As soon as Charter emailed me their little “oh hey, by the way, we aren’t going to be ready with our broadband by the time @home goes tits-up, but hang in there, soldier” message (and this was, count 'em, two (2) days before the November 30 deadline,) I decided Charter wasn’t going to be worth the effort.
I called a local cable provider and signed up. Installation is tomorrow.
And a fourth “howdy” from this here Texan. 
After getting the oh-so-useless recording on the @home tech line last night I was all prepared to tear them a new one, but since this morning my connection has been back up. Early on I was getting dropped every 5 minutes, but it seems to have stabilized for now.
To access the usenet newsgroups now you need to change your news server from “news” to “netnews.attbi.com”. Can’t tell you what they did to the e-mail addresses, since I never used it.
Oh, man, you guys are all fucked. According to the lads at http://www.arstechnica.com :
and
Yeah, and some “may experience temporary discomfort when this sandpaper-covered baseball bat probes their colons.” Sorry to hear it, folks. I’m afraid some of you might be in for a rough ride.
Insight @Home customer checking in. I still had service as of, say, 10:30 last night. Don’t hold out much hope after seeing Sofa’s post, though.
Overall, I haven’t had much trouble. I’ve only lost service three times or so in a year. Guess I’m a lucky one.