Greetings Programs!

As I said in my last Phlog post, it's been a good while since I actively
did anything really with my Gopherspace, or SDF in general - it's not for
lack of desire, oh no, it's simply been me being tied up with other projects.

I like to keep busy by, well, being busy. I hate wasted time, but I also like
to relax where possible, so I have this weird pattern of turning whatever
hobby seems to get the best results for the least effort (and, of course, has
my current interest in general) and I focus on that. Over the past year and
a half this has changed from archaic computing projects like my BBS or this
Gopherspace and into a phone project that originally started as simply one
switch on NPSTN, but has now grown into over 130,000 phone numbers available 
on a similar VoIP network called PhreakNet.

To make a long story short, we use Asterisk PBX software to, in our own way,
re-create the phone network of yesteryear. I, for one, have chosen to re-create
multiple switches of various types. Other people may focus on one or two
particular switches, or maybe just like to have a switch system dedicated
to interesting recordings. For my setup, however, I've done a little bit of
everything.

This has really been a focus since February, with my interest in getting
into such a network beginning in Fall of 2020. Eventually I learned how
affordable special hosting for such could be and went from having never seen
a single line of dialplan code in Asterisk to, well, what I have now - an
often complimented soundscape that is as practical a method to communicate
as it is fun to listen to.

I have simulated routing, authentic sounds cut with behaviors that make sense
according to the Evan Dorobell recordings, various obscure technical
documents, or just dead reckoning. While the idea is that the project itself,
Wolf River Telephone, is a "what if" case with independants taking over
Telephony, as opposed to the Bell System, I still try to always re-create a
real switch, or use a real switch and real technology as a basis for the
behaviro and soundscape. Doing things like having step switches use
register-sender systems also allows everything to "make sense" from a user
perspective -- you wouldn't just dial a long distance call on an old SxS, you
would dial a trunk code or go through an operator as a rule, even for local
toll calls in some cases, and while simulating such in Asterisk is something
I've actually done, I found it just made the nature of people dialing around
not just my local network but the network on a whole too damned complicated.

I could go on and on about this, and intend to down the line. I just need to 
really get back into the groove of writing -- not just here in the Gopherspace
but also on my website, among other related projects.

More to come.

Chris
7:01 PM 12/17/2021