Wow, the folks over at Gamer DNA are having a rough time lately.

Last week the site was down for about 3 days while they upgraded something.  Honestly, I never really got a chance to play with the new site…  I kept checking back all day long while I was at work, and it never came up.  I poked my head in briefly the next day, and it was up, but I didn’t have time to do anything more.

I just attempted to post an update on my EVE gameplay, and their site is down again.

Saw a couple trailers that looked interesting before our movie today…

Whiteout looked interesting, until I got home and read more about it.  The trailer had a very strong The Thing vibe going on…  Looked like there might be something sinister buried in the ice.  Or maybe a Mountains of Madness type thing going on.  But it actually looks more like a generic murder/thriller kind of thing.  I have to say I’m a bit disappointed.

Ninja Assassin also looked decent.  Didn’t see anything that looked like an amazing plot or storyline, but the action looked absolutely frenetic.  Might be fun to see that in the theater.  I’m not sure that I’d bother seeing it anywhere else though.

There was also a trailer for Avatar, which we got to see in 3D.  It looked pretty nice…  Definitely some pretty visuals…  But I’m just not sure that’s a movie I want to see.  I think I’ve seen this movie before – back when it was called Dances With Wolves, or maybe Fern Gully.

We just got back from seeing The Final Destination…  Which is actually the 4th movie in the series…  Which is vaguely confusing…  Since they dropped the number altogether and make it look like a new movie.  But I guess that isn’t so unusual these days.

I enjoyed the original Final Destination movie, but the sequels got pretty repetitive.  And I honestly wouldn’t have bothered to go see this movie in the theater if it hadn’t been for the RealD 3D stuff.

The storyline is the same as all the other movies – somebody has a vision that miraculously saves their group of friends from a horrible accident…  And then Death picks them off, one by one.  Lots of gory deaths, one after another.  All rendered in frighteningly graphic 3D.

It really wasn’t all that terrifying…  There’s not a whole lot of suspense or mystery going on…  The whole point, really, is just to see these people die – in 3D.

It was a lot of fun.  Lots of painful-looking deaths.  Lots of horrible ways to meet your end.

But, again, not much more than that.  And, really, if it hadn’t been in 3D I would not have bothered.

I really wish we could get something else out here…  I was so happy with my Verizon DSL back in the city.  Yeah, it was slower, but it was reliable.  That’s something they never mention on their commercials…  They talk about how much faster cable Internet is over DSL – but they never talk about the unreliability.

I’ve actually been pondering switching to some kind of satellite Internet.

I’ve had enough experience with satellite Internet to know better.  We’ve had to maintain installations of Hughes or WildBlue equipment, and it’s always kind of finnicky.  Plus there’s the latency issue…

But when I’m putting up with this crap from Charter, and I see one of those Hughes commercials on TV, it’s tempting.

And if Verizon ever ran fiber out this way I’d switch in a heartbeat.

So, yesterday, our Internet was crappy.  Slow connections, kept getting disconnected from EVE, couldn’t load a bunch of web pages.  Very frustrating.  The very first thing I did is reboot both the cable modem and our router.  You’d be amazed how many things that fixes…  But it didn’t fix this problem.

Next I tried a couple different routers.  We still have that Netgear I borrowed from work, and the old Linksys we had from Vonage.  Both of them worked the same – which is to say, not very well.

Then I started trying to track down the problem…

DNS, in general, was working.  I could resolve pretty much any name I tried.  But I couldn’t connect to much.  PINGs failed.  TRACERT showed a couple un-named hops, then a few hops in Qwest’s network, and then it just stopped.  And when I ran a speed test at DSLreports it showed me getting 300 Kbps download, instead of 5 Mbps.

I thought it was pretty obvious that the problem was somewhere outside my network.

I kind of hoped that Charter would find the problem themselves and fix it…  So I waited.

Around 8:00 I got sick of waiting.  Their phone support is just plain awful, so I thought I’d try their on-line chat support instead.  The person I spoke with indicated that they were going to re-provision my modem, and if that didn’t work I should call their “Tier II” technical support.

Of course, they never asked for any account information, so I don’t know how they managed to re-provision my modem…  But they claimed to.  And it didn’t work.  So I called “Tier II” technical support.

Unfortunately, “Tier II” technical support is the same crappy support number I’ve been using for years.  I suspect that the on-line person just made up the whole “Tier II” thing…  Because I can’t imagine what “Tier I” would be like.

I got to listen to their automated system try to troubleshoot my issue…  A droning, robotic voice asking me to identify my modem, power-cycle things, check my TV, etc.  Mashing the 0 button repeatedly eventually convinced them to put me through to a live human being.

I should’ve taken my chances with the robot.

My live human being had a thick accent that was hard to understand, and was obviously having a hard time understanding me.

I explained that my Internet had been crappy all afternoon.  I explained that I had run several tests and the issue was obviously outside of my network.  I asked if they were aware of any issues in the area.

He summarized my problem as “every afternoon your Internet is bad.”  I corrected him.  He didn’t seem to realize the difference between this afternoon and every afternoon.  Even after I had corrected him.

Then he wanted me to connect a computer directly to the modem.  I reiterated that I’d tried several different routers.  I reiterated that TRACERTs were failing outside of my network, not inside it.

He explained that since I didn’t have the wire maintenance plan it would be $30 to send someone out to look at my wiring.  He also suggested that I could add the wire maintenance plan for only $5 per month.

I tried once more to explain the problem to him.

He explained that since I was using my own equipment they couldn’t guarantee that anything would actually work.  He indicated that I had to connect a computer directly to the modem in order to troubleshoot it properly.

I asked him how a malfunctioning router would cause TRACERT to fail outside of my network.

He suggested that my wireless might be bad.

I explained to him that I was not using wireless.

He suggested that I could purchase a wireless modem/router from Charter, or that I could rent it from them for a low monthly price.

That’s about the time I gave up.

I was sincerely hoping that the problem might have fixed itself overnight.  But I’m getting about 400 Kbps download this morning.  So it looks like I’m going to have to call Charter again…