Technical Difficulties

Allow me to preface all of this with the fact that I truly look forward to gushing about the incredible experience that is Holland and the beautiful city that we have the privilege to be calling home.
This is not that blog post.

At risk of sounding like I've fully assimilated into Dutch culture and the stereotype of complaining at any opportunity, one thing that I am appreciating the use of this blog for is as a sort of journaling of every step of this process, the good and the bad.

The last several days have been wrestling with technical problems and problems with tech, the most prominent being our website, our internet, and our computers. Please believe me that even if you don't do tech, I recommend sticking through the end, things get exciting.

Website

This likely to be the most tech-jargon section, so if that's not your bag, feel free to skip.
Our website has been lovely to work with, genuinely. We are using an open source CMS called Ghost to manage our posts, comments, admin panel, and interfacing with email services. We are hosting this ourselves on a cloud platform and have been impressed with its interface, functionality, and most of all, its performance. All of this is running on 1 core, 2gb of memory, and handling it beautifully. Installation was a process with not enough memory to handle the PIP installation of the platform, so we had to create and make full use of SWAP, but we are now running smoothly. So what was the problem?

The website itself has been great, the difficulties actually lie in the email side of things. There are two types of emails that can be sent, both making use of the Mailgun service (the only official service supported by Ghost);
Transactional (SMTP) - Single emails like confirmation when you sign up
Bulk (API) - Makes an API call to Mailgun to send emails to everyone at once

I'd set up and tested both types of services prior to us flying out of Washington, but at this point, there were two subscribers, me being one of them. Upon flying out, we shared the website to friends and family, and the subscriber list shot up (thank you all, you're so wonderful and we're so happy you're here).
By the time we'd arrived, Mailgun silently restricted our account, preventing bulk emails, but transactional continued working.

Several days of this, we noticed Ghost noting that subscribers were not notified, and after looking into Ghost's logs, we discovered that Mailgun was restricting us.
Upon reaching out to Mailgun, they accused us of being illegitimate for not having a previous mailing history from this domain, not organically obtaining subscribers, not having terms of service & privacy policy, and not having a double opt-in system for subscription.

So early one morning, I got to write up a Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy, and attempt to appeal to them that 14 subscribers is an awfully small amount of users to bulk email if I were to have added them illegitimately, and show them that due to their contributions to the Ghost project, a non-double opt-in system is not an option and we are well within practice.

It took several days of back and forth and more accusations towards us when I finally threatened to move away from their service to add my own Node-based bulk emailer to this VM. Thankfully, this seemed to escalate things enough that leadership there apologized and released the restrictions.

Loosely related to this, now that we have a working bulk emailer, I've since added commenting to blog posts if you are logged in - so I look forward to having more dialogue with you here!

Internet

We celebrated the fact that T-Mobile did, indeed continue to provide texting and data when we landed in the Netherlands. This was immense and we honestly could not have even gotten to our hotel without that (who had cancelled our reservation while we were in the sky).
We also celebrated that when we found this apartment, WiFi was a free accommodation, too, until we got to the apartment. What they neglected to tell us was that it was literally a phone network running from a router two brick buildings away from us, so if we pin ourselves to the window, only our laptops could reach the network and would still disconnect often, making the 124kbps (about the size of a pdf) from our phones feel blazing fast by comparison.

So as it turns out, living in buildings from the 1800's means they don't exactly come prepared with fiber optic, so our remaining option? Cell phone towers.
I attempted to sign up for the Odido mobile network so I could get a mobile router, but in order to buy an NL phone number or mobile router, you first have to have a NL phone number. How? Someone online suggested that going in-store rectified this easily.
The same day I wrote the legal jargon for our website, we found our way to an Odido cell company in City Center.

A quick break from the tech side of things, I need to tell you how much Holland loves coffee. When we entered Odido (formerly T-mobile in NL) needing a NL phone number and a mobile router, the first question the employee asked us at 2pm was "coffee or espresso?"

Huge commendations to Odido staff for making everything easy, and fairly affordable, we now have unlimited internet, calling, texting, home internet, tethering, and data for a grand total of €45/mo. After using the Network Survey app on my phone, I was able to find the spot in our apartment with the best connectivity, graduating us to ~300mbps (albeit 100ms ping, so nothing latency-sensitive). For those at home, this is 300x faster than what we had before with a more stable connection. It still disconnects us periodically, but this is finally a usable setup.

Computers

Okay, even if you're non-technical, this is the big exciting one.

Most of our belongings are shipping by...ship. Our computers, however, we wanted to have available as soon as possible and ensured that they would arrive safely, so we decided to ship them separately through UPS.
It took a whopping $3,200, but this was going to be our peace of mind, because after all, these have all of our photos, legal documents, business plan to earn our visas, all of our work-related files, as well as our source of entertainment. If nothing else makes it, these need to, they're our lifelines of sort. UPS even packed it all in front of me, making sure that it was extremely well packed. Paper on the inside to protect internals, 2 layers of thick plastic wrap, 2-3 layers of bubble wrap, additional layers of bubble wrap on all corners, and all gaps in this massive box filled with paper. You could drop this from orbit and it would bounce.

We did two separate shipments, since I still had Emily's computer monitor box, which left enough space for me to add her mouse, keyboard, and additional cables. This arrived first.
By arrived first, I don't mean to our apartment though, UPS decided to drop it off into an access point for us to take public transportation to go into a non-descript building down into the sketchiest basement you can picture, so that we could lug our box back through public transit - but by golly, we have it.

So thankfully this package was small enough, we could carry it on the bus, but the other package containing our computers, we knew, was going to be FAR too large for that. This HAD to come to our door.

The day comes for our computers to arrive (Dec 1st), and UPS certainly comes by, but without a text, call, email, knock at the door, or so much as talking to a neighbor, UPS moves along and claims that we rejected the package. An hour later, I get an email from UPS saying they intend to ship it back to Washington since I apparently rejected it. Now obviously, we no longer have our Washington address, so I had to put a stop to this immediately, so I called UPS' support line. Two hours, I was on the phone with this worker, trying to convince them that I am, in fact, THE Christopher on the box, and that this is THE address that it should have been shipped to. After the two hours and them getting off the phone, I was convinced no progress had actually been made.

The next morning, I thankfully wake up to a voicemail from the Washington location that I shipped out of, asking what the story was on it. Due to the time difference, I had to wait until 5pm, but I was able to give them a call and they were going to work with the Dutch UPS to resume delivery.
For an entire day though, the Dutch UPS was less concerned about getting me my package, and more about trying to find the employee to pin the blame on, but finally Dec 4, I hear it's on the way.

UPS gives a 3-or-so hour time frame in which they'll arrive or likely push the time frame back from, but I was not going to mess with chance, once I had a time frame, I was planting myself outside in the cold to do nothing but wait.
Thankfully, they didn't push back the time frame, and I only had to wait outside about 2 hours in the cold, I'd only been without feeling in my face for 20 minutes!

The truck arrives, driver steps out, looks at my door, gives and exasperated sigh and says "naawwww" while stepping back into the truck. I ran to the driver side to ask if he was UPS, to which he admitted he was. He ranted the whole time about the size and weight of the box, that it took 3 of them to move the box, and that he wouldn't help get it to my door (which is through a gate and on the back side of the building, I'll post more about that on a later date). While I'm signing for the box, he unceremoniously rolls it out of the truck and onto the ground. I was shocked and frustrated, but remembered just how protected these were, even if he wasn't aware.

I excitedly run and collect Emily and we heft the heavy box all the way to our apartment, where the box was almost exactly the same width as our hallway.
We open it and it's an impervious wall of paper and bubblewrap, just like I remember, despite the box looking like it took a casual stroll through a warzone.

My friends
This fortress of plastic and air was more than penetrated.
We pulled out the monitor first, and it looks damaged, which sucks, but understandably is the most fragile part.

Next bag, keyboard, mouse and cables, looking good at a glance. A key popped out, but I'd replaced those switches, they didn't sit super firmly, I wasn't surprised.
Lets pull out Emily's computer...

Wait...if this is breaking metal casing, how are the internal components?
Um...okay, how's mine?

To call this feeling defeating does not do it justice.
These pictures only scratch the surface of the damage done, CPU fan's ripped out of its threads killing the CPU, CPU fan, and the motherboard in one fell swoop, the front, top control panel, and the top cover refuse to stay on, and the motherboard is nowhere near lining up with its rear IO panel.

Lets take another look at the keyboard and monitor?

Hindsight is always 20/20, but the regret I have for having ever used this service as opposed to pulling out the SSD's and rebuilding from scratch on arrival is beyond measure. On top of everything we're already trying to work through, now having to wrestle with UPS Insurance on the other side of the world, troubleshooting and Frankensteining working parts together to hopefully have A working computer, and figuring out eWaste in a place where I need to use public transit and is less tech-centric to the point they only have one tiny computer shop in quite a bit more than inconvenient, especially when files on these computers were supposed to handle a part of our visa process.

Tune in next week to see Christopher practicing necromancy so that he can have a fight to the death with some historical guy named Murphy. Until then, positive thoughts, a little extra sugar, and immense amounts of patience are on the menu.

Thank you for putting up with this rant, and I really genuinely look forward to sharing with you all how truly beautiful and wonderful this place is. I appreciate you all, and...