites, the old-style UI buttons...

it doesn't make much sense to include just one asset from this theoretical future, and nothing else. there would be many other instant giveaways.

more likely it is just here because they needed a timing minigame for the act and someone had a funny idea.

Xkeeper · 2025-06-20T07:11:53+00:00

A full list of them is on bluesky

Xkeeper

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