No, it's not for the exams or for the f-bombs I sprinkle throughout the lectures.
This apology is for the fact that I have not been able to update the course websites for the past two days. The course websites had been hosted by Bluewater Cable which was sold last summer to East-Link Cable. On Tuesday, they made a number of changes, several of which had some serious side effects, including intermittent telephone service, intermittent internet service, lost telephone messages, and most seriously for this posting: something which makes it impossible for me to gain access to the websites via FTP.
Allegedly, they have been working on this problem for over 24 hours but still haven't solved it. I'm skeptical. And pretty upset about their (lack of) service.
Fortunately they do not have a complete monopoly here. We have telephone options, satellite television and server options, etc. Changing would be a pain, so they can "exploit" us to some extent by providing unreliable service. But not much.
Update: I just spent a half hour on the phone with their tech support and received exactly the same final response that I received 24 hours ago: everything is set up properly and it should work but it doesn't, so we'll have to get back to you. This annoyed me for three reasons:
- They play crappy C&W music while I'm on hold. How about some Haydn string quartets for once, eh?
- They have now known about this problem for 24 hours and done nothing about it.
- They seem to be VERY busy trying to deal many problems that arose during the changeover/integration of the systems. They should not have attempted this change if they weren't ready for it; and clearly they weren't ready for it.