Microsoft has outdid themselves again.  NXE or New Xbox Experience, is the brand spankin’ new dashboard for the Xbox 360.  It’s been a long awaited change and it was everything I could have expected from corporate giant Microsoft.  An unoriginal piece of shit.

Can anyone remember a time, at all, within the last 20 years where Microsoft had an original idea and not just a bunch of executives asking the engineers, “How can we make this companies product bigger, better, more expensive and force it on our users so they have no choice but to help us continue our Nihilist rule over the computer software and electronic entertainment industry?”

I updated this damned Xbox the other night, looked at what was working, then became so fucking irritated that nothing on the dashboard was new to me.  The first thing that happens when you start up is that it requires you to choose an “avatar” for your profile.  An avatar setup which has the very familiar look and feel to it.  I’m not sure where to pinpoint this similarity, but I’m going to ask the people at Wii to help out, I think they might have an idea.

Yeah, it’s the little cartoonish characters to select as YOU that Wii had done when it was released.  Now Microsoft is doing it because they’re a bunch of burnouts who can’t complete a thought for themselves.  Fucking pieces of shit.

To go through the rest of their shit, they’ve come up with a new 2.0 kind of feel, but it’s all too familiar.  Oh yeah, they used their own idea from Windows Media Center to work with on your Xbox now.  Awesome, I totally have never seen that shit before.  They even made it possible to copy your DVDs to the harddrive and play them back, like the PS3 did.  OMFG!  NO WAI!  Although, you do still need to have the DVD in the disc drive to get it to play.  WTF?

It seems that this shit has been going on for years, from Windows, to the Zune, even the secret project that nobody is supposed to know about, their answer to the iPhone.  Hell, Microsoft took the console idea from Sony back in the day.  How about Word/Works?  I bet you didn’t know that it was a near copy of Wordperfect, now owned by Corel.  I could do this all day, folks.

The bottom line is, Microsoft is a bunch of copycat assholes with money to back them.  If they didn’t have their corporate muscle, the little guys might have room to breath.  But everytime a little fella gets above water and starts to tread like a pro, the big M swoops down and steals all their buoyancy.

Microsoft, you’re a successful company, I give you props for that.  Hell, I even give you props for improving EVERYTHING everyone else does, considering you have to pay out the ass to get that far.  But you’re ruining our economy and all our diversity by not giving us things we haven’t seen before.  Why don’t you take the advice of a former employee and suck my left nut?

So here I sit on hold with “Technical Support” from Charter Communications, which I must add is about the most uneducated bunch of motherfuckers on this planet.  I’m lucky to even get someone who speaks god damned American.  No offense to the Pakistanioniteskis(whatever the fuck they’re called), Indians, Afghans, whatever other middle-eastwesternsouthnorthern country folk they can buy off for .30/hr, but you are ALL in the wrong field.

Seriously, if I had a problem with my Nike shoes, then yes, I would totally fucking want to talk to you, your cousin is probably right there on the assembly line with hands on experience.  But seriously, this is good ol’ American internet, on American soil, installed in America, for American customers…yada yada.  Do you see where the fuck I’m going with this?  I want to speak to someone I can understand, who speaks my language firsthand, who understands my lingo and who has an accent that is somewhat decipherable by my AMERICAN ears.(shut the fuck up, I know I’m Canadian born, don’t fucking rub it in.  the point is that I live in the USA and that i consider “American” pretty much all of North America, we’re the same, eh?)

The technical support team for Charter has no fucking clue what they’re doing.  I have a problem, which involves DNS servers and corrupt data.  Charter’s server has corrupt entries on their DNS servers regarding a couple of sites, for research purposes I’ve found a MASSIVE list of web pages that I cannot access, let’s use a popular one for today’s blog, drugstore.com.  Naturally, as I happen to be tech savvy enough to know what the fuck is going on 99% of the time on my network, I cannot fix this because it’s a serverside issue.  It’s as simple as the server admin making his special little remote log-in and rebooting the DNS server(s).  Whoopidy fucking doo, it’s not like that shit doesn’t already happen 3-4 thousand times a year anyways(assholes at Charter like to do this at 2am when you’re playing a high stakes game of poker, Xbox Live with the guys, while watching the rare occasion of some super hot girl you know flash you her cash and prizes on webcam…).  This becomes more inconvenient than the presidential debates interrupting a re-run of Gilmore Girls.  I sooooo beat off to that show. Not.  Wait, maybe I do.  Is that the show with the hot mom with a hot daughter who’re always chirping back and forth like a couple of geese deciding to change fields?  If so then, errr, never mind.

Anywho, I’d like to share with you how my entire experience with Charter’s support went.  It started out pretty calm, I jumped onto their website to try their Live Chat Support.  This started off looking very promising, no pushing 1 for technical support, then 3 if I wasn’t in Ireland, then back to 1 if I still had technical questions, onto 99 if I was a male with hair longer than 2 inches…I might have a few details fuzzy, but that’s how I remember it.  The technician came into the chat and the magic of the internet presented me with his name.  For the life of me I cannot remember his name, but it was definitely not a domestic name.  But for the sake of the blog, we’ll refer to him as Abdul.  Abdul came into the chat and delivered me his first canned message:  “My name is Abdul. Thank you for contacting Charter Communications. How may I assist you today?”

I responded by telling him every specific detail, that I was trying to reach some certain websites and due to DNS server entries being corrupt, I could not do so.  I continued to explain that I’ve tested the site in a browser, with pings and tracerts, all the technical jazz, and am unable to reach the stated page(drugstore.com if you remember our above conversation).  I continued to explain that it’s not my computer specifically, that it’s a Charter problem and that I’ve had other’s on and off of Charter’s service attempt to reach the site with the same results for ALL the Charter users.  He was ignoring the information I provided him with.

Instead, he wanted me to run some “tests”.  Basically this numb-nutted foreigner didn’t understand that I speak tech and not idiot and that I have taken the liberty of getting all the tiny, mundane tasks out of the way with prior to my phone call, such as restarting the computer, unplugging the modem, booting in safe mode, administering a blood transfusion…  I soon got his texty hands and words out of idiot mode and on track with me.  He quickly gave me new DNS server addresses to use and left the chat.  “Ok.” I thought to myself.  “This is a good solution.  Finally.”  Holy fuck, I was wrong.

After entering the new DNS settings, I rebooted my router, jumped back on the intrawebz0rs, and surfed to drugstore.com.  It worked!  Holy fucking shit, it fucking worked!  I then went to try the pages that I actually had problems on, yes, they worked too.  I was amazed that the stupid fuck managed to fix me with new DNS settings.  Or did he?

A few moments went by and I noticed my Xbox signed me out of Live.  So I checked my computer.  ALL my internet was running at epic fail speeds.  In fact, I wasn’t able to connect to anything at all.  The DNS had given up.  Nothing was working.  So I removed the settings.  I went back to the chat, received yet another foreign looking named tech chat attendant person.  Went through the exact same motions and came up with similar results.  The difference?  The new support minion gave me new DNS addresses to try.  So I did.  Naturally changing that setting dumps my internet right off for a brief second, so I lost connection to the chat.  The new DNS settings didn’t solve the problem.

So I went back, yet again, and did my thing, yet again.  This time the support specialist got my full bag of steam, I let him have it, and explained EVERYTHING, even the 2 prior shitty support requests I had made.  Well, this dickwad decided that he was unable to assist me and had me do the following:

Servo: can you reach that site?

TTD Jowalsh: I am so sorry, but we are not allowed to do that here in our end.

Servo: then how can you properly troubleshoot my problems without being able to physically see them?

TTD Jowalsh: I am so sorry, as much as I would like to help you with your concern today. However, my scope of support is only limited to the connectivity of the modem to the computer, and I only support basic e-mail trouble shooting. To be further assisted, and assure you that they can solve this matter you may call our second level technician at 1-888-438-2427. Thank You.

TTD Jowalsh: Thank you for choosing Charter Communications. Answers to frequently asked questions and self-help options can be found by looking in the “Customer Help” menu at www.charter.com. If you have further questions, please chat with us again. Our Chat Support is available from 7:00 AM through 1:30 AM Central Time, 365 days a year. Have a great day!
If you require further assistance, go to www.charter.com/contact
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

So guess what I did?  Yeah, I took Jowalsh’s advices and called the number.  Let me just stop here for a second, WHO THE FUCK NAMES THEIR CHILD JOWALSH?!?! Ok, seriously, as if names like Ernest, Griffen, or Mike.  Uhh, never mind.  Back on track here.  After going through the previously explained fucking 1’s, 3’s, etc, I finally got to a human voice.  Oh wait, it was a prerecorded “live help” voice.  So I used the ol’ “speak to representative” trick.  The phone then started ringing.  I got on the line with some Indian sounding dude(dot, not feather) and he did exactly what all the online techs did.  So I explained it all to him again.

After working through a major mess of shit, confirmations, yadda yadda, he puts me on hold to go ask a supervisor.  He came back, continued to fail as I kept trying to explain to him that this was a server side error.  Then he’d return back to his supervisor while I listened to Kenny G being voiced over by some nasally hag talking about television shows.  He comes back to ask me again for the site name, which I give to him, then he asks me to ping it.  I received no return ping.  So I asked.

“It hasn’t worked at all for me to ping it, I’ve told you this.  Why don’t you try pinging the site?”
“I’m sorry sir, I’m unable to receive a response from that host.”
“No shit?”
“Maybe the site is down?”
“Well 5 people I just talked to on different ISPs can see and ping the site just fine.”
“Have you tried running a proxy?”
“Yeah, it works fine through a proxy, but slow as fuck.  This is supposed to be high speed internet, right?”
“Sorry sir.  Let me check with my superior.”

After 5 holds, with Rauuldabi returning to his supervisor, he finally came back with another “I’m sorry sir, there isn’t much I can do for you.  How about you try emailing…”  I was pissed, but here I am, emailing some asshole in Hindustani about a problem I have in the US of A.

This is really a lot more hassle than it should be.  I don’t want to proxy my shit and have to wait 3 minutes for something to load, it should just be.  But nonetheless, these asshats have left me with no option.  So I suppose I’ll patiently wait by my inbox for a return message, which is probably going to be sent to me by some guy named Taj.  *sigh*  Anyone wanna fuck?