January 2007

Dear Client,

Happy New Year to you! Hoping your holidays were enjoyable and you spent them with good company.

You may have noticed a decrease in spam the last week or so. This came about due to the recent earthquake on December 26 th that cut most Internet access to Korea and neighboring countries. Our log files are half what they normally are.

Last month brought no outages for our connection, so I’m hoping Qwest has taken care of the connection issues we experienced last year. We will have to see what happens when (if?) we get our winter rains. So far it’s been pretty dry here.

We’re continuing to experiment with different wireless hardware vendors—we’ve had 2 equipment failures during testing from one vendor and are now trying a different one. While the progress is slower than we’d like, it will result in a more reliable network.

One of the results of the wireless expansion is that we will need to put in production an upgrade we did to our billing system a few months ago. We’ve been running it in parallel for a few months to see what the differences were and have been trying to get comfortable with it. The wireless technology needs the features it provides. So by next month, you will see a slightly new format to the invoices you get from us. We will also be able to send out invoices and statements via email in multiple formats—html, text or pdf format.

Santa was good to us—we have a new member for our family: Cookie, a 1½ year old female Akita we got from a rescue organization, Akitaadvocates.com. She was turned in and spent some time recovering from an infection. Our cats don’t think too highly of the present, but they are getting used to it. Cookie hasn’t been helping, as she gooses them to see if they will react. One of them obliges by running, but the other now stands his ground. She’s doing well overall, though.

Sincerely,

Ben Conner