If my daily post fails to appear, it probably means my telephone service is down. I am back to using dial-up exclusively, and when the phones go dead, the phone company (Verizon) can take weeks, weeks! to fix it. Apparently there is no money in land-lines any more because service has gone from terrible to absolutely astonishingly non-existent. I believe that we, in such rural locations as mine, have worse service than most third-world countries.
Before now (February, 2012), I had what is called “broadband over the powerlines” which was not very dependable, but quite a bit faster than dial-up. And, of course, it did not require phone service. Unfortunately, the company, IBEC, which provided it to my location, has died.
