So now eight more days have gone by, and for what? I did try to log in a few nights ago and was told the system was down for maintenance, this at 8 or 9 in the evening eastern time, not very user friendly. Usually maintenance like that means something crashed and we're desperately trying to put it back the way it was. In the wacky world of production support, apps don't always behave the way they're supposed to, whether its prime time or the middle of the night.



Last night I was up until 3 am, not like the old days, watching old movies, but watching log screens scroll by and e-mailing back and forth to our users in Sydney as it was their first day with the second phase of our application. Sydney is used to being guinea pigs because they're the first foreign exchange site to see the sun rise, and this was no exception, since even though this same software had been in use in Boston for six months, and gone through a few minor upgrades already, this was the first foreign site to use it, and naturally they encountered a few things that their American counterparts had been spared all this time. But nothing too earthshattering, no one was demanding we turn it off and go back to the old system, so hopefully they can plug away for another day or two until we can fix the most annoying problems. Invariably when you first distribute a brand new, rewritten from the ground up application that's supposed to make their lives easier, it initially makes more work for them instead, but it settles down fairly quickly. It's partially their own fault because they barely participated in the UAT test, so a few things that might've been caught went unnoticed until it was too late. If I could be there to help smooth things over it would do wonders for our own PR, but such is not to be. We've got four more sites to go, supposedly in the next month, but I wasn't exactly planning on staying up all night for the rest of them. Give somebody else a chance, why hog all the glory?