Rumor has it that the DSL provider we've been happily using for several years may be going poof. I found a list of providers serving the area, but it's just a list, no reviews. I'd be interested in hearing from local people using providers other than Telerama (current) and Verizon (previous, rejected for sucky quality on pretty much every front).

Our needs are fairly simple, but we do require always-on service (no PPPoE stuff with its manual activation and whatnot) and we much prefer a fixed IP address so we can support incoming service. Reliability (with good support when that fails) is more important than cost, though obviously we'd like to keep costs reasonable. All other factors being equal, I prefer to patronize local companies over national providers. We do not have wiring in place to support cable, so we're not looking to change technologies at this time.

And if anyone has information that would counter the remors about Telerama, please let me know. We've had nothing but quality service from them and we'd hate to be part of a stampede based on bad information. However, we also don't want to be stranded, and this doesn't sound good right now.

We get our DSL service through Telerama. Allow me to sing their praises.

We've been seeing apparently-random short network outages just often enough to be annoying, and this is new behavior. The problem could be the DSL service, the modem, or a physical problem on the line, but how do you tell which?

So I wrote to Telerama's support folks to ask if they had any thoughs on this. In particular, had they received similar reports from anyone else? They had not, so they guessed that it probably wasn't them.

They then said "here, let me file a trouble ticket with Verizon on your behalf" and, when the results of that came back today, "sounds like your modem; would you like to borrow one from us to test with?".

I really didn't want to have to go out and buy a modem on the possibility that that was the source. Now we don't have to. Yay Telerama for helping us out with something that's not really their problem!

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

Ah, what a joy. I have cast out the demons of stupidity (that would be Verizon) in favor of Telerama. The installation was nearly painless, the pain involved was a problem at our end (not theirs), and the tech-support people (who answer 24 hours a day, by the way) were cheerful, helpful, and not clueless bozos like the guys over at Verizon. (I almost wrote "Luddites", but they obviously don't reject technology wholesale. It provides them an income, after all.)

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Well, maybe tonight I'll be able to figure out what's wrong with the damned network connection. Off I go... (It's got to be between the modem and the outside world, and thus Verizon's problem. But the modem itself is the only part I can't either swap or drop out of the loop, so it could be an actual hardware failure. I'll admit, though, that I am trusting in Westel not to light the "ready" light if there's no signal coming in.)

We have a Stupid DSL Setup in our house, but I'm not sure what to do about it. (This thought is brought to mind by friends who were @home customers.)

Once upon a time, I worked for a company that had a policy of paying for a second phone line to support a modem (back in the days before DSL was available). They would pay for installation once.

When Dani and I moved into our house, DSL was available so we decided we wanted that. The company was in the process of figuring out its policies for paying for DSL. They told me to use the modem policy -- get a new phone line, bill the DSL to that, and put the phone line in the company's name.

But, I said, DSL doesn't compete with voice on the line; you don't *need* a second phone line. We can just add DSL to our existing line and you can pay (or reimburse) the DSL part of the bill.

No deal, they said. They would only pay for DSL if it came on a separate bill to them in the company's name. No reimbursement, no layering on an existing phone line.

Well, we said, this is profoundly stupid, but if they want to waste their money... we realized that at some point we would no longer be employed by that company and then we'd have a stupid situation on our hand, but what could we do?

So we got the phone line, and put DSL on it, and the company was happy, and the phone company was undoubtedly laughing all the way to the bank.

A couple weeks after our installation was complete, the company changed the policy to "we'll just give you $40/month if you have DSL and you deal with it". I was peeved, but moving the service would have cost a couple hundred dollars out of our pockets, so we left it alone.

When I got laid off, Dani and I talked about fixing this. But there are two things that have prevented us from doing anything thus far:

1. The current service works. For Verizon, this is no small feat. Moving the existing service would risk disruption for several weeks.

2. The current service is a permanent connection. New accounts are now PPPoE, which is we're told is a royal pain in the ass. And we'd have to reconfigure our network, and every time we look cross-eyed at the network something goes wrong. Why invite it? So if we set up a *second* account (and later kill the existing one, once it works), we'll be stuck with PPPoE because it will be a new account.

We don't actually know that moving the service would preserve our PPPoE-free existence; they might still screw that up. I'm pretty confident that I could not get a reliable answer from their customer-service people before committing, either.

So we are paying $18/month for an unnecessary phone line to preserve a correctly-functioning connection to the Internet. Is that lame, or what?