Emilia Teasdale reports in The Columbia Paper that many Columbia County residents who use “fairpoint.net” email addresses experienced a major slowdown in receiving e-mail last week. A Fairpoint representative told the paper Aug. 25 that the problem was fixed, though the company was still testing what caused the problem. Frank Shannon, owner of Insight Computer Center in Chatham, told Teasdale that his customers lost information in addition to the slowdown. Fairpoint serves much of the eastern half of Columbia County with landline telephone, DSL, and dial-up Internet service. Areas in and around Kinderhook, Hudson, and Germantown are served by other providers. Across the country, Time Warner internet service went down Wed., Aug. 27, causing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo -- among many others -- to comment. “I have directed the New York State Department of Public Service to investigate this outage as part of its review of Comcast's proposed merger with Time Warner. The Department will also review whether the outage affected Time Warner's provision of telephone service in any way. In addition, the Department will include its analysis of this event in its ongoing study of the telecom industry, which is exploring potential changes to the regulatory landscape pertaining to telephone, internet and cable."

If your radio reception wavers this weekend, it may be due to a solar flare that erupted on Aug. 24 from an active sunspot known as AR2151. While the sunpost was not facing Earth at the time of the flare, it may effect the planet's electromagnetic fields this week. "The responsible sunspot will turn toward Earth in the days ahead, boosting chances for geoeffective solar activity as the week unfolds," experts with the space weather website Spaceweather.com wrote on this week.

WGXC signs off forever from the Catskill Community Center, wheeling its studio equipment to the Catskill Library Sept. 1. The WGXC studio at the Catskill Community Center closes Sun., Aug. 31 with a DJ round robin at 6 p.m. and concludes with a special "Sunday Night Mixtape" hosted by Jillian Sutton at 10 p.m. until midnight.