Same Router, Every Room
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
I ain't chasing chrome, I ain't chasing shine
Give me a black box that toes the line
Seven ports open, one glass eye
I shape the traffic, I don't ask why
Same router, every room
Rack, or cloud, or a hotel gloom
I carry the map in my own two hands
Same router, every room, that's where I stand
No pretty dashboard gonna hold my hand
I wrote the rules, I understand
Packed it in a bag, hit the road tonight
Home finds me under a stranger's light
Same router, every room
Rack, or cloud, or a hotel gloom
I carry the map in my own two hands
Same router, every room, that's where I stand
Captive portal, strange upstream wire
My own network still catches fire
Don't need to touch every phone I own
I carry my house, I ain't ever alone
Same router, every room! (same router!)
Rack, or cloud, or a hotel gloom! (own the gloom!)
I carry the map in my own two hands! (in my hands!)
Same router, every room, that's where I stand! (where I stand!)
Own the layer, own the wire
Flexible, honest, built for the fire
No magic thinking, just cold hard truth
Same damn router since I cut my teeth
The band
Highway to Prod
Two bars of unaccompanied riff, then the whole pub: open-chord crunch, the snare hard on two and four, and a high rasped howl that spends the chorus flat out at the top of its range. Half late-seventies bar-room stomp, half Sunset Strip sleaze, with a screaming lead break in the middle. Boasts about the reckless thing it did on purpose, and never once sounds sorry about it.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post Why I Keep Coming Back to MikroTik.
MikroTik earns its place by giving me practical routing power from the rack, to the cloud, to the hotel room.