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The Untold Story of the Globelines DSL Outage

2008-10-03T11:04:32Z

It’s been more than two months since our home DSL broadband connection with Globelines got disrupted for 24 days. So in the interest of consumer interest, I decided to recount my own “horror” story even though it happened a long time ago. All I can say is that it was quite a difficult three weeks and I managed to subsist on retail Wi-Fi in various hotspots and about a week of ümobile 3G. it’s really a good thing that my livelihood is not dependent on having reliable broadband connection at home, though my sister could not telecommute in her work as a result. Our troubles started on the night of June 25 and lasted until servicemen from Innove restored our DSL connection on July 19.

I know a lot of people would’ve gone ballistic at a disconnection period that long (like during the time in 2006 when an earthquake in Taiwan cut various undersea cables), but I guess it’s a testament to my family’s good nature that we were relatively patient about the whole thing although we were still collectively displeased. My Plurk friends have actually been witness to my DSL-lessness throughout those days: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

We subscribed to Globelines in April of 2007 and the service had been relatively ok enough and we didn’t really encounter the so-called post-honeymoon stage. There were times when the connection was slow or when it would go out but those instances were often resolved overnight and occurred few and far between. So I found it odd that one day after the DSL connection went dead on June 25, it was still down.

Customer Service Hell

We had recently paid a few months overdue before on June 17 so I checked through the 24-hour hotline whether our payment was reflected. Well it wasn’t, and even our June billing details were not indicated. So we called up customer service to ask for reconnection and we learned that our account was being “migrated.”

Well, that “migration” story turned out to be the bane of our customer service. Every time we called and followed up our problem, the CSRs would become confused about our predicament and after putting us on hold to do further consultation, they would eventually give the “account migration” reason. The whole thing is quite bizarre, really. Many of the CSRs are apparently not aware of any migration of our accounts and some are even surprised when we tell them about our account migration. We ended up calling both the customer service and the technical support service (which are apparently two different call centers) and they could not provide us any substantial help, only to keep logging our calls and adding a follow-up ticket requesting feedback from their back-end support team. They were all nice and polite and all but some admitted that they cannot provide any real status because the whole database is not transparent to them. In short, they could not provide immediate help at all.

Things turned from bad to worse when we received our June billing statement in the mail and found out that it was the final billing statement! I immediately called up the hotline and asked what’s up with it. The answering agent told us that our account was apparently disconnected last April. This was utterly flabbergasting since we were still getting Internet connectivity until June! As usual, the agent was not able to help very much and she proceeded to log yet another follow-up ticket into their system.

The real breakthrough came when after the umpteenth time I called their hotline, I was able to talk to a guy who didn’t sound at all like the numerous agents we’ve talked to before. Well, this guy was polite, but he didn’t stick to any script nor peppered his speech with any flowery words. He even was voicing his thoughts aloud. I actually suspect he’s a supervisor or somebody higher up because he was able to provide a helluva lot more information than all of the other agents before him combined. For one thing, he did a database search and was able to find a new account under my name. Apparently, there really was an account migration an not just a euphemism for whatever they don’t want to tell their customers. It also turns out that all of our follow-up tickets were being attached to the old account so nothing is being done about them at all.

Finally, two days after I talked to Mr. supervisor, service crewmen from Innove arrived at our home and restored our DSL connection, complete with a new phone number. After 24 freaking days.

This customer service tale is actually quite ironic because the reason why we got a Globelines account in the first place is because we’ve heard that there are more customer service horror stories with PLDT than with Globe. It actually came to a point where my dad considered upgrading our PLDT line to MyDSL (but we didn’t push through when he found out it would take 2 weeks).

Learnings

Here are a few things I learned about Globelines’ customer service:

There’s no coordination between the technical support representatives and the customer service representatives.

Their ticketing system is stupid. Follow-up tickets do not seem to be linked to each other.

Globe really needs to improve their proactive customer relations. Their reactive customer service might be better than others but I’m more angry by the fact that we were not told ahead of time about any changes to our account until the whole thing is dumped on us like cold water on a sleeping person.

The fact that we were one of the first households to avail of Globelines when they started servicing our subdivision may be ultimately be the reason why our account was migrated. It might be that in their eagerness to enter a new area, they did not lay down their infrastructure pat and so our account eventually needed to be migrated. (I don’t know of any other Globelines subscribers in our subdivision so I can’t be sure of this one.)

Globelines technicians actually use Speedtest.net as a diagnostic check. That’s the first site the service crewmen went to to check the DSL connection.

Epilogue

Because of this disconnection I did not blog nor Plurk much during July. It’s a good thing that I’m not Karma-conscious (unlike a lot of plurkers out there) so I didn’t mind that I lost around 10 points. And hooray for passive income because even if I’m not blogging, I’m still earning from my blogs. In fact, July had been my best month for AdSense (now since surpassed by my August earnings); my total earnings in July was more than 50% higher than my best month before that. [ :-D]

Belated 2008 Philippine Blog Awards Post

2008-10-01T14:48:00Z

The awards night of the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards rocked! The event, held last September 21 at the One Esplanade, was a much bigger, better, and brighter affair than last year’s award. For one thing, there were more categories and awards, and there are a lot of winners that I have never heard about. This goes to show that there’s been a lot of effort to be more inclusive.

Congratulations to all the bloggers that have won (and that includes me [ :-D]). Congratulations in particular to Ferdz Decena for winning the Best Travel Blog Award! Among all of the winners, I consider his award the most spot on! Kudos as well to the organizers and the volunteers that have sacrificed time and money to put up such a great show!

Some pictures taken with a wonky cellphone camera are shown below. The rest can be viewed in Flickr.

[IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] [IMG]

L-R, T-B: 1. Waiting for the program to start. 2. A blogger event isn’t really complete without live blogging. 3. I finally saw a live WeeWillDoodle doodle!. 4. Batang Yagit wins the Bloggers’ Choice Award. 5. Benj wins the hotly contested Best Personal Blog Award. 6. Jester and his hunny. 7. Jayvee hosting the much anticipated raffle. 8. Best buddies Benj and Jeff. 9. Frenzied media coverage .

Google Dumps Navteq; Opens Up Map Maker for the Philippines

2008-09-23T11:08:00Z

Here’s a couple of interesting development on the Google Geography department. First, the quick news item: Google has dropped Navteq as one of its mapping data providers (i.e., companies that provide street, point-of-interest, and routing data) in favor of continuing to do business with Tele Atlas. This is not unexpected since Navteq was recently acquired by Nokia and the industry movement of these two companies in the past year have made them competitors of each other. This latest move by Google was first revealed last Friday, September 19, in a blog post by Mike Blumenthal. The announcement from Google Maps Guide Adam contained this snippet:

I wanted to give you a heads up that Google Maps recently made some changes to the map data. Specifically, we have moved Google Maps over to use the same map data from Tele Atlas that is currently used by both the Google Maps API and Google Maps for Mobile.

While Navteq was not mentioned, anyone with a background of the situation can easily read between the lines. Before dropping Navteq, Google had signed a 5-year agreement with Tele Atlas. In the deal, Tele Atlas will continue to supply mapping data to Google while Google will provide back to Tele Atlas corrections submitted by its users to the data.

The second news item is more relevant to us. Google has finally opened up its Map Maker service to the Philippines. Google Philippines Country Representative Aileen Apolo sent me a private plurk yesterday then later did a public plurk giving this unofficial announcement. (Update: you can now read the official announcement from Google.) Only a few areas in the Philippines are open for public editing but the current data now is quite comprehensive. Metro Manila is fantastic, Metro Cebu is moving along, and Davao City is just starting. Some areas along the countryside are also in the works, notably the belt between Calamba to Batangas City, where there is a strip of high-resolution satellite imagery that somebody had traced over. The street data for Metro Manila found in Map Maker is certainly a far cry from the pitiful roads in Google Maps that I criticized a little more than a year ago.

This is certainly a welcome development but I have to admit that I am far less than ecstatic. Why? Just read my previous blog post where I dissected Google Map Maker. Now that it’s available for the Philippines, I’ve dipped my hands and tried out Google Map Maker and compared the experience with OpenStreetMap, an open-content project I’ve been contributing to and been blogging about since last year. The verdict? Both have their strengths and weaknesses but I’ll continue to invest my time and effort with OpenStreetMap as a matter of principle (even if I’m a Google fanboy). OSM is open-content while Google Map Maker is a walled garden; I prefer the former of course.

That said, I must say Google Map Maker is a more structured project data-wise which eases contributing somewhat. The data that you can enter is expansive but very limited: only enough to support Google’s location-based services. OSM, on the other hand, is very permissive in its data entry such that you can literally tag any point, line, or area with any sort of string data. The OSM community just agrees on basic conventions but anyone is free to add their own data whatsoever. This provides for a much more richer dataset at the expense of computational complexity and anarchic development.

As a final note, shown below is the current data the two projects have for the Fort Bonifacio Global City district. The Google Map Maker contributors still traced over the pre-Bonifacio High Street satellite imagery while in OSM, the data is much more updated and richer. (Of course I had a hand in that.) [ :-D]

[ Comparison image of the Fort Bonifacio Global City area between Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap.]

I Won the Best Single Technology Blog Post Award!

2008-09-21T11:50:00Z

[ Photo of my abstract art PBA 2008 trophy.]

Whee! I won the Best Single Blog Post Award for the Technology Category in the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards. The post that won is the nosebleed-inducing “The Making of Lakbayan (Part 2)”. [ :-)] Well, it’s not a complete achievement since that particular post was a self-nomination (I figured correctly that it’s harder to win in the Best Blog Division and that people will overlook the Best Single Blog Post Division so I banked my chances there [ :-P]). But, I’m still chuffed to have won and I also have to acknowledge Benj for actually nominating the related post, “Lakbayan”, for the same category. His nomination actually gave me the idea to nominate the more technical “Making of” post. So thanks, Benj!

Pictures and another blog post to follow. [ :D]

Filipino Voices is My Choice

2008-09-17T18:20:00Z

[IMG]

For the Bloggers’ Choice Award of the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards that is. As you may or may not know, Filipino Voices recently emerged as one of the Top 12 Emerging Influential Blogs of 2008. While I have already voted for this group blog in that writing project, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw my support again to Filipino Voices for the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards.

The heart of what makes a blog a compelling website that is worthy of the reader’s attention and deserving of an award is the passion that the writers and authors pour into it coupled with the desire to impart something to the audience. That is what I think what differentiates such blogs from your run-of-the-mill online diaries or journals that you commonly find in LiveJournal and Multiply sites. Filipino Voices embody that passion that I’m looking for. It is a group blog consisting of many writers that have something to say about the burning issues affecting the country. One thing I like about FV is that it brings together authors that have wildly differing viewpoints. In fact, many of them often disagree with each other’s points of view! This is what I think is the ingredient needed to provide value in the stream of discourse found online. Kudos to Nick of Tingog.com for setting up this blog! I can actually see this blog becoming an important website for the coming 2010 elections.

So there: Filipino Voices gets my vote of confidence for the Bloggers’ Choice Award. I suggest that you skedaddle over to the award page and vote for your own choice. If you’re going to choose, don’t be bamboozled by peer pressure into jumping on the bandwagon of voting for the “popular” choice, whether he or she is a rising star or a techno-savvy “poor” person. Hehehe. [ :-D] Go with your own criteria and choose what feels right.

Oh yeah, voting also gives you a chance to win a Nokia N82. To be a qualified voter, you only need to be an established Filipino blogger. You don’t even have to attend the Awards Night this Sunday, September 21, at One Esplanade in order to win if you’re busy or you already have other plans. [ :)]

New Google Earth Satellite Imagery for September 2008

2008-09-06T14:10:00Z

There’s ~~still no official announcement from Google~~ (Update, September 6: now, there’s a blog post), but readers of Google Earth Blog noticed new and updated satellite imagery in Google Earth. As usual, there’s a lag time before the data is updated in Google Maps so you won’t see the new imagery on the web yet (well, except if you have the Google Earth browser plugin).

Below is a list of the places in the Philippines that have new or updated imagery:

northern Nueva Vizcaya and southern Ifugao, including Bayombong
a remote coastal area of Gen. Nakar, Quezon
central Pampanga and eastern Bulacan, including Malolos and Mount Arayat
coastal areas of northern Zambales, including Iba, and parts of Pangasinan
parts of Rizal and a part of eastern Laguna
a remote part of Palawan
southern Iloilo
a small part of northern Negros Occidental
parts of central Cebu
western extremities of Bohol, including parts of Panglao Island
Siquijor
a few areas in Leyte
large swathes of Cotabato, Bukidnon, Davao del Norte, Davao Oriental, and Davao del Sur
coastal areas of Sultan Kudarat
parts of Zamboanga del Sur
a few areas in Sulu and Tawi-Tawi

[ Screenshot of Miag-ao Church and Malolos Church in Google Earth.]

This means that for the first time in Google Earth, we can now see a high-resolution satellite image of Miag-ao Church, one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and Barasoain Church in Malolos, possibly the most historic church in the Philippines. I blogged before that Microsoft’s Live Maps one-ups Google Maps by having Barasoain Church in hi-res. Now Google has caught up.

Of course, you can expect me to feature these two churches in Vista Pinas when Google Maps has the updated data. [ :)]

Of Decay Products and Retrograde Motion

2008-09-01T15:19:53Z

Remember the Wikimedia illustration-for-pay project I blogged about last year? Hmmm, maybe not. (So read that blog post! Go on. I’ll wait.) anyway, the first round of illustration requests started last month and will run until early October. There are 50 needed illustrations in various fields such as biology (jellyfish cross-section), mathematics (Császár polyhedron), engineering (airborne wind turbine), and computer science (application virtualization). All but two of the illustrations will have a payout of $40 while the remaining will be worth $15.

As I said in my previous blog entry, I have mixed feelings about the whole project, but I am supporting it. Anyway, I spent the past two weekends creating two of the requested illustrations. The first request is for an illustration of a radioactive decay product and the second is for an animation of a planet’s apparent retrograde motion. Shown below are the illustrations I created linked to their Wikimedia Commons pages.

[ Diagram of the thorium decay chain from lead-212 to lead-208.]

[ Animation of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars in 2003.]

The decay product illustration took me about five hours to create: about half of that to draw the initial image in a popular vector-graphics application and the rest in developing and running scripts to fix and optimize the resulting SVG and then finalizing the image in Inkscape. All in all, I was pretty satisfied with my output.

The animation, on the other hand, was quite hairy to create and took me eight hours. The initial phase involved taking periodic screenshots in Stellarium, an open-source planetarium software, and tracing over the series of shots later on. The key problem of the whole process is that Mars’ path needs to be progressively drawn in, and the date caption in the bottom-right corner needs to be updated every frame. What I ended up with is creating 79 layers in a popular raster-image application, each depicting a different date, and using three separate paths of Mars path with judicious use of moving masks. Rendering the GIF image maxed out my laptop’s resources and I had to kill some background memory processes to get me some more memory. But the final image is worth it and I think it’s quite pretty if I say so myself. [ :)]

The images are now in the review phase and hopefully only little tweaking is needed if changes are necessary. Well I certainly hope that the animation is more or less sufficient since I don’t particularly relish the thought of going through the whole rendering process again. [ :-P]

So, is this the future of Wikipedia? Do we have to pay people to contribute content? Personally, I would still contribute images to Wikipedia like the set of maps of Dinagat Islands I did earlier this year without getting any compensation in return. There’s something fulfilling about contributing to the world’s largest collaborative information project in history. But truth be told, I would not create the images above if there wasn’t any monetary reward involved. So I guess my own answer is that some sort of compensation is needed in Wikipedia, but only for content and/or processes that very few people would do otherwise. We can continue to expect that people will contribute out of their own good will, but to build quality in less-popular areas, much more motivation is needed.

August 2008 Groovee Playlist™

2008-08-30T14:49:00Z

Whee! Here’s the sixth installment of the Groovee Playlist™ series (see the previous one). As before, I’ll link to the Wikipedia article about the song (if it exists) as “[W]”, and to the YouTube search (or official music video) for the song as “[U]” so that you can sample the song and see if you like it as well.

“4 Minutes” by Madonna and Justin Timberlake feat. Timbaland. [W] [U] This is a really catchy duet between Madonna and Justin Timberlake. I also find the music video with its special effects very fascinating.

“Underneath” by Alanis Morissette. [W] [U] Without a doubt Alanis is one of my favorite artists and this single is a pretty great addition to her long list of wonderful singles.

“Boys Do Fall In Love” by Parokya ni Edgar. [U] Is this the first serious cover done by Parokya, who is otherwise known for their parodies? If it is, it’s a really great interpretation.

“Damn Regret” by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. [W] [U] Well, this is the sort-of requisite alternative/rock anthem of this edition of the Groovee Playlist. I like the power of the chorus.

“Say It Again” by Marié Digby. [W] [U] This is such a nice, bubbly and perky song! And the video is very cute—just like Marié Digby. Hehehe. [ :D]

“Viva la Vida” by Coldplay. [W] [U] I didn’t find “Violet Hill,” the free first single from Coldplay’s latest album, to be that great but their next single “Viva la Vida” is a much more likeable offering and is musically similar (somewhat) to “Clocks”, another song of Coldplay that I love.

“Forever” by Chris Brown. [W] [U] I am so freaking in love with this song! I first heard the club remix (very likely the Cahill Club Remix) of this song and I instantly liked it (and Googled the song through my cellphone). After that first exposure, I had a really serious case of LSS over it for the next 5 days. And I’m certainly not alone. [ :D] The intro sucks a bit, but it starts getting better once the verses start. I must say that “forever on the dance floor” has joined the ranks of my all-time favorite song lines.

“Rainbow of Joy” by Brownman Revival. [No link, sorry.] Well, this is a promotional song presumably commissioned by Lipton for their Milk Tea offering, and subsequently, I hear this almost all the time on the radio. It’s a good thing that this song is really a rainbow of joy to hear or I’d be quickly annoyed! [ :)]

“Praan” by Gary Schyman. [U] I shared this “Where the Hell is Matt?” video in Plurk and it made me smile and the background music by Gary Schyman is just so dreamy and uplifting. [ :)]

“I Will Possess Your Heart” by Death Cab for Cutie. [W] [U] This is a pretty nice and leisurely rock song that, while it doesn’t have any catchy or salient parts, is a really great song to fill a lazy Sunday afternoon.

“Closer” by Ne-Yo. [W] [U] What is it with predominantly R&B artists releasing dance-club-friendly songs? There’s Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music” (featured in the March 2008 playlist), and Chris Brown’s “Forever” listed above. While I prefer those two other artists’ songs over Ne-Yo’s “Closer”, it is still quite a palatable song with a nice catchy chorus. The verses needs to be improved, however.

“Realize” by Colbie Caillat. [W] [U] Nothing beats her first single “Bubbly” (featured in the October 2007 playlist) but “Realize” is still a pretty decent song as well as her earlier single “Battle” [U].

“Eargasmic” by MOBBSTARR / DiCE & k9. [U] I found their first hit “Itsumo” a bit cheesy but even if “Eargasmic” is somewhat musically similar, it’s quite catchy and would make for a really great club sound.

As always, reactions on the selected songs as well as other music recommendations in the comments are very much welcome. [ ;)]

Georgia in Google Maps

2008-08-23T14:49:00Z

[ Screenshot of Google Maps showing no data for Georgia.]

Due to the currently ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia, it has been noticed that Google, as of now, doesn’t have any data at all on the country in Google Maps. No cities, towns, roads, or points of interest—just a blank region. This lack of data also affects Georgia’s neighbors Azebaijan and Armenia. Conspiracy theorists thought that Google censored the data either at the behest of the government of Georgia or Russia, but Google was quick to dispatch a blog post saying that they didn’t have data at all in the first place. Their reason? They “simply weren’t satisfied with the map data [they] had available.”

Hogwash! If the only reason why they didn’t place any data is because they weren’t satisfied with it, then why did they add really inferior data for the Philippines last year? As I mentioned before, the primary reason why I thought that they didn’t have any data on the Philippines before last year was that they were waiting to get better data and wasn’t satisfied with what they have now: precisely the reason they’re spouting as to why Georgia is still blank now.

Oh well. I’m still waiting for Google’s promise to “[work] tirelessly to add more detail to the existing countries in Google Maps.” It’s been almost a year already and there’s still no improvement to the data for the Philippines. The low quality of the data has been noticed by many people already like in this comment left by Luis over at Technograph.

28 is the Second Perfect Number

2008-08-19T16:36:00Z

And 6 is the first. Perfect numbers are positive integers that are equivalent to the sum of their proper divisors—that is, when you list down all the factors of a perfect number (except itself) and add them all up, you will get the number itself. The proper divisors of 28 are 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14 and their sum is 28. Neat eh? Incidentally, I expanded the Wikipedia article on perfect numbers in 2003 based on a tutorial I wrote back in 1998.

So why am I pontificating about 28 and perfect numbers? Well, I don’t feel perfect at all now that I have reached that age today. (Yeah, it’s my birthday.) Will I ever reach perfection? I don’t think so. We can turn to Buddhism and note the fact that because I’m still alive, I’m not yet in nirvana. And if we’re to consult the Bible, Romans 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.

So, while 28 is considered a perfect number, it shouldn’t matter if you yourself don’t feel perfect at that age. If life is already perfect, what’s the point of living then?

Going back to math geekery, here are some more “interesting” properties about the number 28. And you might want to revisit my blog entries for 27, 26, 25, and 24. [ :-D]