TLDR: I'm British and traveled to Canada, got contestable parking tickets in Montreal on my Avis rented car which randomly had California plates. What could go wrong if I don't pay?

First, sorry for the English. My French is far too basic for this and don't want to use an online translator.

I am British and went to Canada for a holiday. I flew to Toronto and rented a car from Avis but it randomly had plates registered in California.

I spent a few days in your lovely city. We parked in a private lot near us arriving in the evening. We paid for 24 hours as the max we could do on the machine.

On the next day we got tickets from SPAQ. Our bad - we accidentally parked in the spaces marked as for monthly holders. Moved the car, got another 24 hour ticket and paid the $40 fine.

Second day, no issues. Paid another 24 hours. Noticed there were parking enforcement people every time we went past.

Third day, oh wow. Got another fine from SPAQ but now another from Ville de Montreal. Checked and rechecked the signs. Can't see any issues with our parking. Can't see any signs or anything saying we can only park for 24 hours. Was completely within the space. Was even in a different space than the car before as had gone somewhere the evening before in the car.

Is there any reason the tickets might be valid? It feels really unfair and wrong to me but my only option to legally challenge is to enter a pleaa of not guilty by post with a risk they set a court date in Montreal that if I don't attend would be found automatically against me.

Is there any way they could find out from the California authorities that the car is registered to Avis? This is my main worry as they would just pay and recharge me with an admin fee.

What other potential risks do I run by not paying them?

Thanks in advance!

In London, England, where the roads are narrow, the parking spaces are limited and we have plenty of availability of vans that can actually fit things in, we still get these a*holes with their unnecessary large pick up trucks made for a road system completely different to ours...

These spaces are wider than usual and long enough to fit them but they still have to park like w*nkers blocking the only footpath around!

I mean, I have a 5 door hatchback and know that my car overhangs the back wheels, as does any primary school kid drawing a car...

I've really landed on my feet here.

Background

Our road recently got upgraded to full fibre so I switched my ADSL supplier from 300MB to 1G (is it still ADSL?!?). I also have cable broadband at 600MB so last year bought an omada router with dual wan, then bought two EAPs and been quite happy with the speeds. My equipment includes a desktop PC as home server, and a mini PC with pihole and home assistant.

Cable broadband (virgin media) just came up to renewal so they offered me 1G at same price (£35 a month) to compete with the new speeds on my street.

The new 1G ADSL provider had incorrect info on their website so ended up on CGNAT instead of Dynamic IP. It said they have dynamic IP for 1G and 3G lines, so part of the reason I went for 1G was this, which I made clear to them. They took a while to try and fix it and were pretty poor so just for offered a 3G upgrade for £39pm and 6 months free !!!

They're coming on Monday to replace the modem \router for a 3G one. I can keep the old router (brand new 1G wifi 6 router) as a mesh.

Advice needed

Please help me figure out what I need to change to make the most of it?! I purposefully didn't go beyond 1G as was not expecting this much speed for many, many years!

If anybody knows good resources on upgrading speeds past 1G please let me know.

For my home network, do I just sell everything I have and start again? Do I just use their modem and WiFi?

Do I need to check all my wires and potentially upgrade them? How do you check the speeds if they don't have them printed?

On my home server, do I need to upgrade the network card to get the most out of it? Will it be fine if the connection to the pihole DNS is still 1G if it's only requesting addresses?

I am sorry for anyone on lower speeds seeing this with envy. I do appreciate how lucky I am.

TLDR: broadband provider messed up so got ridiculously cheap upgrade to 3G ADSL and also upgraded to 1G Cable (dual wan 4G). How do I make the most of this given my equipment is all 1G?!?

After self hosting several services for a few users, with SSO, backups, hardware issues etc, I really appreciate how good the IT was in my old company. Everything was connected, smooth, slick and you could tell it was secure. I had very few issues and when I did, they were quickly solved. Doing this all at scale for thousands of employees spread across the world, it is a wonderful sight to see.

Now at my current company, it's at the opposite end of the scale where I almost believe that I could do a better job by myself! They've trying to do everything you would expect but somehow doing it wrong. They are so heavy on security I have a Citrix environment that takes me 3 logins to get to, fails constantly and means I can't work without internet (like on a long train journey for work purposes recently), and on the other hand they've only just turned off admin rights for users so we could've installed anything we wanted!!! All our attachments (incoming and outgoing) are saved to a secure website (like OneDrive) and replaced with a link. It doesn't save the file names on the email so it's really tricky to find old emails if it's a document you're looking for. I could go on but just venting at this point as it's so frustrating!!!

Thank you to the good IT people out there. Your roles are so important but not appreciated enough!

I had a child and both of our parents were in another country so wanted to keep them updated with photos and videos but refused to use social media. I have been using Back Then which, to be fair, has worked pretty well. I pay a subscription and can give access to anybody I want through their email. They then have to download an app and sign in to see. It updates them if there's new photos and shows them in a nice chronological order by age. There are other features (likes and comments) but tbh, no-one really uses them and I don't care about that. For me, it's just the privacy and access control I'm after

Now I have built my home server and got to the point where it's reliable (enough), plus I'm happy with my security/SSO setup, does anybody recommend a self hosted photo sharing tool?

My son is 4 and is now randomly saying I love you to me and my wife, and at other times giving us proper tight hugs. We are so buzzing about it. Ever since he was born we have been doing that to him as neither of us got it growing up so wanted to show him all the time that he is loved, and it really feels like all that effort and work is really paying off as he is such an emotional and lovely boy.

Just wanted to share as a super proud dad...