And...guess what?  Another 48 hours...this has been going on for a week and you can read the backstory here.

Yes, this is most likely the fault of Telus Mobility but as I am a customer of Fido they should have this resolved within the first 48 hours if they said they would.  The portability system should be working by now given that the US has had an automated system since 2003 (that's even in the CRTC announcement).  Pure incompetence.

Last week (it's been one week now) I started on a quest to transfer my phone number from Telus Mobility to Fido.  We were granted the privilege of number portability here in Canada and it seems that mobile companies here are so poor they can't afford to properly implement it even though they've had years to do so.  Let me give you a run down of what's happened so far.

Last Wednesday I went to a kiosk at the mall and signed up for a pre-paid account with my Nokia E70.  I have been using the E70 with my T-Mobile SIM for the last six months and there have been no problems.  I'd like to note that T-Mobile is not available in Canada and I was roaming but still able to make and receive calls via my US number.  After shelling out $30 for a SIM card and activation and another $30 for one month of prepaid I was supposedly only two hours away from having my number transfered over.

Two hours pass by and I receive a text message about the number change and I immediately test it out.  I can make calls but can't receive them.  Well, that's odd.  Let's check my balance...$3.  Wait a sec, where'd all the money go?  Apparently there's a $25 charge that Fido neglected to mention, no problems.  I call Fido customer care (call their 1888 number, and keep saying Representative and pressing 0 until you get an agent) to enquire about my lost monies and am told that all is well and that they've credited my account and that they'll reactivate it.  Wait WHAT?!  Before I can say anything I'm told to wait two hours.  Why should I wait two hours?  What's wrong with my number?  Ok fine, I can wait another couple of hours, it's only the first week and they've only had two years to implement this solution that was implemented five years ago across the border in the US.

I wait two hours, still not working.  So the next day I call back and am told that they're still working things out and to give it 48 hours.  Ok.  I call back on Saturday (48 hours later) and am told to wait two hours.  WHAT?  Why do I have to keep waiting for two hours?  Fido puts another number change request in and they tell me that if it doesn't work in two hours to call back in 48 hours.  I'm a little bit miffed at this point as I keep having to put my T-Mobile card back in so I can receive business calls from my US number after people hear a busy signal on my Canadian number.  Not happy about it but I can give them more time.

I called back on Monday and I was told that they've finally put a request in to the networking department and that I should wait...48 hours.  Later today it'll be 48 hours and I will hopefully have everything sorted out.  If not then let it be known that I'd rather give money and pay a premium to make phone calls using my US number than to let the greedy and incompetent Canadian mobile phone companies get money directly from me (yes I know they'd get a chunk of the roaming charge but that's less that what they'd get if used them directly).

This is not an issue with the mobile companies themselves rather poor planning and horrible programming.  Did anybody even do a transfer test?  What makes one test different from another that you can't do it properly?  The fault in this case lies with Telus Mobility for not routing the number correctly and with Fido for doing nothing about it so far. 

I'd also like to point out that all the US cell phone companies provide unlimited data plans for around 40 USD a month whereas in Canada you get about 25 MB for $50 (if you're lucky).  Welcome to one of the worst places to own a mobile phone on the planet.  Pathetic.

Yes...I know I don't post about Baseball because I dislike it but once in a while there's an acceptable Baseball story that can be posted.

Last few days have been dedicated to XNA development.  Since attention at WPT shifted to game development both Chad and I have been busy designing a game.  It's easy to get carried away and keep adding exciting new things and we really need to restrain ourselves as E3 is just a few months away and we have a lot of work.  To that end I've been developing out most of the base code using XNA in C#.  Honestly, I believe the platform is simple to use and that also happens to be a flaw.

While C# and Java are all nice and well I'm used to writing embedded systems or OS or graphics code at lower levels.  I like managing memory and I find destructors to be a clean way to do it.  With C# you have to implement the IDisposable interface everywhere to get rid of those unmanaged items and in the end you're writing complex code that would've been less complex had we just gone unmanaged.  Sure people will complain "but I don't want to have to worry about cleaning up an array or a list or..." to which I reply "auto_ptr" or "auto_array" (the second one you have to implement on your own, check <memory> for auto_ptr).  That's just crufty old me though.

All in all I got things up and running quite quickly and that's a testament to the XNA team.  They have worked hard and it shows in how quickly I was able to get a 1080p backbuffer going while rendering to an arbitrarily sized window/screen, get an audio manager running, and a basic game engine.  Of course things are still glitchy (I hesitate to say buggy as there's different classes of problems) and that's expected with any new system.

Now that phase 1 is complete, I believe I can move onto getting that level engine up and running as well as some level script parsing.  Mundane (parsing) mixed with exciting (engine)!  I think I deserve some ice cream.