- Today has been ingrained forever more as a day to remember. Q9 was down for over an hour today. I don't mean some customer was down, or their website was down, I mean their entire block of networks was completely unreachable from the Internet. Indigo and Moneris, who are both single homed at Q9 were dark -- no online book sales, no point of sale payment processing -- this from the company that guarantees "100% Uptime". Ironically, Q9 as an employer has traditionally upheld the attitude that no staff member should have access to make any changes to any of its core equipment -- except for a VP, and a COO. People just aren't trustworthy or smart enough to be able to make changes without screwing something up. Should you be lucky enough to be in a position to affect any core equipment, the smallest honest mistake has always meant termination. Obviously, no matter how hard you try to protect your assets, eventually human nature prevails.
- I'm willing to bet that we won't see a single press release or mention of the major outage that was suffered today, and we'll instead continue to see an increase in stock price. Kudos to a company who has not developed a new service or product offering in over 2 years, and continues to flourish on the wings of senior management who I strongly believe never had any intention of running this business for the long term.
- Greenpark has done it again. Sure enough, the site supervisor for our division was supposed to come out to take a look at our return air duct problem between 8-12AM today. At 11AM, when he still hadn't shown up, I called Montwest and asked where he was -- the receptionist had no record of us having an appointment booked to have anyone come out. Sound familiar? Every single time Greenpark makes an appointment to send someone out, they completely manage to screw it up. So after a few more calls, the receptionist finally gets in touch with the site supervisor, who agrees to come by 2PM.
- So he arrives, checks things out, and proclaims that there's nothing wrong. The return air duct in the floor is pulling in 50CFM! So I asked him how is it pulling in air, and where is it pulling it to when there's no pathway from the hole in the floor to the lower floor, let along the furnace? That's apparently just the way it is. So I asked him how hot air that rises to the ceiling gets into the return -- "it gets sucked in" he says.
- This begs the question -- even if this individual was amenable to acknowledging that there is a problem, and attempting to fix it, would we want someone like this attempting to fix it? His speciality is sheet metal.
- Not to beleaguer the point, but we've had to buy a portable air conditioning unit because the office is completely unbearable with both computers on. We have sliding patio doors, so we couldn't get a standard window mounted A/C unit. Instead, the portable unit has an exhaust hose and came with a vertical mounting bracket that the hose attaches to. In order to connect it, the patio doors have to remain open slightly. The site super proceeded to tell us that having the patio doors ajar won't help with the heat.