Here at ZATZ, our installation and conversion project has been going on since October, so I've pretty much consumed Columbia's gross national product worth of java. Over the past few months, many of you have noticed some minor and not so minor changes in our network offerings and been curious about what we're up to.

Sit back, grab your own cup 'o joe, and make yourself comfy. I have a story to tell.

Our major storyline revolves around our decision to move our office. We'd been in our offices for a full decade. Even before there was an Internet revolution and even before there was a dot-bomb crash, we were in those offices. We did journals for Ziff-Davis and even before that, we did our own software products. When I say "been there, done that," we been there, we done that.

There were a couple of nice characteristics of our office. First, it was relatively inexpensive, it was next to a movie theater, a great gym, an awesome Middle Eastern restaurant, and a less-than awesome but fully-stocked-with-chocolate-ice-cream Friendly's. Plus, the building owners were absent--in fact, in the ten years we were there, we never actually met the owners.

Our humble digs would never win an award for style, however. The walls were cinder-block and the offices themselves paneled with pre-Home Depot, 70s-style wood paneling. But, hey, it was our home away from home. At least it was until the ceiling started to leak. No matter how hard they tried (and, frankly, they didn't appear to try all that hard), our absentee building owners couldn't get that darn leak to stop. Eventually, it got to the point where it was making us crazy, and we were worried that if the leak expanded even more, our servers would be at risk.

Finally, we decided to move. And this marks the true beginning to our story because, you see, to move the office meant moving our network connection, which was a hugely expensive T-1. That was to prove to be quite a challenge.

Since we first installed our T-1, technology and broadband availability increased. Business cable and DSL were much more widely available (and vastly less expensive) than T-1. In an economy where everyone's watching pennies, I figured we could save a boxcar of coin each month if we went with business cable in our new offices instead of T-1. In fact, we were offered twice the bandwidth for quite literally 1/15th the price. So we figured, what the heck? Let's do it!