Wow, the 2010 County Health Rankings report shows Brookings, South Dakota topping the list on “Health Outcomes” and third on “Health Factors”. This means the Brookings county rated high in most health specific categories:

1. Health Outcomes (how healthy a county is)
- Mortality (death proportions)
- Morbidity (health state)

Mediacom Internet Service sucks! It was just few months ago when I complained about the sudden interruption of Mediacom’s Cable TV service without any notice. Today, it is Mediacom’s Internet Service that has completely malfunctioned!

According to Mediacom, network problems are responsible for a widespread loss of internet service that began Tuesday night and continue Thursday. The company said that the loss of internet service is not related to the ice storm. Mediacom further said that their network engineers are still troubleshooting the cause of the outage.

I just passed by the new building of the Dacotah Bank in Brookings, SD. A big electronic board was placed in front that says “Dacotah Bank is now open.”

I thought the construction of the building will never be finished. In all those times that I drove along 6th St., it seemed the bank construction has been taking its time. I waited for it to finish because I am planning to open a new account with them. If you want to know its banking hours, I posted the schedule below:

Have you encountered the same problem as mine when you access your Verizon Samsung Trance wireless phone? There seems to be a bug on the Samsung Trance phone units after Verizon updated the software.

Last night, I received a note from Verizon to update the software on my phone. It says that while it is updating, I won’t be able to send messages or make or receive calls. Fine with me. It took only few minutes to update and the phone was back to its normal screen.

Only after I received a message from a friend early today that I noticed I could not access my inbox anymore. Clicking inbox automatically switched the screen to what seemed like a “start screen”. It automatically reboot and then returned to the homepage. Powering the Samsung Trance phone off and back on did not help at all.

Literally, Brookings, South Dakota has a zero crime rate. When you watch the early evening newscast, you hardly hear anything about Brookings. If there is something to broadcast, it will most likely be about road mishaps, or the state of the cold winter weather, or the state of the economy. None of such nature like men in motorcycles firing guns to a politician’s house, or men robbing a bank located just across the police station, or a truck driver intentionally running over a person twice — you know, the type of crimes that some countries consider ok-fine, or ordinary. If you want to see something tragic in Brookings, you would get frustrated.

I think the most catastrophic crime that can be committed in this small city is bike stealing. Funny, but I am quite certain it is. In as much as I would want to believe that there should be a single major crime somewhere, there is just none. Because Brookings knows nothing but peace (should not be translated as boring).

Grab a copy of The Peg Leg Update volume 1, issue 2 from few locations in Brookings. If you haven’t read the first issue, you should.

The Peg Leg Update second issue has improved a lot compared to the first print. The inside layout gives more good-looking pages, presented in columns. The articles are still very interesting and the varied topics are keeping true to what the LeClair wrote in his first editorial — just anything under the sun.

I am blessed to have the best friends in the world. I find consolation, boosting support and cheer when I am with them. Proof: they helped me the countless times I fell, cheered for me when they saw me about to quit and pushed me to the limit so I would learn how to skate on ice.

This past weekend, I had a conversation with a friend about going to the ice skating center again. She wants to learn how to skate, so I told her the story of the day I finally set foot on an ice-skating rink. Coming from a tropical country where ice is more associated with shakes, ice cream and ice candy (ice water in plastic pouches) rather than snow, ice-skating is the least likely topic of conversation among friends. Thus, my knowledge of the sport is way below amateur level.

At exactly 1 AM, September 29, 2009, the Mediacom Cable TV signal in Brookings, South Dakota was cut off. It has been over an hour already since the interruption and the signal hasn’t been restored yet!