By Tad, Tech Support/System Administration

It’s always frustrating (on both sides of the phone) when we have to tell a customer we can’t immediately fix a problem. It’s even worse when the reason we can’t fix it is something that’s out of our control.

By that measure, this week has been something of a letdown. We’ve gotten at least a dozen calls from customers who have our e-mail service (but don’t use us as their Internet Service Provider), asking why they can no longer send mail out.

This is a problem that we would normally be able to solve with a five-minute trip to the mail program’s settings, but this week all of our calls have been from customers who use AT&T (a.k.a. “SBC,” “SBCGlobal”) to get on the Internet. Why does that make a difference? It has to do with the way mail is delivered in the first place — so read on.

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by John Paul, Creative Director / President

I found it rather delightful to watch something I created take on a life of its own.

As you may know, Spiral provides marketing, graphic design and web site development services in addition to being the community Internet Service Provider.

In February of this year, the Nevada City Downtown Association (NCDA) marketing committee, of which I am the chair, decided to run another full page ad in Sierra Heritage magazine. It was to appear in their Arts & Culture edition; a perfect place to promote Nevada City’s assets. Since I volunteer my time and donate Spiral’s resources for the NCDA, it was fun to come up with something a bit different.

I wanted the ad to encompass all the elements that make Nevada City a desirable place to visit. We have fine restaurants, great music, terrific theatre, high caliber art galleries, unique shops, and a wild history … plus we’re adjacent to some extraordinary natural resources. The phrase “civilization on the edge of wilderness” popped into my head one morning, and the response from the rest of the NCDA Board was “That’s it!”. See the ad below that appeared in the March and April issues of the magazine.

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Hi, I’m Rob. I’ve been answering the tech support phones at Spiral for about a year now, occasionally finding the time to help upgrade servers and software, and help continue to improve our services.

I was recently invited to attend Startup School 2008 at Stanford University. Startup School is a free one-day event geared towards helping new and aspiring entrepreneurs launch their business or get their product released. It features talks from people like Jeff Bezos (founder, Amazon.com), Marc Andreesen (founder of Netscape), Michael Arrington (editor for techcrunch.com), Greg McAdoo (partner at Sequioa Capital, a leading venture capital company), and David Heinemeier Hansson (partner at 37Signals). It was also an amazing opportunity to meet over 600 other up-and-comers, to find out what people are working on, what kind of exciting new products and services you might be seeing in the near future.

It’s not easy for me to sit still for very long, so generally I would avoid sitting and listening to speakers all day long. This was a ton of fun however, and I’m glad I attended.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the post office a few weeks back. As many of our customers know (”The Big DSL Secret”), AT&T lays the infrastructure for broadband DSL service in our rural area. As a small ISP (Internet Service Provider) we’re allowed to provide service on that network by Federal law. In early February, AT&T announced a $5 rate hike for their 1.5Mbps and 3.0 Mbps DSl residential customers.

We were thrilled because we could keep our pricing the same and finally undercut AT&T. We sent out our mailing promoting $19.95 per month for 1.5Mbps and $24.95 per month for 3.0Mbps DSL services. And then we got our notice from AT&T … they also raised our pricing by $5 per month for those services.

Unfortunately, since our margins on DSL are so low, we have to pass those rate increases along to our customers. 1.5 is now $24.95 per month, 3.0 is now $29.95 per month, and 6.0 is $34.95 per month (which — good news — is actually $2 less per month). You still get our local friendly technical support and aren’t required to install intrusive software on your computer. More information at DSL Services

John, Chip, Rob and Tad.

Awesome! We want an Internet thing! And you thought it was just an old wives’ tale. If you have DSL, then you’ll want to watch “Gabe & Max’s How to Get the Dreamlife of Your Dreams Using The Internet” on YouTube.com. Click here to watch. By the way, we don’t actually know Gabe & Max, but these guys know how to do a fun parody.