# Sunday, 27 April 2008

OK, I promised I would be good.  At the beginning of this year, I made myself a promise not to be a cynical “you know what” when it comes to the world of software development.  Lord knows I have seen my fare share of Dilbertesque wackyisms over the last 17 years in this biz.  Heck, I even contributed back to the industry with my own open source project.  I felt it was giving back to the software world, that has been so kind to me, but then again maybe it is some form of redemption.  I don’t know.  Maybe that is why I have had only one post so far this year.

 

But… there are still some things that defy any sort of rationale, logical explanation whatsoever.  For example, I am a frequent flyer (~25,000 miles per quarter) and so I keep pretty close track of those miles on my Aeroplan.  Last week, I got back from a business trip to LA and Medford, Oregon.  Oregon, truly a beautiful place, but not as beautiful as the Sunshine Coast, where I live, but I am biased.

 

So, as usual on Friday, I pop over to the Aeroplan site and am greeted with the following web page.

 

 

 

 

Now, I know from time to time, there are outages, and maybe it would last an hour or so, cause how serious could it be?  Pop in a new drive, slide in a new web server in the farm, switch failed, power supply failed – but hey, even those would actually not cause an outage, cause as any data center system engineer knows, these are all “hot swappable” in the year 2008. Well it is Sunday at 9pm and the outage is still in effect.  Now what in the heck would cause an outage of a fairly heavy traffic laden web site for over two days?  I can’t imagine.

 

Note the site says, “Following a routine maintenance procedure, we experienced a system failure.”  A system failure?  Folks this is a catastrophe of biblical proportions in web terms for the year 2008.  A rip in the time space continuum has occurred over there at Aeroplan.  No halfway decent web site goes down for two days.  Even my own rinky dinky web log here that I host on an ancient 1990 Pentium III 600 MHz piece of you know what has not even seen 2 days of outage – ever - even when my power supply blew up and I had to shoe horn the ol’ mother board into a brand new case only took 6 hours.

 

So what the heck could have happened?  I can only guess that somehow the entire data center melted down and there is no back up of the source code and somewhere someone, or a group of people are madly waiting until Monday morning to get into a bank’s safety deposit box to get the latest tape back up.  Like I just can’t image what it could be.  Can you?

 

What will be really surprising to me come Monday morning and Aeroplan is still not up.  If that is the case, I should call Aeroplan – I will host their site for a mere $10,000 per month (cheap!) and I guarantee that their site will never be down for longer than 24 hours, or they can have all of their money back.  How about that Areoplan, do we have a deal?  Oh by the way, I might upgrade my PIII to host it on :-) 

 

But seriously, man, you are giving us professionals a bad name in our biz for not having your sh*t together.  There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever, in the year 2008, for your main business, i.e. your web site, to go down for 2 days!  Either you do not know what the heck you are doing or you just don't care Mr.Aeroplan - either case, if you did not "own" my aero miles, I would switch to a new provider in a flash for such blatant shoddiness.

 

Updated Monday April 28 - Aeroplan manages to get their web site back up and running with little explanation.

However, I still see that my Aeroplan miles I collected from the previous week have not been updated on the site.  We will see if my Aeroplan Miles were affected or not...

Sunday, 27 April 2008 20:43:52 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
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