When I started the Oz Report in December, 1996 I had to rely on dial up access that was not always available in Outback Australia to get out the Oz Report. Now I rely on hot spots that are not always available to get out the Oz Report. Maybe I'll switch to Verizon G3 coverage (which is not always available and for sure not available in Australia). Telstra in Oz is gearing up for "Next G" so we'll get to try that out perhaps.

The Oz Report automatically goes out via email Monday through Friday at 8 AM Eastern time (Daylight or Standard, whichever is in effect). I have to publish the Oz Report articles on the Oz Report blog within the twenty four hour period before the Oz Report issue goes out, to get them into that issue. Every once in a while technical difficulties prevent me from doing that. As they did last Thursday (and somewhat during the whole week). That's why you got one less issue of the Oz Report this week.

This week we have parked our trailer (Oz Report World HQ) at the El Capitan State Park twenty miles north of Santa Barbara on the coast. It's dry camping, with no power, water, or sewer, and, of course, no wireless, so we hang out at John Greynald's house (which he is in the midst of painting) at the bottom of Rattlesnake Canyon and suck off his wireless (he's at the USHPA meeting in Utah over the weekend as he is the Regional Director).

On Tuesday our POP3 email server in the UK went down for good. It was the first server that Jim Page (British hang gliding pilot living in southern France) started his business (www.emailsystems.com) with and its time was up. We use Jim's servers to receive our email because he does a great job getting rid of SPAM and viruses.

I receive between 3,000-5,000 emails a day, but only 20-50 emails (the legitimate ones) make it through to me each day and only a few of them are SPAM messages. Without Jim's services I would be drowning in SPAM (are you?). (Jim only sells to institutions now, not individuals, but he keeps me on as his contribution to the Oz Report.)

Jim and his company treated me right, didn't lose any of my email messages (I hope) and got a new server up on Thursday. Still it took me a while to deal with the disruption in incoming emails. If some of you didn't get through, perhaps that was the problem.

Later that afternoon (we're talking back on Tuesday) Microsoft Windows Update (which I have turned on for Automatic) damaged my Windows Vista installation when it hung installing the sixth of seven updates. Now I can only run that computer (my main Oz Report production machine) in Safe Mode. I'm currently using my three year old Dell 8100 to produce this Oz Report. It's working fine.

Soon I will be using the Dell Recovery capability to rebuild the Dell E1705 (my three month old laptop) from scratch (back to Dell's original image) and than using Acronis 10 to restore by backed up files and settings (as well as installed programs). We'll see if that works.

You may not notice out there in cyberspace, but I do try to be consistent and reliable. Not always possible when the support systems fall down.

Right now we are in Buellton, forty five miles from Santa Barbara as El Capitan was already reserved on the weekends many many months ago. In spite of that fact that they have four wireless antennas here, the connection is quite poor and as it is raining out side it is a bit of a bother to trudge off to the club house where there may be better access.

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