Planetary Ponderings

The ichthux.com site has been down for months due to the fact that the server it was hosted on crashed and died a horrible death. Every now and then we'd get folks in the #ichthux channel asking, "Is the project dead? Cause the web site seems to be..."

So I decided last week to do something about it, and I took over the running of the website. Fortunately, Raphaël had managed to retrieve the data from the DB, and I was able to stick it on my development server at home and build the site up again.

All too often recently I have surfed to either vodacom.co.za or vodacom4me.co.za and had one of the following two problems:

• I can log in, but if I click on any of the links, I get the error message in the title of this post.
• I get the mobile interface, the one I would get if I were surfing from my phone (only on vodacom4me.co.za).

Now the first one is ok, they're feeling a little overloaded, which can happen from time to time. However, it's becoming more and more frequent these days. And therefore more and more annoying.

Many people know the site Worse Than Failure where you can find stories on really stupid developers and techies. Often it's a combination between laughing, and hitting oneself on the head because you're so overcome by the stupidity of the developer(s) in question.

I've used Wordpress on odd occassions, and been semi-impressed with it on all occassions. Recently I have been using Drupal for a variety of things. I used it when I had to put together a sort of a community site for work, and then again when Hannah and I started our blog, I used Drupal again, because I wanted the ability to expand it to more than a blog (and I'm oh so thankful now that I *did* choose the Drupal route, now that we have our wedding photos up there).

So I've decided to give up on getting ADSL. For two reasons.

Firstly, I don't think Telkom will actually give it to me where I currently live. They've had various contradictory excuses about why they can't give me ADSL, and I'm really just sick of fighting.

Secondly, we have to move out at the end of the year, and so it doesn't make sense to order it, wait 2 months, and then just as we get it, we move out.

This morning I read a news article on MyADSL about how Telkom is making life very difficult for ISP's who want to make use of it's ADSL reseller package. Apparently they "lose" orders, their support is just as atrocious as ever, they have to wait for as long as 500 hours before getting an order number at times, and the excuses they get for all the above problems, as well as excuses about not being able to give the user a line, are just pathetic.

So Telkom responded to my last complaint... only after I'd added a comment to my complaint about how they still hadn't gotten back to me after 4 days...

Yet another post to hellopeter.com:

I'm so sick of Telkom... what is a guy supposed to do to get a decent Internet line to his house? Reposted from hellopeter.com

So after more waiting, and Web Africa telling me nothing, essentially, I went to www.hellopeter.com and complained about Telkom. And I got a phone call from them the next day.

A very nice customer service chap (aren't they all nice...?) phoned and asked me for my telephone number and then promised to get back to me. He did too, which was somewhat of a surprise, but he had disappointing news. He told me that according to Telkom's systems, there was no application against my telephone number.