{"id":11038,"date":"2026-04-01T21:14:49","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T21:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/?p=11038"},"modified":"2026-04-01T21:14:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T21:14:49","slug":"april-2026-newsletter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/?p=11038","title":{"rendered":"April 2026 Newsletter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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The Curious Incident of the Internet<\/h2>\n

A Conversation with Jesse Castro<\/h1>\n

By Dale Dauten<\/h4>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
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As we look back on the season that\u2019s coming to a close and all that\u2019s gone so well, it occurred to us that we have a case of \u201cthe dog that didn\u2019t bark.\u201d That\u2019s the phrase that comes from a Sherlock Holmes story about a stolen racehorse. Holmes is talking with a police detective about the nighttime theft, leading to this exchange, starting with the detective\u2019s question to Holmes:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIs there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dog did nothing in the night-time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the curious incident,\u201d remarked Sherlock Holmes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Holmes had concluded that if the watchdog didn\u2019t bark it was because the culprit was someone the dog knew, thus creating a narrow list of suspects.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the case of the park, the silence was the relative lack of issues with the internet. For years, tech issues had bedeviled management and residents, but then along came Jesse Castro and his team. That was four years ago, and when we last wrote about Jesse, two years back, we were able to include this:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yes, Jesse and his team are park heroes, having succeeded in overcoming the many challenges that thwarted other IT consultants. George Igualt, head of management for the parks, says, \u201cFinding them was like finding a needle in a stack of needles,\u201d by which he meant that there are plenty of companies thinking\/saying they could solve the parks\u2019 unique infrastructure problems, but, as George, puts it, \u201cThere was no off-the-shelf solution — Jesse had the only outfit I know that could solve our issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We caught up with Jesse recently, on a day when he was visiting the parks with this wife, Christie.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
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We reminded Jesse that back in \u201924 he had said this: \u201cWhen we started the service was at 10 megabytes per second. We\u2019ve increased that six times, to 60 megabytes. That\u2019s getting out of a go-cart and jumping into a Mercedes.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And have speeds progressed further?<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, it\u2019s better now \u2013 it\u2019s a hundred.\u201d\u00a0But Jesse isn\u2019t content, explaining that he has been gathering proposals to make the next jump to higher speeds. \u201cWe’re looking at what we need to do right now to make sure that we’re bulletproof in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even with all the progress, there are still occasional outages, and we asked what tends to be the biggest cause. Jesse smiled and said, \u201cOur biggest issue is big trucks and not paying attention. We had the American Furniture Warehouse come out here and they just demolished one of our pedestals and didn’t even know.\u201d Speaking of pedestals brought a memory back for Jesse:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThere was one time that Mickey [that\u2019s Mickey Tipton, Jesse\u2019s partner] and I came out and we couldn’t figure out what the heck is going on — why did we lose power all of a sudden? Inside the pedestals there are amplifiers, boosted from one amplifier to the next. It’s a big chain — you start here, you go, say, 100 feet, then you have a booster that pushes the power to the next one, then to the next. But we lost an entire segment and couldn’t figure out why. So, we started going from pedestal to pedestal to try to track it down. I pulled up one pedestal and Mickey opened up the case and it’s on fire, literally on fire. That was one of the craziest outages we\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But now, as the system is improved, Jesse tells us, \u201cThings are running well we don’t get calls like we used to. \u00a0Mickey and Damian and Stephanie, those three are instrumental in keeping the parks running really, really well. That makes life easy because then I can do the other things that I need to do and keep the businesses going.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of those businesses is AI consulting and we took the opportunity to have Jesse weigh in on the changes to society AI will bring. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to worry so much,\u201d Jesse commented. \u201cYes, there are some things they could go crazy. Yes, it could be dangerous. But I just can’t see it being as dramatic as a lot of people see it and believe me, I’m deep in the trenches in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As for it taking all the jobs, he used marketing work as an example: \u201cMarketing is fascinating because you can use AI to help you generate an idea and create the story. But it will never replace a human. This is the one thing that people need to understand: if you\u2019re getting a message out, nobody can talk like you. Nobody can say it the way you do. I can give you a script and it\u2019ll be exactly like I say it, but my stuff will work and yours won’t. \u00a0Those are my words and that’s how I talk. People know that it\u2019s my authentic self. When you don’t have it, that\u2019s easy to pick up on.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Speaking of his authentic self, let\u2019s close with some personal background on Jesse, updating our profile from two years ago.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

JESSE CASTRO, A Brief Bio<\/p>\n

When we sat down with Jesse to talk about internet service, we also wanted to learn something about his background and how he came to be an internet hero while looking nothing like the geeky kid of the tech stereotype.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
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You meet people who always knew exactly what they wanted to do in life, those lucky folks who knew in grade school that they were destined to be a firefighter or veterinarian or librarian. That makes life planning a lot easier. And then there are the trial-and-error people \u2013 that\u2019s most of us. And Jesse.<\/p>\n

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As a kid growing up in Colorado, he dreamed of being an actor and singer and studied for both, but also dreamed of being a pilot. He started pilot training but discovered he was mostly colorblind, which meant he couldn\u2019t qualify for most flying jobs. On top of all that, he also loved cars and learned auto mechanics and ended up working at AutoZone and other car parts stores. While working with cars, he developed another fascination: computers. (\u201cIt was the modems \u2013 how cool that people could talk to each other over computers.\u201d) With an interest in IT and an aptitude for it, Jesse found time to do some moonlighting, starting what he called Smart Guys Computing.<\/p>\n

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Being self-taught, he figured he\u2019d need to start taking IT classes; however, when he took his first class, the teacher soon hired Jesse to help fix his own computer problems. That skill eventually took young Jesse to jobs with Intel and Motorola and then with a software company. It was that last employer that changed his career trajectory, as Jesse was laid off and decided he would never let that happen again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The decision about the future became easier when Jesse turned his full attention to working for himself fulltime. He recalls his promising start: \u201cI made 4K that first week.\u201d The company grew and soon Jesse had multiple businesses, including AI, cybersecurity and marketing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Looking back on his life, Jesse says, \u201cI\u2019ve failed more than most, but I don\u2019t like that word \u2018fail.\u2019 There\u2019s a quote \u2013 Nelson Mandela said it first\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2018You either win or you learn.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Curious Incident of the Internet A Conversation with Jesse Castro By Dale Dauten As we look back on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11039,"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11038\/revisions\/11039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silveridge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}