A day without connectivity is a sad day indeed (Musings on the need for Cinemon...)


Today was taken up in its entirety by a meeting with Bryan and Clint regarding the billing front-end for the VOIP platform. Mostly just walking them through the interface, discussing problems, features we want, that kind of thing. However, about an hour before they were scheduled to come, Roger's cable went out. I phoned Rogers, and on the second try they answered before I got so impatient that I hung up.

Strange thing is, when I talk to the Rogers guys they claim that they have something that provides all the features of Cinemon, yet talking with their tech support guy this afternoon it was absolutely obvious they just don't have anything like Cinemon. Instead of being able to say instantly "Thanks for calling sir, I can see right now that everyone on your street is offline" he didn't even know Bathurst (a very long street) was offline until he was launching into the general debugging song and dance and saw a manually-entered ticket describing the problem.

Anyway, rather annoyed, I started making backup plans (e.g. having us all walk through the rain to Forest Hill Village to hold the meeting in the Starbucks with the free WiFi hotspot). We actually got back network connectivity (for a little while) before we got to the point in the meeting where we really needed it, so we never did fall back on those plans.

Bryan and Clint seem to like the general approach of the interface, there were a few cases where it turned out the user story I'd interpolated from their statements was actually more involved than they'd imagined (e.g. we had a user story where you could buy just the VOIP hardware, which meant that there had to be some way to configure the hardware to work with some other VOIP provider, that apparently hadn't been something they'd seen as a need-to-have feature, while I had treated it as such).

Anyway, with UU tacked on the end, this has been a rather long day, despite only getting 4 billable hours out of it. I think I'll lie down for a few hours... maybe even the whole night.

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