The Radio Link and the Soul: What Forty-Seven Years in Rural Infrastructure Have Taught Me About Work, Technology, Life, and Faith
Old radios still hum out on back roads, holding systems together just enough. We fix what we can, carry more than we should, and learn the hard way—we were never meant to hold it all alone.
Cameras, Cybersecurity, and Grant Money: A Practical Guide for Small East Texas Housing Authorities
If you run a small Public Housing Authority in East Texas — or sit on the board of one — you already know what the technology situation looks like. Somewhere on the property there’s a camera system that half works
Water Is Not Different: What Rural Infrastructure Engineering Is Actually Telling Us Right Now
When utilities, planners, and economic developers talk about water infrastructure, they tend to treat it as a permitting constraint — something to check off before the real planning work begins. You verify available supply, confirm treatment capacity, and move on to the site selection scorecard. Water is background.
OT CYBERSECURITY: What 2019 Engineering Practice Tells Us About 2026 Threats
The question for every OT operator reading this report is whether their current architecture gives them a fighting chance to detect lateral movement before it reaches the consequence-critical pathways, and to recover with confidence when it does. If the answer is uncertain, the path forward is to start with consequence mapping and build from there.
From Signals to Systems: Engineering as Stewardship
A specification tells you what a component should do under controlled conditions. It doesn’t tell you what happens when that component is asked to operate for twenty years in a substation control panel with inadequate ventilation, marginal grounding, and legacy protocols it was never designed to handle.
Elon Musk Is Right About the Bottleneck — But He’s Solving a Different Problem Than Most Communities Face
Because the future is being built whether communities participate or not. And the places that organize early—around power, connectivity, workforce, and fit-first development—will still matter, even in a world where some of the compute leaves the planet.
Power Reality and Fit-First AI Infrastructure Strategy for Deep East Texas
not all counties are positioned to compete for hyperscale data centers, and attempting to do so without acknowledging power-market realities exposes rural communities to financial and political risk.
Power and Connectivity Planning in East Texas
Understanding ERCOT vs MISO—and Why It Matters for Site Development
What I am thinking right now…Power Density Is the New Constraint
What is becoming clear—especially for smaller electric cooperatives—is that power density, not nameplate capacity, is the binding constraint. Most distribution substations were engineered to operate comfortably at 60–80% utilization, with 30-plus-year planning horizons, predictable load growth, and diversity assumptions that no longer hold. That model worked when growth was linear and dominated by residential, light commercial, and modest […]
Technology Services That Fix Today’s Problems — and Design Tomorrow’s Systems
John Hargrove Consulting LLC and Evergreen Technology Solutions work together to help organizations stabilize critical technology now and intentionally design what comes next.Our focus is practical, field-tested technology for businesses, utilities, public entities, and rural communities that cannot afford guesswork or downtime. We Fix Technology That Is Not Working When systems are unreliable, insecure, or […]