I’ve thought about not posting this a few times but my patience is now fully exhausted thanks to the quality – or lack of it – of service from Telstra here.

Just over 3 weeks ago I shifted to another house that’s about 2 or 3 blocks down from my previous address. Before moving we made arrangements for the Phone number and internet connection (which was ADSL 2+) to be transferred to the new address. Now this is where it all started (and continues to) go wrong.

After moving to the new address and having the phone number connected I had to ring up to notify Telstra that the phone is up and running so that the internet can get activated. THIS took about 12 business days to happen with me having to call Telstra several times during that period to sort things out. Here’s a quick summary of some of the things that caused this to take so long.

- I talk to a customer support person on the first day the phone gets connected and they say that all has been sorted and that I should have internet connectivity within 3 business days.
- 3 days or so later I call again after finding out that there’s no internet connection so I ring again
- I get told by the person I spoke to this time that apparently no order was put through and apparently we only arranged to get the phone number transferred but not the internet!! WTH? and that an order needs to be put through to transfer the internet, and I get put on hold for the customer support person so that they can put an order through. During this time as a result of call waiting on my phone my call with the operator got disconnected.
- After getting disconnected I ring again to ensure that the order went through and all is confirmed ok.
- 2 days later I ring again to follow up on the progress and I get told by the operator that NO ORDER has actually been put through and that I have to wait another 3 business days for the internet to be connected. Apparently when my call got disconnected while I was on hold with an operator they CANCELLED the order!!!!!! and yet after I rang again on the same day the last person I spoke 2 has not mentioned anything about this!

Anyways to cut the story short, after a few more days of calling Telstra and speaking with several different people and getting confusing information …etc …etc I finally had *some* internet access and even though I’m supposed to be on an ADSL 2+ service I was getting about 300Kbps speed but the person I was speaking to at the time (Friday) said that my service is currently running at about 70% but will reach full speed when it’s at 100% which should happen by Monday afternoon.

So ok, I’ll wait to see what happens on Monday.

Stay tuned for part 2. The story gets worse… by a lot. I wonder if anyone at Telstra listens to the supposedly *recorded* customer calls to improve their customer support and service.

Wow. It's been over 6 months since my last blog post! I'm sure this will change in 2009 and here goes the first post this year, and I'm sure many more will come. I received the email below on Tuesday and for some reason it does not surprise me! What's seems a bit strange is that the news did not seem to be picked up by anyone. I havent seen any blog posts on the topic or even articles on Stuff or NZ Herald or anything and I probably wouldn't have known if I hadn't received this email.

I'm in many ways not surprised and I'm sure others probably share my view.

UPDATE: It looks like this has actually been covered in a few articles including the following articles

- Telecom shuts web shopping site on Stuff
- Ferrit to close on Geekzone forums

and a few other posts out there. Thanks for the heads up Mauricio. I missed a lot of news somehow.

Thoughts on my mind as I get ready for upgrading my MCAD .NET to MCPD Web...

Getting certified was something that I got interested in doing not long after finishing my degree at university back in 2005. Given that I was involved with Microsoft stuff and .NET at the time my choice of certification was to be Microsoft Certified and more specifically Certified in .NET so in 2006 I started working towards the Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) .NET certification and had that completed, this of course was in .NET 1.1.

I personally find a lot of value in getting certified, I think other than the prestige and self satisfaction you get from certification they provide good awareness of products and technologies and with new technologies coming out everyday it becomes very very hard to keep up with them if you don't use them on daily basis as there are probably many areas you never get to use, so the alternative can be working towards a certification. I think for me these are two reasons I like getting certified: personal satisfaction/prestige (whatever you want to call it really) from certification as well as awareness of new technologies, being aware of what is possible can help in decision making when you get to a situation where you need to get something done and are looking for a solution.

Nic (who is an MCP by the way) is one person I know who questions what certifications imply about developers who have them (this is specific to Microsoft Certifications AFAIK) and he may have good reason for that. The reason is, he has come across several MC** developers who happened to be not so great as developers or not as good as non certified developers. He can probably say more on this one...

So this gets me back to the question of this post, should people get certified or not, and what value will it add? I've already given my thought on this one from my perspective so I would personally like to continuously get certified for the reasons I mentioned above.

I don't think that MC** (dev track) certifications should be used as an indicator of whether or not you are a good programmer or developer but as an indicator that you are familiar with what the framework ...etc can do and how to get started on things. Even if you've done all the labs ...etc this doesn't really mean you are a good developer but means you know how the code in a certain area works.

The above issue has been improved slightly in the new generation of MS certifications, with .NET 1.1 pretty much all material was very specific to the framework and surrounding technologies but with the .NET 2.0 a good chunk of the exam covers some generic concepts (within the context of MS technologies and products) such as unit testing ...etc.

Another way to maybe think about this is asking this question: does having a degree with IT/CS majors imply you are a good developer? The answer is probably not still.

Next month I'm going to be re locating to Melbourne and as a result I have handed over the .NET User Group leadership today as announced by Darryl. It has been a great couple of years since taking over the user group from Peter Jones. I really enjoyed running the group during that time and regret to be handing it over but I kind of had to

The new user group leader is Christopher Fairbairn whom you might have seen presenting at the 2008 Summer Road Trip that was held earlier this year. So from now on Chris will be the primary contact for the .NET user group and Bryn will be helping as was the case in the past two years.

I've just introduced a new blog category to my blog topics Business. So in this category you will find some of my personal thoughts on business related things. Despite being at an early stage in my career, the idea of running a business at some point during my career journey is something I'm interested in doing. At this stage I'm not sure when that might happen, but I guess I'll know eventually. Below are some initial thoughts on what I think makes a good business. This category is basically my thoughts regarding things I think I've learnt from observing what some of the great business leaders are doing out there.

To have a good business I think you need to have the following things.

- A good idea
- Money to fund that idea
- A great team of people to build that idea
- A way to get the word out about your idea

- So what defines a good idea? How do you know if your idea is good or whether or not it makes sense and is worth pursuing.

From what I've learnt: A good idea is building a product or a service that fills a need by someone else or helps make what they do more efficient. So in order to have a good idea one would need to recognise gaps in products or services around them. I think if you can be good at identifying gaps then you've got it!

Ok so you think you've identified a gap that you can fill, but need assurance that it makes sense. Here's another thing you can do. LEARN FROM OTHERS. A really easy way to test an idea you have to know whether or not it makes sense is to run it by someone who's been there done that. After all, why make mistakes and learn the hard way when you can get advice from others who've done it before. There are a lot of people out there who can give advice and help one find flaws in their ideas very quickly.

- How do we get money to fund an idea?

Assuming we've gone through step one and now have our idea. The question becomes how do we fund it. Well I guess there only 2 options, either we have enough Capital to fund it ourselves or the need to borrow. In most cases one will need to go with Option 2 and borrow money. This can be done by getting investors on board, borrow money from a bank, floating a company ...etc. I think no matter which option one chooses you need to do one thing convince OTHERS (the investors) that you have a good idea. Note that getting through step one you convinced YOURSELF that your idea is good.

To convince investors that you have a good idea you need to have them take you seriously. I believe this can be done in the following steps.

- Build your brand (portfolio) and your reputation.
- Have a business plan that describes your idea and goals and how you plan to achieve them.
- Approach people who can help while backing yourself with the above and get started from there.

To be continued...

Next week we will be having our next user group session for the year where Peter Jones will be talking on SharePoint for ASP Developers.

Also coming up this month is a session on Embedded Development which will also be the inaugural session for the newly launching Embedded user group.

More details on the embedded user group session soon.

Don't forget, if you've got any questions, suggestions or ideas for the user group and session content feel free to post a comment here or contact me directly.

I was spending some time today trying to figure out how to turn DasBlog categories into technorati friendly links because it seems Technorati doesn't pickup the default dasblog category URLs, I've come across some posts that talk about creating custom macros to display digg it ...etc links at the footer and this I came across this link here that has a list of tons of existing dasBlog Macros.

In the link above I found that there already exists a <%TechnoratiTags%> tag that you can use, this will display your categories at technorati tags instead of the default category links.

I've also noticed that if you use Windows Live Writer, under the insert section on the right you have an option to insert Technorati tags and others...

Nice!

Hey everyone and welcome to 2008, so this is my first post of the year and I've deliberately delayed my first blogging so that I start blogging straight after the 2008RoadTrip here in Christchurch.

As you may know, Darryl, Jeremy and Chris have been doing a tour around the country (the road trip) with Chris and Jeremy presenting on SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 along with a local speaker covering Visual Studio 2008 and Darryl tagging along.

I think Chris and JB have done a fantastic job presenting despite Chris feeling a little unwell. Our very own Christopher Fairbairn also did a great job on his part. For me it was a bit interesting being an MC for an event that big and talking in front of over 150 or so people. It went ok though I think.

So with Christchurch now done Darryl, Chris and Jeremy still have Dunedin and Invercargill to go, you can still register for these here

The draw for the windows home servers will be done by Jeremy on the 5th of March so stay tuned!

Also as I mentioned yesterday our next user group meeting will be on the 27th of February and the topic for that is ASP.NET MVC presented by John-Daniel from Mindscape in Wellington.

Finally, thanks for all of you who made it to the event  despite the bad weather yesterday. And a special thanks to Chris, JB, and Chris F for a fantastic presentation.

For some more pictures and more on yesterday see Darryl's blog here.