Saturday, June 21, 2008

Rural Compact

The Brattleboro Reformer ran an editorial yesterday on the Rural Compact, which is "a set of principles for building stronger rural communities and a stronger nation." In light of the recent devastating floods in our nation's mid-section, it's more urgent than ever to increase awareness of the importance of our rural communities and farms to the rest of the nation. All too often rural areas are overlooked when decisions are made in Congress and in corporate board rooms. Please, endorse the Rural Compact now!

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Thursday, June 19, 2008

This should have been the first post

But it's not. I felt the need to get a quick message out about the phone service being out in the area since I could not find a reference to it anywhere else on the web. So that became the first post. But in fact, this blog had a previous incarnation. There wasn't much, and it hadn't been updated since 2004. Just a few posts about geese flying, mud, and high blood pressure. Standard schmaltzy stuff, which I promptly deleted. Here, I'll try not to dwell on birds, flowers, and clouds. There's too much other stuff that's relevant. Like right now I hear cows. They've been mooing and braying - yes, braying - since last evening. I think the calves have been separated from their moms. That's why there's such a ruckus at the farm. I could be wrong. I haven't actually walked over there to find out what's going on. But that's what's happened in past years to cause them to moo on and on like that. They'll get over it.

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Phone is back

It rang at around 5:00 PM when my daughter Emma called. I'd emailed a Fairpoint marketing person up in Burlington earlier, and he had been kind enough to respond and forward my email to repair. I then received a message from repair apologizing for the delay and that there had been a cable failure in the area.

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No dial tone

Our phone service is broken here in Guilford, no dial tone. But DSL service is still working. This comes on the heels of a DSL outage a few weeks back. I figured I'd see if I could request a repair call via the web. No such luck. Fairpoint Communications does not have an online reporting tool like Verizon did. So after some Googling, I found some email addresses:

operatorservice@fairpoint.com
information@fairpoint.com

I emailed operatorservice twice, then I got a response:

Operator Service [Nightwatch - Chatham, NY]
to John Majonen
date Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 2:27 PM
subject RE: No dial tone

Hi John.

Your trouble is part of an area cable failure. The commit time issued for this outage is tonight by 11pm.’

Thank you,
Fairpoint Communications Repair

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