Aliant is making a big deal out of a “new” service that lets their digital cell phone customers send and receive instant messages to and from MSN Messenger users on the Internet.

When I first read about this, I was excited, because I’ve used instant messaging a lot to communicate with colleagues and clients, and the notion of having this capability seamlessly following me out the door was very attractive.

Attractive, that is, until I started into the complex voodoo process of sending and receiving instant messages on my cell phone.

To their credit, this mostly isn’t the fault of Aliant: the system relies upon Microsoft’s kludgy way of getting cell phones, with their limited software and capabilities, wired into their instant messaging network.

How complex is it? Here are just some of the steps on the Aliant Accessing the MSN® Messenger Service through Text Messaging page:

• After completing the MSN sign-up process you should have received the following text message on your phone: MSN Messenger Service! To retrieve your contact list, reply to this message with CL. Save this number in your phone to view your contact list anytime.
• You should either save the 9 digit number attached to this message in your phonebook as “Messenger” (it will start with 2220) or save the text message. You will need this number to retrieve your contact list, turn off alerts and send instant messages.
• To retrieve your list of online contacts, create a new text message from the messaging menu of your phone and insert the 9 digit “Messenger” number you saved in your phone book. In the Message field type in the command “CL”, then send the message.
• You will receive a message back with a list your online contacts. You can chat with one of your contacts by replying to this message with the number of the contact you want to chat with ie 1 What’s up?

Now maybe it’s just me, but this all seems a lot like the instructions for how to use the UNIX ‘talk’ command back in 1981. Except that it’s more complicated.

The beauty of instant messaging clients is that anyone can figure out how to use them: double click on your friend’s name and start typing. Trying to contort a cell phone to do the same thing reflects just how primitive cell phone operating systems are.

Suggestion: if you need to chat with colleagues and clients from your cell phone, give them a call. Instructions:

• Dial number.
• Talk.

All of the vacationing Rukavinas have returned to their alloted home provinces now, and the Rukavina level on Prince Edward Island has returned to its steady state of two (Oliver and I).

Pictured here, last week on the wharf in New London after a filling and tasty dinner of Island seafood, is the entire collection. From left to right: brother Johnny and sister-in-law Jodi from Vancouver, brother Mike from Burlington, Catherine, Oliver, brother Steve from Montreal, me, mother Frances and father Norm from Carlisle (Ontario).

By the time this picture was taken, we’d already been out and about for a very long summer day, including a visit to the Do Duck Petting Farm, go-carting in Burlington, and walking on Cousins Shore. And that was only the afternoon. This goes part way to explaining our general “rough and ready” look.

The weird thing you will notice about my family is that, other than Johnny and Steve who are identical twins, the rest of us look like we could be from different planets let along different families, yet we are all (with the exception of Jodi and Catherine, of course) related by blood.

We miss them all.

Angus Orford and his wife Karen Rose have, as reported here earlier, purchased the house next door to us. Yesterday, Angus was out front fixing the steps while his dutiful sisters pruned the front hedge. He asked me if we had an outside garden hose, and when I replied that we did not (despite many years of trying to convince our plumber of the value thereof), he readily offered up his whenever we felt the need.

This is neighbourliness in action, and it is, I think, a useful platform on which to rebuild the broken world of customer service (see Aliant et al).

When I deal with ISN, or Action Press, or Shaddy’s Shwarma Palace, or Eddie’s Lunch, or my plumber Cecil, I’m dealing the real people. People who are, at least in a virtual sense, my neighbours. They treat me with respect, treat my problems as their own, and try to be helpful whenever we can.

We are lucky, here on Prince Edward Island, that this notion of selfless neighbourliness is programmed into the Island DNA; it is truly ubiquitous.

It is only when we move up to more complex organisms — Sobeys, Aliant, the TD Bank — that neighbourliness gets left behind, replaced with faceless ignorance. Somehow when someone is our neighbour we feel obligated (and happy) to offer assistance when called, but when we’re dealing with anonymous strangers, some sort of latent animalistic defence mechanism manifests, and those we’re dealing with try to protect the hive at any cost, with not even a hint of neighbourly obligation.

To bring the story back to Angus: Maritime Electic, where Angus handles public relations, is the Island’s most customer-friendly utility. They aren’t perfect, but compared to their utility kin, they’re awfully good. And why? Because their attitude appears to be “we are your electricity providing neighbours” not “we own the electricity and will eke it out to you if you are compliant.”

Bobby Clow’s store in Hampshire was our “neighbourhood store” when we lived in Kingston, and when we shopped there we were very obviously dealing with Bobby and his family as neigbours. As such, I was always under the impression that were I to suggest to Bobby that he start to carry, say, Belgian endives, he would endeavour his darndest to do so. Not because he expected to corner the endive market or make lots of money from me (at least not entirely), but rather because he understands that being a good neighbour is good business over the long term.

My frustrating dealings with Aliant tonight stuck in my craw mostly because I was talking to someone who, on the surface, appeared helpful and intelligent but who obviously felt a greater duty to the Aliant System than to me as an individual. I wasn’t their neighbour. At all.

Conversely, my dealings with Griffin Technology, even though they are in Nashville, thousands of miles away, were not unlike my dealings with my neighbour Angus over the hose. So it’s not, at least entirely, about geography.

The question I have now is “does neighbourliness scale?” Is it even possible for pan-regional company like Aliant to be neighbourly? Perhaps they should hire away Angus as a start, although I fear he might get reprogrammed and become the sort of generic enemy that Aliant is so good at creating.

I was showing Oliver how to pee this evening just before dinner (this falls into the class of “things you never imagined you would be teaching someone before you had kids”) and I had a thought: one of the most powerful pieces of information you can have when you’re struggling with a problem is the information that someone else has or is going through the same thing.

Whether it’s peeing, or relationships, or illness, or sex, or work problems, the simple act of knowing that you’re not carving new territory, that others have “been there,” is sometimes enough to remove the stress from a struggle.

This is why the meme that Rob Paterson is trying to spread through health care, that self-help groups trump traditional medicine, is so powerful.

It’s also why those parts of our lives that we’re afraid to talk about or demonstrate in public — peeing, relationships, illness, sex, work — are often the most stressful parts of our lives. If we were less uptight about these things, more willing to talk about our struggles in these areas with friends and family, I’m willing to hazard a guess that much of the stress would melt away and, in the ensuing flood of information and tip sharing, the problems themselves wouldn’t be too far behind.

We have a network monitoring system here at Reinvented. It’s not exotic, but it does allow us to keep track of services running on both our own machines, and on our clients’ machines in several sites (for those of you that are curious, we use the open-source Nagios package).

The first step in checking to see whether a remote server is “alive” is to send it something called a “ping” which is the electronic equivalent of sending a “hello, are you there?” message over the wire and listening for the “yes, I’m here” message back.

If our monitor can send a ping and receive back a response, it knows that the remote server is online, and then proceeds to send it more complex messages like “is your webserver running?” and “is your disk full?”

Without a successful response to the initial ping, however, our monitor assumes that the remote server is dead in the water, and it proceeds to do all sort of crazy emergency-like behaviour like emailing us and paging us and generally waving its arms in the air to grab our attention to the problem.

It’s a system that’s worked well for several years, and we rely on it to offer our clients good service.

Until today.

Today, without telling anyone, Aliant, our upstream bandwidth provider, decided to turn off the ability for us to generate outgoing or incoming pings. In essense, they are filtering out all “ping traffic.”

So when our network monitor tries to send a ping to anywhere on the Internet, the entire network appears to be “dead in the water.” And so the system starts emailing us and paging us and generally waving its arms in the air to grab our attention to the problem.

I called Aliant’s technical “support” line this afternoon, and was told that this move was taken because of the various Microsoft-related viruses and worms that were released last week — apparently the increase in network traffic caused by the viruses and worms prompted them to filter network traffic to try and deal with the problem.

Fair enough.

But they neither told me, their customer relying on this service that they were going to do this, nor can they offer any estimated timing on the removal of this filtering beyond “when the virus problem has cleared up.”

I’ve asked them to remove the ping filtering from my subnet, but they claim to not be able to do this.

And they seem perplexed that anyone would actually rely on the ability to ping as a business tool.

I’m so goddammed angry at these idiots at Aliant that I want to scream. Fortunately I don’t need to scream: I’m switching bandwidth providers this week, part of a gradual and determined de-Aliant-ification of my life.

Another month or two, once I’ve switched cell phone and land-line providers, I’ll be totally free of Aliant’s unique approach to customer dis-service, and able to conduct business without worrying about crap like this.

Sorry about the strong words, but from PEINet to Island Tel to Aliant, I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of hours banging my head against faceless technologists who have neither the skill to execute their duties, nor the compassion to admit this. I count myself extremely lucky to have an alternative bandwidth provider to fall back on, one where a real person answers the phone, and where I can go camp on the owner’s doorstep until problems are solved.

Mick Jagger is on Charlie Rose tonight. Check your local PBS listings.

Try this: go to the UPEI Webcam page and click on the “time lapse from beginning of construction” link. As a longtime webcam maintainer, I stand in awe of both their ability to keep their camera running, and their ability to keep it in the same place for so long. It’s a great tour through Island winter, spring and summer.

Back at the beginning of August, we ended up taking an accidental trip to Quebec City when a “short weekend away” got out of hand. We travelled to Moncton, then up the eastern side of New Brunswick through Campbellton into Quebec, then to Rimouski, and from Rimouski down the St. Lawrence to Quebec City. 

Highlights of the trip were:

• Savonnerie Olivier
• Amqui, Quebec (especially the playground)
• Museum in Rimouski
• The Quebec City Zoo
• Old Quebec City

My last visit to Quebec City was when I was 19. I’d just dropped out of university, and I was hitchhiking to the east coast. Catherine had never been, and she’d always dreamed of it, so when the weekend opportunity arrived, and we were pointed in the right direction, we seized the day. It’s a wonderful city, well worth a visit for anyone within a couple of days driving (which is a lot of people in North America). It’s about as European a city as you’ll find without crossing the Atlantic.

Most of my family has left now, though Johnny and Jodi from Vancouver are around for another 12 hours until they fly back in the morning at the insane time of 5:50 a.m. Thus closes a family-packed week, most of which was spent at a rented cottage in Canoe Cove.

Highlights?

We all enjoyed go-carting, both at North River, and slightly zippier and slightly longer, at Burlington Amusement Park. The Do Duck Petting Farm was its usual wonderful self — this is, I think, the single best attraction for children on Prince Edward Island.

On the same trip to the north shore, we walked along the beach at Cousins Shore, had dinner at the New London Seafood Restaurant (excellent service, good food).

Otherwise there was a lot of walking along the beach (and, for Oliver, swimming around, tethered to one uncle or aunt or grandparent or another), drinking of beer (recommendation: get a keg from the Gahan House; good, handy form for beer, and works out to about a dollar a pint, Johnny says) and eating both in and out (including an excellent pasta meal cooked by Johnny and Jodi).

Perhaps the wisest decision was to rent a cottage duplex rather than One Big Cottage. This gave everyone their own personal space, and let us split into sub-groups when it made sense. The cottage we rented is owned by the Trainor family (their main base of operations is in Hampton, where they’re known as Hampton Haven Cottages). The duplex was clean, well equipped, and had uncommonly comfortable beds (better than most hotels). The location, about 500 feet from the beach, across from Camp Keir, can’t be beat.

Sometimes it’s good to slip into the tourist role for a while, even if you live here fulltime; helps put the tourism industry in perspective. Having been in Boston, New Hampshire, New Brunswick and Quebec in the past month, I can say without hesitation that the people and facilities of the Island tourism industry are a cut above the rest.

Now, onwards and upwards towards fall…

Maybe I’m late to the party on this scam, but here’s what happened to me tonight: my cell phone rang, with a very long number showing up as the “caller ID” on the display. When I answered it became obivous from the echo that it was an international call, and looking up the number later, it looks like it might have come from Ghana.

On the other end of the line was a fuzzy voice, asking me to call another number, also seemingly in Ghana. After telling me to call the number, the caller rung off.

I called Aliant Mobility, and poked around the Internet a little for more information, and the general idea here seems to be that if I were to call back the number in Ghana (or whereever), I would incur incredible long distance charges.

Oddly enough, a few minutes later a call came in on my office line from a number seemingly in France (country code of 33, or maybe 133), and the caller hung up without leaving a message.

Aliant took the call details, and promised to report the call to the fraud department there. They did advise not to return the call, which is common sense.

And it used to be just email we had to be afraid of…