I have a Kindle, which connects to the Internet for free and allows me to check my email and other stuff. I also have a Palm Centro that allows the same. So when there is an outage, I am covered.

Guess what the first thing I do is when an outage happens? I have to look up the Time Warner Cable phone number, which I always forget to write down.

I will be shutting down my Sprint service as soon as I am allowed to contractually, so the Palm Centro connection will be going away (replaced by a T-Mobile connection for my N900). But the Kindle connection is forever, or until further notice, anyway.

What I always do when my Internet is down is disconnect my cable modem for awhile and plug it back in. Then, after I call tech support, they always ask me to do the same thing, again.

I also try the Free Internet Chess Server over my computer, because I have sometimes found it works when everything else is down! I guess this means that DNS related things are down, but other services are still up and Time Warner Cable is doing some kind of maintenance.

But it doesn't do me much good to have the Free Internet Chess Server working, unless I feel like a quick game of chess, or of course I could shout out a question, such as "my Time Warner Cable is down! Anyone here with the same problem?"