Last week (28th May), I had five Internet services across two countries. This week, I have seven (7), with two new ones in Australia. It all begin, when Internode decided that in their own best interest to migrate me from my existing DSLAM to one of their own infrastructure. They had sent an email indicating when it was likely to occur. And they were sending invoices to the same address. Naturally, they would send the date of the migration to the same address they had used for the past 9 months to communicate to me with, right? Wrong. Internode still do not understand why they never sent the notification email, as it turns out. Compare the response time, update times, and restore times they specify to what actually occurred.

2012-05-28 12:05 BST

I'm informed of an outage. In the past, the problem has been at my end, so I run through the standard diagnostic procedure. Everything seems to be normal, so I call Internode. Sure enough, our service dropped off the Internet. According to Timothy, that happened at 11:15 AEST because of a migration to their own DSLAM. After some diagnosis from Internode, they realise that whilst the migration has successfully disconnected the service, they have not reconnected anything. There is no sync. Ticket #454448 raised - which is when I'm informed that I'm on the business SLA. I've asked for updated to both an Australian and UK mobile. "Not a problem". Estimated time of resolution: 48 hours. Yes, 48 hours. There goes the first SLA milestone.

2012-05-30 07:28 BST

I ring and speak with Carl. He indicates that as best he knows, the service is to be 7pm. for those keeping score, no updates have occurred during this time. To either number. I query him about the SLA period. He says the response time is 2hrs and restore time is 10hrs. He also indicates that this can all be checked online and that we can apply for a refund.

2012-05-30 10:27 BST

I ring, again, and this time speak with Justin. I ask why I've not have an updated, since 7pm AEST has well and truly gone. He authenticates me and places me on hold to investigate. Advises that the issue is fixed, says he sees sync on the line. I indicate that I do not. He asks me to turn off the ADSL modem, we do, and he still sees sync. on the line. Believes there is another problem at the exchange, another issue raised with wholesaler. No ticket number issues to me. ETA to fix 7pm 2nd June. Note:This was a 1 hour International call

2012-06-01 04:00 BST

I happened to check, and notice I have connectivity to the external interfaces (and thus, obviously, line sync.) again. No notification though.

2012-06-01 14:31 BST

Amidst all this, I also have to to source two external connections - Telstra & Optus, get them setup, reconfigure routing, email delivery and other network services so that the businesses which are relying on the Internet, still work. Not fun. Especially when I have no access to the routers. I had to get multiple people on site.

2012-06-04 11:XX CEST

I'm told that the second site has gone done. Inexplicably. After some round-trip and diagnosis, we determine that the routing change has occurred. However it has been done incorrectly. And, of course, no notice / or update occurred either. Multiple tickets are raised by multiple people, amongst them: #4562559 from my mobile phone whilst I am in Zurich.

2012-06-04 16:56 CEST

I am informed, and it is confirmed, that the attempted routing change has been reverted and we are back to how things were on 2012-06-01.

2012-06-05 05:44 CEST

I wake up, and find out that of at least three hours ago, they appear to have called (finally!) and actually fixed the routing to both sites. That is a week of down time, multiple people (4 people) around in various countries around the World and hundreds of dollars in calls between us all to get things working. Now, to look into compensation.

2012-06-05 09:43 CEST

I receive a missed call, which I later learn is Internode actually calling me (for once!). At that moment, I'm actually giving a lightening talk on Django-PaaS

And that, dear reader, is why Internode Business SLA is a waste of money. The services were broken by a change of no net benefit to me, was over a week ago. Also, during this process. My UK home Internet went down. My UK Three post-paid service "ran out of money" and Vodafone has a service outage for half a day. A perfect storm of Internet dis-connectivity. So, if you have been wondering, that is why I've been offline for various parts of the last week.

Below are four of my (150!) browser tabs opened, that I oddly had in sequence. There has been much made of the pheonmen of lifelong learning and although I thought I had finished my exams when I finished University, I'm still doing them. From left to right:

Duolingo, where I am learning Spanish.

Quite a reasonable site, currently invite-only. My worry is my pronounciation will be crap though. I do wish that it did not have to use Flash to accomplish things though.

Udacity, where I am doing CS212 - Design of Computer Programs

Nice interface, annoying that it uses YouTube to host videos as that meant I had to whitelist YouTube in Flashblock.I picked this course as one of the other ones I wanted to do had already closed. I suspect I'll eventually do each of the courses they have on offer. One nice thing is that courses run every 8 weeks or so.

Codeacademy, I am currently doing their Codeyear course.

Well presented, but I find that their Javascript interface is extremely slow to startup. It consistently lags behind my typing speed by about 3 seconds.I'm using Firefox beta, so I'm always running something fairly fast and modern too.I'm primarily doing this course to see how/what they are trying to teach non-programmers. My feedback is that it is not geared towards someone with no programming knowledge. The initial 10 weeks of Javascript presentation proceeded at a very fast pace. If I weren't a programmer already, I'd have stuggled to keep up.

Coursera, here I am doing the Machine Learning class.

I'm not a fan of this interface at all, which is why I find it hard to come back to the site each week. I'm not sure exactly why though, since it uses WebM and no Flash. Hurray!!Either way, I'm doing the Machine Learning class. I tried this last time it was offered and got to week 5 same week I'm on now and then I got suddenly busy IRL, so was not able to complete the course.Unlike Udacity, courses run at set times and you have to do the work on the required dates in order to get the statement of attainment, which can be hard when you are juggling multiple things

Keep in mind, these are just the extra things I have decided to learn. I'm also learning more about Django, Puppet and Python in my work everyday. Plus I'm actually doing a Spanish course in real life too. Oh, and I have a job and I go out. I'm generally actually pushed for time. Which probably explains why I have not been keeping up with the blog. It isn't because I hate you, although it might be too ;-) , I'm just busy.

Yes, folks. If you haven't been stalkfollowing me on various other online channels (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.), it might have appeared to you as if I was no longer alive. A blog with no updates in over 6 months! Heavens. However, the truth is that I've had a number of pressing matters to attend to. Mostly they relate to my personal finances and to my Fathers' health. Fortunately both of them are slightly better now. I shall endeavour to post once a week, or more frequently, when I've got interesting news / reviews / rants I'd like to share with all three of you (Hi Mum! Hi Dad! Hello you other weirdo!)