Internet & Me: A Remarried!
It has been a while since my last entry here. I was unhooked from the virtual world for almost 2 weeks, partly due to my hectic schedule. The rest I blame a telco company for their exceptional ‘world-class’ service.
I was really pissed off with my internet connection lately. It got disconnected about 2 weeks ago, and the provider unbelievably took 6 sweet days to rectify the problem. I can’t help myself giving a free lecture to the operator who happened to handle my complaints. Poor guy!
2 days before Xmas, I’ve been notified by a colleague on another service disruption. Unlike my 1st experience (wrong jumper -> 100% telco’s fault), it’s a major breakdown this time around, involving traffic to Europe. 3 submarine cables fail in the Mediterannean Sea.
Since there’re arguably nothing much to blame for the telco company, I hereby help them to publish the announcement:
ANNOUNCEMENT
SERVICE INTERUPTION
Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) would like to inform its customers that its Internet services are experiencing some degradation in performance due to fault with circuits on SMW4 submarine cable systems between Palermo (Southern Italy) and Alexandria (Nothern Egyp) linking Malaysia to Europe. As a result, Internet services customers may experience slow browsing when accessing websites hosted in Europe at this time. Due to some activities to restore the circuits, traffic to Northern America may experience minor degradation while traffic to other countries is not affected.
Customers using other IP services such as VPN, critical applications and such over the Internet to EU may also be experiencing service disruption due to this incident.
Restoration works on the affected cables are already in progress while some of the links have been rerouted to alternative routes to reduce traffic congestion. We expect the complete recovery of our services by December 31, 2008. We shall make further announcements to keep you updated on the progress.
TM apologizes for any inconvenience caused by this, whilst at the same time, we would like to assure you that we are doing all that is necessary in order to restore our services as soon as possible.
Customers can call TM at 100 and select “Internet Services” or e-mail us at help@tm.com.my for any Internet related problems.
I guess I was lucky to be away for 5 days during the breakdown. I don’t have a clue of how serious the problem is. Today I surf the net, seems to be OK. Perhaps the restoration had completed.
Internet & me are no longer departed. We are remarried! 
What can we learn from Bukit Antarabangsa tragedy?
#1 Buyers’ power. Despite PM’s warning to stop all hill side projects with immediate effect, we could still see heavy duty vehicles cutting off hills. I wonder how powerful is our PM’s word? If our No.1 can’t change these people, we could. I personally think the basic rule of supply-demand could works here. As a consumer, we should say NO. Stop buying these kinds of properties: near hill slopes, river banks, high tension cables, waste dumping areas, etc. We have the power to choose, so use it wisely. Create no more demand, and the supply would stops itself. Don’t be easily fooled by the developers’ sweet talk. The slightest miscalculation could risk our lives. Makkal Sakthi!
#2 Execution. We have bunch of action plans well documented in our shelves. All those policies, regulations, laws and systems that were outlined 15 years back don’t really doing us any favor. Every time a disaster happened, committees were formed, ideas were tabled, plans were drafted and rules were tightened. All to ensure history won’t repeat itself. Sadly enough all those efforts were forgotten easily after a short while and were quickly put into cold storage. We lack implementation and execution. That’s where the focus should be. Now the most we can say is “only if we did this.. we should do that..”
There’re more to be learned if we perceive it from different angle. It’s always important to learn and make corrective actions, even we are not directly involved with the incident. I’m writing this here to show my concern.
Today’s news predicts another landslide in June 2009. Please no more casualty!
Happy Eid al Adha!
Budeen.com would like to wish all Muslim readers a joyful Eid al Adha celebration. May this ‘Festival of Sacrifice’ brings us closer to God, granted us peace & harmony, and reminded us the true meaning of SACRIFICE!
God bless us with rahmah & maghfirah. Ameen!
Nokia unveils new N97 phone!
Nokia has unveiled their latest flagship model N97 at the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona yesterday. They claimed the smartphone to be ‘world’s most advance mobile computer‘.
The Finnish company has finally move a gear up in giving Steve Jobs a little bit of a challenge. I believe we will very soon see a lot of comparisons being made between Nokia N97 vs Apple’s iPhone. After all, these 2 gadgets promise to do everything a computer does with one key difference: You can actually slip these suckers into your pocket!!
“From the desktop to the laptop and now to your pocket, the Nokia N97 is the most powerful, multi-sensory mobile computer in existence”
John Geust, Nokia Vice President
Click here to explore N97’s full list of talents!
