The Qwest arrangement at Happy Trails is not consumer friendly. They now charge for fixing the phone line from the Town Center to your lot if it goes bad, which would affect both DSL and your phone. I switched to Cox for my phone and Internet services last season for just that reason.
Here's the recent notice from HTCA:
If you are a Qwest customer....please be aware that as of November 2008, Qwest will charge you for telephone repair for the telephone line going to your lot. Please call Qwest 1-800-573-1311 if you have any questions.
Thinking of a new computer? With the advent of Windows 7, the best system configuration will be 64-bit, IMHO. Just thought you'd want to know. 
Why 64-bit?
Most programs are still 32-bit. Any that you're likely to want to install will probably work just fine on 64-bit systems. 16-bit software will not work, but you probably won't want to install anything that old. You will need to download 64-bit drivers [example] for some of your peripherals — printers, scanners, cameras, etc.
Microsoft has extensive supplier contact information online, complete with phone numbers and website links. You can probably find what you need there. Don't miss the alphabetic links just above their table. For example, clicking the "L" there will bring up LinkSys, Logitec, Lotus, etc.
You probably know I'm a fan of full disk backup (drive images). It's getting easier to do them. Most versions of upcoming Windows 7 will include "Complete Backup and Restore", which can make full disk backups. It's also included in Business, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Vista, which unfortunately left most of us out.
It's not easy understanding how to handle these full backups though. Leo Notenboom has generated a nice video series on how to do it. The videos are based on Acronis True Image, but they will help you use Complete Backup and Restore too.
Most of you have used Wikipedia, even if you don't do so directly. I say that because it's often the first search result you get when you "google" a term. 
There's much more to the wiki universe than Wikipedia though.
For example, I recently found Wikibooks, which may not interest you, but it's the kind of place that interests people like me.
That discovery prompted a bit of prospecting, which lead me to Wikimedia — a motherlode of wikis. It was more like rediscovering the Lost Dutchman Mine, because I knew it was there, but had forgotten about it.
I suggest you explore Wikimedia. That's a good way to help you remember that it's there as a resource. You're also bound to stumble on some things that interest you. For example, I found a recipe for San Francisco Sourdough Bread in the Cookbook branch of Wikibooks. You might also want to save a bookmark/favorite for Wikibooks so you can get back there when you need it.
We recently received a request for contribution from National Veterans Services Fund. That's four of the top-ten solicitor buzzwords all in a row. Alarmed by that confluence, I looked into their merit further.
As near as I could tell from the fine print in their brochure, they delivered a whopping 22.43% of all funds collected in 2008 to some kind of unspecified services for veterans. That's a big improvement from the 3% that Charity Navigator reported for them in 2004.
Microsoft just released Microsoft Security Essentials, their free, long-awaited anti-malware utility. The reviews I've seen have been positive. No thorough independent test results are available yet, but indications are that it provides good protection. [report] [tests] [from a competitor]
Popups are one of the first signs of a malware attack. If you see one when using your browser, don't do anything else until you kill your browser as described by Brian Krebs at Security Fix. You need to read the article now before you're caught by surprise.
The example Brian used was the same pest that I saw a couple of days before reading his article. It showed up because an innocent website had been infected by a botnet.
I closed my browser just in case, even though I felt that my computer was fully protected because I run Windows 7 as a Standard User. It appears that I escaped, as I haven't seen the popup again.
If there was a big bang in the cosmic abyss, but nobody was there to hear it, was there a big bang? Opinions vary, but thanks to the marvels of science and modern computers you can now listen to a rough approximation of what it might have sounded like. [the story] [Via Starts With a Bang]
Benjamin Franklin told us that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. That's why He created barley. But now another essential ingredient of beer is threatened. Whatever shall we do?
Why has no one thought of this before?
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