back online

We've been without home Internet service since the morning of December 23.

It seems that our local cable monopoly—Rogers Communications—has decided that its agreements with third party service providers such as ours (TekSavvy) aren't worth properly service. Teksavvy tried explaining this all during one of the other outages to hit Toronto in 2011 but given my long history in IT I'm not impressed. If it's happening repeatedly, the incident response system (and the business arrangement between the two firms) needs some serious fixing.

As it turned out, something went wrong with the webserver for emuu.net and I couldn't fix it for at least two days. That's on top of not being able to chat with anybody via Skype on New Year's, missing the NHK TV special (which my wife had been looking forward to for months) and generally causing havoc. I wound up using my X'mas gift—an Amazon kindle with 3G capability—to keep us online. Bizarrely, this 'experimental' use of an e-reader worked well enough that I was able to make some purchases, find a nice restaurant for a New Year's meal, etc.

One of my purchases, and I'm not kidding, was a Mac- and Wintel- compatible USB 56k modem. Remember those? They still exist, as does the USRobotics brand. Next time, we won't be caught quite this flat-footed.