Family Guy season 7 is out for ZZTV subscribers.
DISCLAIMER SCROLL: all over the world but places affected by risks of -included but not limited to- heat, cold, flies, human activity, mosquitoes, chikungunya, noise, radiations, light, darkness, beer, coke, water, humidity, dryness, construction, deconstruction, crap, windows, doors, trains, oil, gas, accidents, calmness, hackers, bloodsucking, hoaxes, fraud, shoes attack, aliens, electromagnetic fields, …

BLANK SCREEN…
“Darling, could you check what’s going on with the TV receiver?
– No more TV!
– Since we have paid for a premium ZZTV subscription, we can watch it over the Internet!
– Internet is down!
– Maybe the server is down?
– In that case, I’d suggest to go to another restaurant!
– Dammit, let’s call the hell desk! Something must be wrong with our settings…
– No phone connection!
– Wireless call?
– No network…

Oh sorry, in fact this post isn’t about Family Guy 🙂

This F– story is about a reality, though a bit exaggerated, about a growing disease in Information Technology… This is déjà-vu about ten times during this month.
Not later than midday today, they announced some risks of thunderstorm during the afternoon. As a result, the phone connection and Internet went down in the next following 5 minutes.

Yesterday, there was another similar story with one of my client’s servers, hosted in a dirty-center whose habit is frequent power failures; what a pleasant sunday morning, being woken up on the phone, while being gone for the week-end abroad…

Last week, I experienced some interesting issues with my personal server hosting company whose network has been down for eight hours.

The winner is definitely this cable company in Belgium and Luxembourg; I think if they guaranteed 99.9% downtime, it wouldn’t change much from what we already have… This is a part of their strategy: the more downtime they have, the more clients will call their hotline using a premium number, then wait for an answer; and the more money they make!

In the past, I used to have multiple Internet connection, thus I spent about a monthly invoice not far from a Portuguese salary, just for my personal internet connectivity. Of course, despite of all these securities, outages from both providers at the same time happened, which used totally different networks and physical supports… Whose leg are they pulling?

I wanted to figure out how cookies work, so I made a Web site pertaining to the telecom industry where people can register and shout, scream, cry and complain about operators. But they can also share their positive experiences.

The concept of this site is not to mention companies name when submitting an experience. If the company name is provided, I’ll keep it for myself and will maybe laugh one day when so many people are complaining about the same operator 🙂

The beta version is in place: some (important) features (profile edit, comments, ratings, contact between users, statistics, search) are still missing and I expect some bugs as I did all the back end today. The features will come slowly, so please be patient. It includes a tiny CMS I wrote for the occasion, using the Smarty (yumm, chocolate!) classes.

The site is www.czll.com, czll is a typo defining a broken call…

Do not hesitate to try it and report bugs!

Yeah, this is a come back in the telecommunication politics after many years in the darkness!