[jbawgs]

I live in eastern KY and there are a few programs like this one. In Hazard KY, another coal-bust town, I was accepted to a program to train force.com developers. Hold your scoffs please, we've learned a lot in the last few months, including using JS.

The broadband struggle is real. I worry that at some point we'll still need to relocate.

[Muuuchem]

Is broadband expensive or bad or unavailable? What about satellite internet? I live in Mississippi and broadband internet is affordable and available throughout the state and has been for years so I expected Kentucky to have the same or similar. Some places miles away from the nearest town in MS definitely don't have broadband.

[jbawgs]

1mb 'broadband' service, offered as DSL, runs about 90$ per month, and that's our only ISP. One could get satellite that's faster, but satellite internet also has low data caps, and the cost scales out of proportion. The terrain derails reliable wireless services, and the low population density rules it out anyway - folk are pretty far apart.

[yourapostasy]

I dealt with those kinds of limitations a few years back when I lived in a rural area, and if faced with the same limitations today, I recommend the following, as this is my current operating mode when on overseas trips and on limited connections while still needing to work. It still sucks, but I've done what I can to make it suck less. It still blows my mind when I observe while traveling that much of the "fly-over" communities in the US have worse or similar broadband terms, at more expensive rates (in both absolute and local PPP terms) than Nepal, or many other developing nations. The US post-industrial revolution is seemingly rotting out from within.

Basically, the high level solution is live in the CLI as much as possible, and remote into your "main driver" as much as feasible. I had to accept that I won't ever be working with my daily processes transparently. I had to make conscious decisions all the time, for example: do I work with this customer-sent Word file on the remote Windows box or download and work on my laptop?

Mostly I live in SSH and screen to various Unix boxes. Will add Mosh and tmux this year to try them out over unreliable connections. Windows RDP was okay on bandwidth caps, a license of NX was used for those few times I could not escape X11 (ship it to a remote Windows box to maintain state). ESXi for those times I had to work through a VPN and view the remote display via the VM video because the VPN cuts off all other remote access.

If you are in this for the long-haul, then your own Supermicro Mini-1U with up to 128GB RAM colo'd will probably be cheaper than even an OVH annual dedicated server.

Hope this helps.

There should be a public list of politicians who voted for blocking municipal broadband, to give tech-oriented voting blocs an easy way to inform single-issue voters how to vote against them.

[protomyth]

Who is your electric company?

[jbawgs]

Our electric company is AEP, but our ISP is TDS. They're awful.

[jbawgs]

Hadn't ever considered it, didn't know the power companies were crossing over like that. I'll definitely investigate further, thanks!

[protomyth]

If you could get a group to approach AEP to also provide internet, it might be worth it. Several electric coops in ND are doing it and succeeding.