Unbelievably, the saga of getting internet installed goes on still. Last Tuesday I went home to meet the technician that was to install it. At some point in the afternoon, he called me to say he was waiting outside, and that he had knocked but no one answered. So I went out front to look, but there was no one there. Turns out he had been sent to our street address, but in a different suburb.
Several angry emails and phone calls were made, and now I have a customer service manager and a technician whose job it is to get me sorted. That was a week ago. Now I’m rescheduled for next Monday, but there’s other problems; our phone lines aren’t getting the dial tone they should, so they’re going to have to come out and fix that too. We are going nuts. It’s surprising how dependent we are on the internet these days, not just for necessities like paying bills but even just for peace of mind. The source of the problems, seemingly, is Australia’s telecom monopoly, Telstra. See, this is why I’m a fervent free market capitalist but an equally fervent anti-monopolist. If they had any competition, they would be ridden out of the country on a rail by this point. And I would be leading the charge.
Speaking of monopolies, last Friday was our first meeting at the main Microsoft office in Melbourne since we got acquired. It seems to be full of salesmen: no techies to be found (though apparently there are some there). The meeting was largely managespeak with a lot of acronyms that none of us understood.
There are two phrases I just learned relating to Microsoft. “Drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid” is the term for, basically, getting into business with Microsoft (i.e. making the decision to have your product work with their operation system/business plan, agreeing to their standards, etc.). And “eating your own dogfood” is what Microsoft employees (including us, now) must do – this means that we are forced to use their newest, as-yet-unreleased software months (and sometimes years) before it is released to the public. So, where you may be using Internet Explorer 7, I’ll be using IE 8, with whatever kinks and bugs that haven’t been worked out yet. That is, when I’m not developing on my Linux box <grin>.
The owl is apparently a regular visitor in our backyard – we’ve seen him four times now. I’ll have to figure out some way to get a picture of him – so far we’ve only seen him in silhouette.
