Yeppers, we've considered going back on satellite (we were one of the first customers of Hughes DirecTV®) but the cost is beyond our retired pocketbooks.

Our dial-up POP is clear over in Dillon, Colorado (the other side of Breckenridge, which you may have heard of) That's nearly 75 miles away.

Understandably, our ISP is very aggressive about keeping their modem pool open, so they drop the connection after just 3 minutes of inactivity.

Yeah, we set our email client to check every 2 minutes, and that served to "keep us alive" for a couple years. But those rascals got onto us just recently. Now, checking mail doesn't work - they've put some kind of detection software inline to figure that out and drop us anyhow!

If you've surfed this site, you know we have more than a hundred megs of content, all of which must be maintained and uploaded on a continuous basis.

Here's the rub: while we are uploading, with the new aggressive approach of the only ISP in the area, we get "dumped" even though the upload is happening. We've even been known (gasp!) to say very naughty words when it happens.

Now, we aren't hogs. We don't leave our computers online when we ain't usin' 'em. But we needed a solution.

So we put together a little series of low bandwidth (requiring only 60k per hour) "keep alive" programs to fool the ISP's software for so long as we are performing the uploads without unnecessary hogging any of our bandwidth.

<META REFRESH, unfortunately, was picked up by our cunning ISP, but the javascript actually requesting new pages has solved the problem.

We're sure very few of you share this dilemma, but in the unlikely event that you do, you may come to our site and click on this link to use this series of scripts on our server (in moderation, of course) or download your own copy for uploading to your own server.