I signed up with a new ISP the other day. It felt a little weird as I’ve had the same ISP for seven years. Unfortunately, because of corporate buy-outs which led to bad service at inflated prices I was ready to leave. It’s a real shame. Long before the Internet was available to the mass public I was a member of Exec-PC BBS (a computer Bulletin Board Service). Even though the Internet has Flash animations, fancy graphics and a global community, somehow it was more fun reading simple text only messages and exchanging files with a local community of users. I think it was around eight years ago, they began to offer Internet service and it had the same high quality as the BBS. Five years later Exec-PC became the largest ISP in the midwest and the owner decided to sell his company (a good decision, I would have done the same). Service has been on a steady decline since. I am especially pleased about one thing though — all the sleazy, scum-sucking spammers have yet another dead e-mail address in their databases.