If you are one of our internet customers, you have a new servant working for you! Please meet the Barracuda Spam Firewall which is the latest tool from the Glasgow EPB for helping you win the battle with junk email. The Barracuda Spam Firewall is the replacement for our old spam filter you knew as Postini. The Postini system was great for a few years, but could no longer meet the demands of today’s email environment. We will be terminating our contract with Postini so if you have any type of whitelist (list of email domains that you have identified as friendly) you want to transfer to the Barracuda, now is the time to do so. The Barracuda device is a state-of-the art spam filter from Barracuda Networks and is doing a wonderful job of eliminating junk spam email and keeping it from clogging our network. On average this piece of equipment is blocking over 2 million pieces of junk email a day (that is over 130 per day for every man, woman, and child in Glasgow)!!! Postini was only blocking around 900,000 pieces of spam a day so you can see why we feel the new Barracuda device is worth the money.
The Barracuda Firewall has several different layers of defense to protect us from things like email floods, viruses, and just the normal every day annoying spam emails we all get. We are going to attempt to focus on the features you, the customer, will see and what they mean, but first let’s talk about how the Barracuda Spam Firewall works.
The device and the software that drives it, assigns each piece of email that comes into the system a spam rating of “1" to “10". From the Barracuda device’s perspective, the higher the number, the more likely it is that the email is spam. Conversely, the lower the number, the more likely it is to be something you really wanted to receive. The whole system is set up on this concept and every piece of email that comes in gets tagged with a score of 1-10. The system looks at your email score and it uses the following rules to decide what to do with it:
· If the score is 2 or below, it delivers it to your inbox as a legitimate email.
· If the score is between 2 and 7, it might be legitimate but it’s probably not so it puts it into your quarantine box so that you have the option of delivering it to yourself.
· If the score is above 7, it is almost 100% sure it is spam and it drops it so that it isn’t delivered to you at all and you don’t have to deal with it.

Now let’s talk about how you go in to customize your new spam filter. By now you have received a “Spam Quarantine Summary” email from the Barracuda Spam Firewall device.
It shows you what is currently in your inbox and the easiest way to login is by clicking the link at the bottom that says:

To view your entire quarantine inbox or manage your preferences, click here.

By clicking the “click here” link you will be taken to your personal Barracuda account.
The other way to login is by going to http://barracuda.glasgow-ky.com and entering your username, which is your entire email address, and your password. If you don’t have a password yet just fill in your email address and click “Create New Password” and the Barracuda will send you an email with a password in it and instructions to log in.

Once you’re logged in your going to see a few screens which we will discuss below. First you will see the “Quarantine Inbox.”

Quarantine Inbox:
On this tab you can view the contents of your quarantine box and use it to perform several actions. To perform an action on an email, put a check in the box next to the item then click an option at the top to perform that option on your email. If you want to perform an action on all of the messages, then click the checkbox in the header right next to “Time Received” and it performs the action on all of the emails on the screen. Your quarantined emails will stay in the quarantine for up to 30 days then they start to be deleted.

Here is a description of the options:

Deliver – Choosing this will deliver the selected item to your inbox and you will receive it shortly like you would any normal email.
Whitelist – This adds the sender of this email to a whitelist which means that it will bypass all of your spam filters regardless of what the message is about and it will be delivered to your inbox. For example if you have a mail coming from jimbob@yahoo.com and it is always getting declared as spam but it’s not, you would white list an email from that user and then every piece of mail you receive from that email address will be delivered to you.
Whitelist/Not Spam – This does the same thing as the above Whitelist function plus it automatically delivers that piece of mail to your inbox and classifies it as not spam for use in your Bayesian Filter (that is a term you will see a lot and it simply refers to the way Barracuda filters each piece of email).
Delete – This does just as it says and deletes the selected email from the quarantine box on the Barracuda.

The next two options are used to load what is called the Bayesian Filter. The Bayesian Filter is basically a self learning intelligent filter that learns that you as a user think is spam, and what is not. This is different for every user so the more emails that you classify the better it works. It takes a minimum of 200 emails classified in each category before the Bayesian filter begins to learn.

Classify As Spam – Classifies this email as spam in the Bayesian filter and makes sure that emails like this are always classified as spam and not delivered to you.
Classify As Not Spam –Classifies this email as not spam and loads it into the Bayesian filter as a valid email. It then delivers it to your inbox.

There is also an actions column at the left hand side of each email listed which is a shortcut to the actions at the top. These are basically used to perform a given action on a single email without having to check the box and click the buttons at the top.
That is all there is to the Quarantine Inbox so now let’s take a look at the Preferences tab. As I’m sure you’ve already guessed the Preferences tab is where you can customize almost everything on your account.

When you first enter the preferences tab will see the Whitelist/Blacklist Options.
As we talked about above, the whitelist are things that you want to get through no matter what.
The Blacklist is email addresses that you always want to block. So if you’ve got someone who sends you emails you don’t want to ever receive emails from, the Blacklist will make the Barracuda eat those emails and you’ll never see them.
To add an email address to either of these categories all you have to do is type the email address in the blank for that category, and hit add. It’s as simple as that!!!

The Quarantine Settings tab is our next option.
It has several options you can change but we recommend leaving these alone.
Enable And Disable Quarantine - If you disable your quarantine then any of those messages which rate a score of between 2 and 7 are going to be delivered to you and the word [BULK] is going to be put in the title of the email. This is fine for users who have some type of anti spam software setup on your computer, but we do not recommend turning this off unless you’re 100% sure you know what you’re doing.
Quarantine Notification – This sets how often you would like to receive the notification emails from the Barracuda about what is in your quarantine inbox. Many users don’t want to receive those emails so you simply check Never and then hit “Save Changes.” After doing this you are not going to receive quarantine emails so you’ll need to check periodically and see what’s stuck in your quarantine.
Default Language – This one is pretty self explanatory. Please don’t change this setting.

The next tab is the “Spam Settings” tab which of course actually controls your spam settings. Under this tab you can do all kinds of stuff but once again we enable leaving it to the defaults we have set for you. However, if you want to change the settings here are what the settings do.
Spam Filter Enable/Disable – This turns off the Spam Filtering. If you are unhappy with the Barracuda and want to receive all of your emails regardless of whether it’s spam or not, you set this to “No” and click “Save Changes.” Be warned if you do this you are going to receive every piece of email that comes to your email address regardless of whether it’s spam or not.
Spam Scoring – We recommend leaving this alone so we’re not going to go into it much. If you set “Use System Defaults” to no and change the numbers, you can change how the Barracuda interprets your email. We do not recommend and don’t support you changing these settings. If you do however want to you can read the description next to each category to see what it does.
Barracuda Bayesian Learning – This is the control for the Bayesian filter which I talked about earlier. As you can see it lets you know that you need 200 of each type before it starts to work well. If you want to delete everything in your database hit the “Reset” button.
Bayesian Database Backup – This allows you to download your Bayesian Database to a file and keep it for re-uploading it later in case you accidentally erase it.

The final tab is something that I’m sure everyone is going to use. That is the “Password” tab.
This is where you go to set your password to something besides the randomly generated one which the Barracuda gives you. To do this you simply type the old auto generated password in the “Old Password” blank. Then you type what you want your password to be in the “New Password” blank as well as the “Re-Type New Password” blank and you hit “Save Password.” It’s as simple as that and now you have a password you can remember instead of having to memorize random characters.

That’s all there is too it. We hope you enjoy the Barracuda as much as we do. It is a very powerful tool that we are using to make our email system the best in town.

Last week the TVA Board of Directors met and agreed with a TVA staff recommendation to increase their base wholesale electric rates at the same time that their quarterly Fuel Cost Adjustment (FCA) takes effect. This latest increase in the cost of power will take effect October 1 and the two increases combined will amount to a staggering 20% increase in the cost of the energy we purchase from TVA. Of course, the Glasgow EPB will have no alternative but to pass this cost increase along to our customers in the form of higher retail electric rates. By the time these increases trickle down to your bill, the net cost of your electric power will likely go up about 17%.

Since this increase occurs on October 1, and since the bills you get in October and November are normally lower just because the weather is milder, which naturally reduces your consumption of energy, this rate increase will not be greatly noticeable until your December and January bills. Isn’t that when we all really need a surprisingly high energy bill . . . at Christmas time and in January as the bills are rolling in for holiday spending? To say that this is frustrating to us at the EPB would be the very definition of an understatement. We are very disappointed in TVA and in our inability to protect you from this sort of economic shock.

Should the FCA remain at this level for a whole year, combined with the upcoming increase in the base rates, this rate move will take an additional $4 million per year out of Glasgow’s economy. When we think of all the steps we are taking, and have taken, to keep rates low and keep more money circulating in Glasgow’s economy, those steps, while often painful to us, are insignificant compared to the dire effect that this rate increase will have on our economy. Try as we might there is nothing we can think of that might offset this $4 million annual raid on our community’s savings. But we must not give up.

While the "company line" on this rate increase is that an extended drought in east Tennessee has drastically reduced hydroelectric power production (it has) and the cost of coal and natural gas has risen drastically (they have), and that the cost of power TVA must buy from its neighbors is going upward (it is, but the shame is that they are buying power in the first place) the underlying reason for the spiraling cost of electric power in our region is that we have made bad decisions for the last twenty years. We have employed a rate structure that actually encouraged folks to use more electric power than necessary and at the wrong times of day. We have sought new industrial and big box retail customers for the region without any questions being asked about what energy reserves were available to serve them. We have, for much too long, sought out growth for growth's sake, without consideration of the true costs associated with that growth. All of those things have combined to put TVA, and Glasgow, in the position of having to meet each new announcement of a new factory with the need to purchase more power from the market or build more expensive generation to serve that new industry. Those are the real reasons why your power bill is going up.

We tried to purchase power from another supplier, but that attempt was successfully countered by TVA. We built a robust broadband network and have installed advanced meters capable of exploiting a new wholesale rate structure that will reward customers who are willing to change the time of day when they use the most energy, but that new rate structure is excruciatingly slow in being offered. Still, there is more we can do . . . we can all work together to respond to this attack on our treasury by trapping more money in our Glasgow piggy bank. We can fight back by doing this one simple thing. We can all redouble our efforts to spend what money we can in businesses which are owned and operated by our neighbors right here in Glasgow.

When we shop in locally owned businesses we are voting for ourselves. We are saying that we value our dollars and we long to help our neighbors be more successful, which makes us all more prosperous. Shopping from locally owned businesses is a move which cannot be interrupted or usurped by a move by a few folks on a distant board of directors. Local businesses also tend to spend their money locally. A local dress shop probably uses a local accounting firm, a local law firm, a local cleaning service and local electricians and plumbers. Eventually, those local dollars come back to benefit each and every one of us who live here. We will be talking with you a lot more about this concept of localism over the upcoming weeks, months, and years.

So there you have it. The upcoming electric rate increase that we have been warning you about for months is now official. We have worked hard to defend Glasgow from this sort of news, but have yet to be totally successful, but we are not quitting. Now lets all work even harder to find new ways to strengthen our local economy and protect it from those who would take more out of it than we can afford to lose.

We thought this day would never arrive! But, finally, our new cable modem termination system (CMTS) is being installed. The picture shows our own Wade England being assisted by Darie Marza with TVC, poring over the data that must be properly configured for the new CMTS to operate properly.

As we discussed in an earlier message, the new system should improve the performance of our cable modems and your internet access no matter where you are on our system. The new CMTS has much more "horsepower" and should do a much better job handling all of the internet traffic that is transmitted to and from Glasgow every minute of the day. However, as we discussed earlier, this process does come with the possibility of interruptions to your internet services. The work will be ongoing during all hours of the day for the rest of this week. So, the new CMTS should be working by the end of the week but we will be very deliberate in our efforts to move each internet customer to the new system. About three hundred folks have already been moved to the new system so we can do testing with them and figure out all of the nuances of the new CMTS.

On Sunday, September 7, beginning at 6:00 a.m., will start moving over the next group of about 1,400 customers. The following week, on Sunday September 14, we will again start at 6 a.m. and move another 1,400 customers over to the new controller. This process will be repeated, hopefully for the last time, on the following Sunday, September 21. During these moves customers can expect Internet outages on the days we move them. We can’t say for sure how long the outages will be but it is our intention to cause minimal downtime and have the section of customers that we move up and running normally by midnight on Sunday of each week.

So, things are going well so far in our efforts to completely upgrade our internet service. However, your individual performance improvement might be a few more weeks in coming due to our plans to do this is a very methodical manner. Before then you may see our trucks in your neighborhood doing some fine tuning on the broadband equipment before the final moves are made.

On another note, you have likely also been seeing some messages from a new anti-SPAM device we are testing from Barracuda Networks. If you have been seeing a drastic reduction in the amount of SPAM, or junk email, coming into your inbox, that is a result of the new Barracuda device. You might also be seeing daily reports from the device delivered to your inbox which detail the number and characteristics of junk email it has stopped on your behalf. All you need to do is open that report from Barracuda and review the mail it has trapped. If you want any of it actually delivered, you can tell it to deliver them. If you want any of it permanently deleted, you just have to click on "delete" beside the messages you want gone.

Presently we are only evaluating the Barracuda device to see how effective it is. We'll keep you posted on how all of this goes!

Later this week the news that we have been warning our customers about for the last couple of months will finally become official -- TVA will announce that the cost of electric power in Glasgow will again increase sharply on October 1. I am still forecasting something in the 15% range. Of course, everyone will be upset over this announcement, but what no one will likely mention is that another increase of this magnitude is likely to occur again on January 1, 2009. Instead of quoting what this increase will cost some imaginary "average" homeowner, let's just make it easier. Drag out your most recent electric bill and look at the electricity portion of the bill. Add 15% to that cost and you will see the sort of impact this is going to have on your budget.

The real shame about this is that the regular person, who is already challenged by the rapidly increasing cost of everything they need to survive, had little, if anything, to do with the real causes for these rapid increases in the cost of electric power. While it is true that TVA is facing upward pressure on their rates due to drought conditions that have limited their hydroelectric power capacity and sharp increases in the cost of coal and natural gas (both items that they purchase and burn to produce electricity), the real cause of this pain is a wholesale rate policy that has existed for the last twenty years. This rate structure has given the signal to everyone that there is an infinite supply of energy and that we should use all of it that we possibly could.

Additionally, TVA's economic development team has continued to pursue new development and has begged new industries to locate in the TVA region, even when they knew that they did not have the native generation capacity to serve those new loads. As a result, each new celebration for the announcement of a new factory locating in the region has been followed by a frenzy of telephone calls to TVA's neighbors in which TVA's power supply planning folks had to make deals to purchase energy from those neighbors to serve the new factory. The really nutty thing about that is the fact that TVA has had to pay much more for the energy purchased from those neighbors than what they are charging the new factories for that energy. Most thinking folks would see that such a "buy high - sell low" philosophy will not work without the rest of the existing customers being willing to pay more so the new loads can be subsidized. When December and January roll around, and you are staggered by the bill for the electricity you are using, try to remember how good you are supposed to feel about the new Toyota plant in Mississippi and the recently announced Volkswagen plant which is locating in Chattanooga. You are helping purchase the electric power for them!

It is too late now, but if only our leadership could have read this article back in 1990, and if they had the guts to follow its advice, we could be living in an energy "garden of eden" by now. It is a shame, because, as a result of a lack of leadership and our lack of demanding it, we are now about to be cast out of paradise, doomed to walk in the equivalent of energy purgatory for the foreseeable future. As I have said before, the energy cost options look more promising in Glasgow than those of most of the other TVA cities, but even here, things are going to get worse before they start getting better.

Over the last few years the cost of electric power from TVA (via the Glasgow EPB) increased about 35%. Now it appears that, over the next six months, that cost will go up again by staggering amounts (as this is written TVA has not given us the final bad news, but it is likely that we will see an increase of something like 15% on October 1 and something very similar again on January 1, 2009) over the next six months. Add this to the stress we are already experiencing at the gas pumps and the crisis many of you will feel this winter as you see the unbelievable natural gas bills and the result is a gut-wrenching fear unlike anything we have ever seen before. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that it is now okay to go ahead and panic!

We have talked about the reasons for these dramatic increases several times before in this very blog. Drought in east Tennessee is drastically reducing the amount of cheap hydroelectric power TVA can produce. Increases in the cost of diesel fuel makes transporting coal from the mines to the coal-fired generation units much more expensive and that is driving up the cost of coal. China and India are using staggering amounts of coal and diesel fuel in their zeal to make cheap consumer goods for us to purchase at Wal Mart, and that is driving up the cost of both of those fuel sources. We hate to have this fact shoved in our faces, but the real culprit in these increases in the cost of all forms of energy is the way we live our lives. We use too much energy each and every day. In other words, we have found the enemy, and he is us.

As a Glasgow resident and a customer of the EPB you have something going for you that folks who buy their electric power elsewhere do not have . . . yet. For the last twenty years we have been developing a broadband network that touches each and every home and business in our community. For just as many years we have been planning to use that network to help our population use electricity in a totally different manner than the way we have taken for granted over the last eighty years. Even though our efforts have been discounted and ignored by TVA and the other elements of the electric power business in our country for most of those twenty years, it seems that the dawn is beginning to break over our landscape of ideas about infotricity.

Infotricity is a term we coined many years ago and it is meant to identify electric power, combined with a robust broadband network, as a totally different product. Electricity is something your home and business has been running on forever, but the decisions about how much and when it is used have been handed off to major appliances for the last several decades. Those appliances; air conditioners, water heaters, freezers, refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, clothes dryers, etc., have developed a very disturbing habit. They tend to wind up all running at the same time on hot afternoons like the ones outside right now. When they all get together and run at the same time it creates a demand for electricity that has a sharp spike (we call it a peak demand) that lasts from about 1:00 p.m. to about 7:00 p.m. on summer days. It is that peak demand that all power generation systems struggle to meet. Those peaks cause the most coal and natural gas to be burned. Those peak demands are the root cause for most of the large cost increases we are seeing for electricity.

By comparison, our plans for infotricity will chop the top off of those peak electricity power demands by using our broadband network to break up the habits of the appliances to work at the same time. Instead of the cheap thermostat that today controls your water heater, air conditioner, freezer, and refrigerator, we can use IP (Internet Protocol) commands to tame these appliances and turn their cacophony into a symphony!

Here is how it might work. Once our high speed network is connected to your home and when the home is retrofitted with new IP-based controls for the air conditioning, heating, water heating, etc., we could work with you to establish your temperature limits and living style and put all of that information into a server that is assigned the task of orchestrating the delivery of infotricity to your home. Then, every day as TVA determines what their mix of available generation is and what the likely temperature extremes for their service areas is going to be, their generation folks would transmit information to these “infotricity servers” which would, in turn, organize the temperature targets for your home and your appliances such that they do not contribute to TVA’s peak demand. The result might be that your home is “precooled” to a temperature cooler than normal in the morning while power demand is low so that your home can coast through the afternoon longer, and get a little warmer than you would normally like, in the pursuit of a flatter demand for power. As far as your other appliances go, well, so long as you have hot water when you want it and cold milk in your refrigerator, you really don’t care when the heating and cooling occurred, and infotricity would exploit that reality. In addition you would likely have additional reminders that you need to try to reduce your energy demand during peak periods. There will likely be a reminder in your email, information scrolling across your television screen, a red/green indicator near your washer and dryer, etc. All of this will be focused at reminding you that infotricity is far less expensive than electricity and that you need to participate by cutting back your consumption during the peak times.

Technology like this will allow TVA to offset the construction of new power plants made of concrete and steel and fueled with coal, natural gas, or enriched uranium with virtual power plants made of fiber optic cables and IP addressable appliances and fueled with a flow of bits, bytes, and intelligence. In effect, even though your home will not look any different, if you participate in this new world of infotricity, you will have a piece of a massive infotricity generator in your home. The technology, coupled with your willingness to respond to signals, will form the basis for the cleanest and most sustainable method ever devised for the generation of electric power. This is an earthshaking (maybe an earth-saving) idea and, the really cool thing is, it has been developed right here in Glasgow. We are optimistic that TVA is about to start working closely with us to further our development of this idea such that it begins to provide real power to their generation fleet within a couple of years.

These same ideas will work for businesses and industrial customers just as well as they will work at our homes. The secret to better living through infotricity is in learning how to use energy during the hours when it is abundant and less during the hours when it is in short supply. It is really just that simple. This is also the only way that electric cars will ever really fit into our total energy solution. Electric cars are a great idea so long as we can make sure that folks are not trying to charge them during the hours of peak demand. If plug-in cars arrive and if we are not prepared to charge them with infotricity, they will only compound our energy problem instead of improving it. But, once again, Glasgow is in a perfect position to take advantage of this technology when it is available.

In summary, things are bad, but not as bad here. We have ignored the simple fact that all energy resources are finite and we have been doing that for many years. While we have been ignoring facts, the population of the world has doubled and a lot of the new residents have decided they want to use their share of our energy resources as well. Now we have to pay more to keep them from using the energy we Americans had come to see as exclusively ours. Most communities find themselves virtually helpless to do anything about this situation, but Glasgow has been planning for this problem for twenty years. While we cannot tell you to relax and not worry about it, we can tell you that we have ideas and plans, and you are going to have options. These options will not be painless and they will not allow us to continue to be oblivious to reality, but they do give us hope for a sustainable energy future that is better than many of our neighbors can expect, at least for a while.

We really wanted to give the community a great big gift for July 4, but, alas, fate, and our vendor, was not on board for our big surprise. What we intended to do was shock you with a major upgrade to our internet service that would have occurred while you were out celebrating the holiday. You would have loved it!

The upgrade we are now planning for August 12-14 will still make you happy, but now it is not going to be a surprise. During the days and nights of those three days we will be installing a new CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) and moving all 4,600 EPB internet customers to the new CMTS. The CMTS is the engine of our internet business. Over the last several months we have been doing a lot of maintenance on our old engine and, at the same time, the people of Glasgow have been dramatically increasing their usage of the internet. As a result, the engine just has not been running up to par.

About four months ago we realized that internet traffic was growing more quickly than we could upgrade the old CMTS to accommodate. So, we went shopping for the biggest, baddest, fastest, newest CMTS (It's a HEMI!) on the market and we found it. When Motorola told us what it would cost, we fainted. But then when discussed the things many of our heavy usage customers were saying about our slowing service from the old CMTS and that had the effect of throwing cold water on us. We then woke up and gave them the order.

In reality, we really thought that our new FTTH (Fiber To The Home) architecture would grow so rapidly that we would not need a new CMTS. When your home or business is connected to the new FTTH system, you don’t even need a cable modem anymore as your internet service is delivered in scorching fast native Ethernet. But, out here in the real world, our FTTH rollout has been slower than we hoped and the growth of internet traffic in Glasgow has been far greater than we expected. So, a new CMTS for the cable modem customers became a necessary expense.

When we placed the order we agreed to pay a sum that is scary to behold, and they agreed to have it installed by July 4. But, as we have already discussed, they have now delayed us until August 12. We seem to get treated this way by vendors fairly often. It comes from being small. We plan on doing the installation mainly at night and that should have relatively little effect on your internet service as the installation takes place. However, while we are talking, you might as well know that these plans sometime go awry. Since so many folks are already unhappy with us because their service has slowed, there is little we hate more than telling you that the service might be interrupted some while we upgrade it, but that is the truth and we might as well discuss it. We hope you will see this as a small inconvenience in return for impressive improvements. For example, isn’t the section of Interstate 65 from the Cumberland Parkway to the Scottsville Road exchange in Bowling Green nice now? But, do you remember how awful it was while it was under construction?

In other words, those three days might be a bit like highway construction, but after the work is done the new highway will be well worth the trouble. We really hope you understand and we also really wish the surprise had worked out. Do we still get some brownie points for trying?

I grew up in a house where my father took trouble calls for an electric utility. Since 1975, I have been employed in the electric utility field myself. So, for, ahem, over fifty years now, I have been closely associated with power systems and the things that make them perform well and the things that cause problems. In all of that time I have never seen anything to compare to the number of momentary power interruptions we have had over the last month caused by squirrels and blackbirds. While it is normal for us to have an interruption cause by a bird, squirrel, or snake fairly regularly; by that I mean perhaps one per week, we have had something over twenty five such interruptions in different parts of Glasgow over the last month.

I don’t know much about the lives, mating habits, and mental attitudes of squirrels and blackbirds, but it is certain that they have been up to something very strange for so many of them to simultaneously contact a grounded surface and an energized conductor over the last month. When they do that, either a power fuse blows and the folks served by that fuse are out of service for an hour or so until we can arrive to replace it, or the flash causes a substation breaker to operate which means a one second power interruption to about 400 homes and businesses. Either way, the offending animal is vaporized and the affected customers are unhappy.

Is this happening because it has been a while since we attacked the whole city with aggressive tree trimming? Is it a phase of the moon? Is it something in the air or water? It is rare that we run into a reliability problem that we cannot propose a solution for. Normally there is a solution that some liberal application of money and/or work will provide. However, this problem is vexing us. We are about to start on the north side of Glasgow with a new, very aggressive, tree trimming program that we hope will put more distance between transformers and squirrels, but none of us are sure that will keep them away. I am reminded of my own efforts to keep them out of my bird feeder and that experience leads me to predict that they will still find a way. How do we convince squirrels and blackbirds to be more careful? If you have any ideas, please let us know.