The idea wasn't to report the outage. It was to still have communication during the outage. There were a lot of people who needed help removing downed trees and such, and having a phone to make and receive calls was important. Fortunately, we didn't have any damage. But if we had, we could have called for help. And what if we had a medical emergency and needed an ambulance? I didn't have a cell phone then, and I'm not sure how well cell service was working at the time.

A few years ago, we had a major storm that took our power out for four days. We had (and still have) one plain old corded phone, so we never lost phone service. Most people we tried to call, though, never answered because their cordless phones didn't have power. I think it's a good idea to have a corded phone around for such emergencies.

I have a Panasonic phone system with 3 cordless handsets and one base station. It keeps all of the phone book entries centrally, so if you change it from one handset all get the change. Same with the caller ID log. No connection to my computer, but this sounds like most of what you're asking for. Maybe you just need a newer phone?

The U.S. may eventually start charging for that too. User fees are favored by some in Washington, notably the Obama Administration.

You don't even need a radio if you're operating from non-towered airports and remaining in class E or G airspace.

I have a C64 I bought brand new in Dec. 1984. I also have a Datasette cassette tape drive and two 1541 floppy drives. They all work. Another cool thing is that a printer interface that I got back in about 1986 to run a dot-matrix printer works just fine with a Canon BJ-200 injet printer!

Did anyone else think the title referred to "box lunches"? Maybe I'm just hungry.

Zone Improvement Plan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code