Testing the system

OK:  This post is going to go through the my trying to reduce my bill to the phone company.

Since one of the things that we are going to have to do is ruthlessly cut our expenses and get rid of the fripperies that we currently consider necessities, it is important to look at our "communication needs".  Right now I am shelling out around $140.00 a month on DSL, cell, and traditional phone service.  Needless to say, There is around $100.00 a month that can be shaved from that total. 

The cell phone will probably go first.  I am beginning to think that the world was a better place before these damn things anyway.  So that is the first $60.00 is shaved off the top of the costs.  The other way to go is purge the land line and go to a cell-only system.  There is not as much money to be saved, $55.00 vs $60.00, so this is almost a push.  While my distaste for cell phones is noted, they are mobile and have real advantages.  This will take some thinking.

After that, the DSL is is the next potential target.  I am more ambivalent getting rid of this, for obvious reasons. It is $22.00 a month, but if I get rid of it, that means that dial-up is the wave of the future in my house.  I will get rid of one or the other of the phones, but I think that the high-speed will stay on for a bit, but be a target to be re-examined each month.

If I do flush the high-speed, I don't want to tie up the land-line, so, in order to read my current system of blogs and write this screed, I will need to have a means of writing off-line and posting, and have a means of rapidly collecting the blogs I read. 

The easiest means of posting is just doing e-mails to your blogger account.  If you go to the e-mail tab under the setting menu in your dashboard, you can set up the system to allow you to post using you e-mail system.  This is offline heaven for posting.

Reading is also pretty easy, offline readers are abundant.  Since I am a Linux user, I get Liferea free and it goes out and get stuff from Mayberry, Dragon, and Yves and a slew of others out there.  I can read them offline and at leisure.  I am going to gou out and look for widows programs that do the same thing for my windows partition.

So that is it.  Mostly a post saying that you don't have to give up all that much should you decide to downgrade your phone system.  There are viable workarounds.  Since I am doing this post via the e-mail system as a test, it might not look the same, so as much as anything,

"This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency,  the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This station Degringolade serves the world-wide web area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System."