I suggest a nice walk, a cup of tea, maybe watch the dogs play at the park, or listen to water rushing over stones at the nearest creek.

Otherwise I got nothin'.

I can't help you, unfortunately, but as far as Mefi not loading... it doesn't load for me a lot of the time lately - so that one you might keep checking.

I hope it gets sort out!

IT guy thinks it's a Bell South problem. There is no joy in mudville. The only site I can even get to now is Metachat so if somebody would write a whole bunch of stuff for me to read while I eat lunch, that would be ossom. Sigh.

Whaddayawanna read about?

Here's something I typed in last week.

That's probably a routing problem. Access to site (a) goes through a good router, but access to site (b) takes a different route, hits a bad router and drops packets. You can do a tracert to see where the problem is.

Unfortunately, all you can usually do here is talk to your ISP, listen you their lies and hope it gets sorted quickly.

Btw. Don't be scared by the routing terminology. If you think about websites as physical locations you have to drive to. Routers are just intersections. You use different roads and intersections to get to different sites. If one intersection gets closed, you'll still be able to get to some places, but other places will be closed off completely or gridlocked (because people are taking the back roads).

In other words, the Internet is a series of tubes. (sigh)

This *could* be a routing problem as seanyboy suggests, or it could be a DNS problem (this is the lookup table that your ISP uses to route messages to and from resources on the Internet).
Two things to try:
1) To see if you have a routing problem, go to down for everyone or just me? This will tell you if there is a problem with the website, or with you accessing it.
2) Change your DNS IP addresses to the Open DNS server. This is quite safe. To do this (I am assuming you are running Windows, as you mentioned Outlook):
a) Go to Windows Control Panel and open Network Connections.
b) Right-click on Local Area Connection and select Properties (bottom of the list).
c) On the General tab, scroll down to select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click the roperties button.
d) On the General tab in this window, select the radio button that is labelled Use the following DNS server addresses.
e) In the IP address boxes alongside, set the first DNS address to 208.67.222.222 and the alternate to 208.67.220.220
f) Click OK to close all of the dialog boxes and try again (you may need to reboot, not sure if this will work on the fly).
You can leave your DNS server permanently set to the Open DNS IP addresses. I do - and I suffer from far fewer problems than most Comcast customers ... :-)

Whoops - in stage (c), that should have been the Properties button.

Y'all rock; thank you. Apparently it was a BellSouth problem after all and now it is fixed, which is a relief. Seanyboy, be proud - when nothing, but nothing, else on the intertubes would load, I could still get onto Metachat, no problem.