I was born before ADSL existed. Not before the internet - I'm not that old - but before it became something you *lived in*. The internet of my childhood was a thing you did on purpose, like going to the library, except the library was in the living room and made a sound... You've got to hear it to understand.

For those who never heard it, and for the nostalgic among us.

The sound of the internet arriving, mid-90s: dial tone, the number being dialed, and the handshake. Recording by William Termini, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The first computer I remember wasn't mine. It was the family's, which meant it was mine only in the sense that I was the one who kept touching it. The hard disk was small enough that installing anything felt like a negotiation. Delete a game to make room for a new one. Copy your save files to a floppy first, because you *knew* - everyone knew - that the reinstall would go wrong and you'd need to roll back. We kept our lives on 1.44 megabytes, and I don't remember it being painful. I remember it being *exact*. You counted. You chose. Nothing was abstract yet. Then the CDs arrived, and with them the smell. You know the one. That faint plastic-and-ink smell when you crack a shrink-wrapped box, the manual still stiff, the disc seated in its little foam ring. An operating system used to arrive as an *object*. You held the whole thing in one hand. Windows 98 was roughly the weight of a sandwich. I unboxed my first OS like it was a gift, because to me it was - someone had decided what computing was, printed that decision on 200 pages, and handed it to me at a shop. I didn't know it then, but that's the era I keep returning to when people ask why I run my own servers. Everything since has been a slow removal of edges. The disk became a download, the download became a stream, the stream became something that's just *there*, on someone else's machine, in a country you'll never visit, under a company you've only ever seen as a logo on a billing page. Convenient. Extremely convenient. I won't pretend I didn't enjoy every step of it. But the floppy era taught me a lesson I've never unlearned: I like knowing where things are. The first machine that felt like *mine* rather than the family's was nothing special. I've seen the spec sheet in my memory so many times that the actual numbers have worn away, and I've decided I prefer it that way. What matters is that it was the first one where the question wasn't "what can this computer do?" but "what can I make this computer do?" That question has cost me an enormous amount of money, sleep, and kitchen table space, and I regret none of it. So here's where this blog is going, and why the name is a small joke I'll explain later. Most of what I do for a living is cloud. Real cloud, big cloud, the kind with regions and availability zones and a support plan. I'm not here to tell you the cloud is bad - that would be a strange thing for someone whose paycheck depends on it, and also it would be untrue. The cloud is astonishing. I like the cloud. But at home, on hardware I can touch, I run [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io). Not on a Raspberry Pi cluster arranged on a shelf for the photo, though I've done that too, and the photo looked great. I mean actual metal. Machines with fans you can hear, disks you can pull, a rack that hums in a corner of the house and draws real watts off a real circuit that I wired. And the honest pitch is not "it's better." The honest pitch is this: I like knowing where things are. Bare metal is where things are. When my homelab works, I know exactly which machine, which disk, which cable, which rule in which firewall. When it breaks - and it breaks, regularly, at inconvenient hours - I know exactly which machine, which disk, which cable, which rule. There is no dashboard standing between me and the failure. The failure is *physical*. I can put my hand on it. Some people would call that a disadvantage. I call it the closest thing to the floppy-disk era that exists in 2026. The catch, and I will never downplay this on this blog: it costs time. An enormous amount of time. Kubernetes on bare metal is a hobby the way a dog is a hobby - it's fine when you're there, and it knows exactly when you're not. The cloud gives you weekends. The rack does not. If you're reading this deciding which side to pick: the cloud is probably right for you, and I say that without condescension, because for years I picked the cloud too, and it was the right call, and I still make it every day at work. This blog is about the other side of the ledger. The part you can't bill.