Yes – My intent is to trash talk this horrible company and badly as possible. I have no reason to be nice here. They need some straight-talk and to be put in line. If you’re reading this from CenturyLink – don’t take it personally, don’t even think I dislike YOU. Take it corporately. I’m sure there’s some good people at this company, but the vast majority are idiots, and if you’re at CenturyLink right now, you probably know in your heart it’s true. You’ve probably wondered how you ended up working with such morons. Sorry to refer to your colleagues in such a degrading way, but somebody has got to speak out. THIS IS UMPITYGRUMPITY AFTERALL. And I’m about to speak my mind.

First of all – really? I spoke with the supposed regional manager for eastern Washington’s CenturyLink network during my time of CenturyLink DSL frustration, and you know what he told me after not fixing the problem, but making the techs “look into it” more? He basically gave me a guilt-trip for speaking my mind on my blog and used the word “harsh” in referring to my words about CenturyLink. Well duh – they’re harsh, because that’s the perception I’ve had of their customer service. When a product doesn’t work right, and it doesn’t get fixed..and then it’s given up on, that’s harsh!

Now that it’s 2011 we know that 1.5 mbit/sec in some parts of the Methow Valley is STILL all that they offer (when just down the street they have FIBER OPTIC!), and my friends pay more for that than my parents were paying for 10mbit/sec. Heck more than I pay for 20mbit/sec! We know that their service is already ridiculously overpriced, but to top that off, guess what? Yep. Their service severely sucks. We tried working together with CenturyLink’s customer service guys who were on task with my situation to resolve the same issues with some friends of mine. You know what happened? Nothing. No, not even a call. No visit. Nothing. Every time these friends would try to call tech support, they would get told the same thing: Reset your modem to defaults, reboot your machine, everything is working on “our” end. Seriously!? This is unacceptable!

At some point in this post I have to say things like CenturyStink and CenturySmell, and CenturyPoo, and really get those key words ingrained so that when they search for blogs about them, they’ll see that we’re not happy.

With that said, we will drop a link to the post that they made me oblige to write …which I updated with a comment detailing how they CenturyFailed. http://www.umpitygrumpity.com/centurytel-comes-through/comment-page-1/#comment-10358

We were not the only ones with a typical home network setup with CenturyLink who had daily disconnects almost hourly. Their service plain sucks and there is no getting around that. They can’t fix it either. They’ve tried. They had it “looked into” with several techs. Several higher-ups have looked into it and still blamed one dumb thing after another on us. Oh, the wiring in the house must be bad? OK – I replaced the entire wiring with brand new CAT5 straight from the demarc to the jack with the DSL modem and nothing else connected to the line whatsoever. So it’s still broken. What now? Oh, it’s because we have VOIP phones. Really? What kind of morons suggest that internet service gets dropped because of standard TCP/IP devices? Internet is what they run on!! Not break. Idiots.

Now come to find out CenturyWhore is buying up a semi-decent phone/internet company – Qwest. Why does this piss me off? Because I have Qwest internet and have been happy with it for months. Now it’s going to be subject to the same CenturyClank corner-cutting and terrible network management as the rest of the CenturyLink infrastructure. OH NO YOU DIDN’T.

CenturyLink, if you think for one second that I’m going to be licking your boots to stay a customer of QwuitLink FailNet, you’ve got another thing coming. Since I heard the news, I’ve already been looking elsewhere for internet. I’m leaning towards Verizon FIOS or maybe just the new AT&T 4G wireless data when it comes out.

Now that I’ve ripped these guys a new one, I’d like to know what they can come up with as far as web propaganda that makes it sound like they actually care.

Trust me, I wouldn’t have felt as compelled to write this, if they wouldn’t have made me feel obliged to write up a “they came through” post and then turn around and still fail in every way. What am I supposed to do? Write up an article redeeming them and leave it up even though technically they didn’t come through at all????? You can do the math as well as I can.

CenturyLink, you can leave and make your crappy internet monopoly go away with ya. I’m a savvy consumer, and I am not going to put up with your corporate bureaucratic BS. This is my CenturyLink rebuttal!

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Somehow, I think reversing the video output horizontally (mirrored) would achieve a decent result without any side-effects other than EVERYTHING being horizontally reverse (including images and buttons, and all UI elements).  However, then I would have to get used to moving the mouse cursor to the left when I want to go right, and right when I wanted to go left.  Unless of course, there is a way to invert the mouse’s horizontal directions as well.

The closest thing I’ve found is a Da Vinci backwards font.  However, this doesn’t achieve the result of making all text read right-to-left.  Besides, the system actually uses many different fonts, and making it hacked to use a single font like that would take a lot of work, and make it darn near boring.

If you have any ideas I could try, please let me know!

8 Reasons to jail-break your iPhone:

1. Alternative keyboard configs! I absolutely hate the standard QWERTY keyboard.  I type with DVORAK on my PC, and it is so much easier on my fingers and hands…and I don’t get carpel tunnel.  I downloaded a free DVORAK keyboard config for the iPhone and BAM… now typing on the iPhone just became a lot easier.
2. Blacklisting apps which allow you to completely block unwanted or unsolicited calls. (cannot be done with regular apps on a regular firmware.
3. Ability to install customizations such as the SBSettings feature.  It lets you set up simple on/off switches in a very accessible place that you can usually access from most apps.  This is very nice to enable or disable the phone, or tethering, or the wifi, or data network, or SSH, etc.
4. Alternative phone service through VoIP providers.  This can work through a SIP app that can be installed, which the best one I’ve found isn’t available from the iTunes store: Siphon (FREE).  You can save your minutes by using this!
5. Tethering your internet service on your iPhone to your computer!  I don’t use it a lot, but when I need it, it’s sure handy!
6. Further customize your icon dock to have more than just 4 apps.  I have 6, and although it’s crowded, I much prefer it this way.
7. Exceptional apps that Apple doesn’t approve of.  Some apps are really great and for some reason unknown to man, Apple decides not to allow them.  Probably because they would take away from their market share.  At any rate, some apps are hard to live without.  The OpenSSH (secure shell) app being one of them.  I can get into the inner workings of my iPhone and transfer files in and out without hassle…all done over WIFI.  This is very useful when I’ve got apps like Cycorder (free video recorder for the 3G) and need to copy the videos off.  The iFile app actually provides a half-way decent PDF reader which makes a GREAT alternative to the built-in PDF reader on the iPhone.  This way I can read my eBooks from my phone the way one would read a book on a Kindle.
8. The obvious reason to SOME might be that you can install cracked apps.  While that can have it’s advantages, you must be careful not to get ones with viruses, and sometimes the apps come corrupted or something and might just simply crash on you.  It’s a risk you must weigh yourself.  Also to be noted, the place for downloading the cracked apps which was the safest and most official, has stopped offering their repository of iPhone apps.  So that’s another thing to consider.

With all of this said.  Please don’t go out and just try and jail-break your iPhone without doing some research or consulting somebody with experience.  I would hate four you to brick your phone on account of my suggestion because you didn’t find out that you had better not do it a certain way with your particular model or something.  From what I understand, you have to carefully consider jail-breaking an iPhone 3GS because it can mess things up, or even cause it to have to be booted from a special app on your computer if it gets turned off.

Personally I’m glad I don’t have the 3GS, because I love the way my phone works as a lovely jail-broken extension of ME.

Now I’m not talking about just making stuff crash or not work.  I’m talking about full blown serious issues…not being able to boot!  I would see the iPhone show the Apple logo and then about 5 seconds later it would just shut off again.  Even more serious was that when I put the phone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode, it would fail when trying to restore the firmware to factory settings.

It’s funny thinking about the way this all happened.  It seemed so innocuous…so innocent.  I was working with it just fine.  Then I was prompted by somebody to enter their phone number quickly into my phone for safe-keeping.  I entered it into my SBSettings Fast Notes as I do a lot of things when I want to jot something down super quick.  When I thought I’d just leave the fast notes open and hit the sleep button, I didn’t realize that the darn thing would leave the on-screen keyboard up!  This was a big problem….I couldn’t use the phone any longer since the stupid keyboard blocked my view of the unlock slider!

What I ended up doing made my heart sink with what happened next.  I went to go shut it off….slid my finger across the screen to confirm shut-off…and waited.  Then when I turned it on again, it wouldn’t boot.  I got the results described above.  At first it seemed I had messed it up by shutting it down with that keyboard still up…but that really doesn’t make any sense.  After looking online for a solution to my problem, I found it was a huge issue due to a recent Rock update.  Great…the one I had installed.  The one that seemed to be working just fine.  But I hadn’t actually powered the phone down and up again until this moment.

So what did I do to fix it?  I tried a LOT of things.  Took me a couple of hours to finally get it sorted out to where I could restore the thing.  Of course restoring it was a last resort to me because I didn’t want to lose my files, and restoring all my apps and settings is a pain.  I had to try everything I could find before deciding that I should just restore it.

First I remember trying to use the iH8Sn0w iREB v3.1-2 for Windows.  First I thought I’d try the Recovery Boot Loop fix…which all it did after I got the libUSB installed and clicked the button for my iPhone 3G was reboot and still shut off.  Then I tried the actual iREB app and clicked my 3G iPhone button, and it didn’t appear to do anything.  Then I downloaded and tried iRecovery for Windows.  At first I thought it failed, but then I read the README.TXT file which said it was supposed to be run from a command prompt window.

iRecovery had two options.  To upload a file, or to start up a shell.  So I started up a shell.  The shell might have been able to do something to fix the darn thing, but I don’t know enough about doing that stuff.  I had tried to use some commands that I found online:

setenv auto-boot true
saveenv
fsboot

Doing this didn’t seem to do anything, but I’m thinking it may have contributed to making the restore work.  After those commands I typed in the “reboot” command and watched it reboot and then shut off.  So at that point I decided to try a restore again, which also failed.  Then…this might be the only thing which was necessary: I rebooted the phone into Recovery mode & was able to restore a custom firmware file to the phone. For those who don’t know… Recovery mode is entered when you boot the phone like so: press and hold both the Home button AND the sleep button for about 12-13 seconds…then while still holding the Home button, release the sleep button once the image on the screen pops up, – still hold the Home button about 10 seconds until iTunes says that there’s been an iPhone detected in recovery mode.

Also for those who don’t know, you can download a custom firmware file to your iPhone by SHIFT-CLICKING the Restore button in iTunes (that’s holding down the shift key while left-clicking).

A fair warning which many would already know if they jailbroke their iPhone, but worth mentioning: DO NOT update to the latest official Apple iPhone firmware (3.1.3).  It contains no new features, and nothing was done to it that is worth updating.  If you like your iPhone jailbroken as I do, then do yourself a favor and pay attention and special care to NEVER update the iPhone to that version.  A friend of mine did it by accident and he cannot jailbreak his phone anymore.

It’s almost without fail…haha, that when I play music with WMP, at some point it stops working…(I might actually think it’s closed too), and begins to chew up CPU and RAM like there’s some kind of famine going on. If I’m not careful, and check the task manager (tsk tsk manager), and the WiMP has only decided to take up SOME of the CPU, then it sits there in the background forever until I realize there’s something slow.

Seriously? Does it have to act this retarded? Geeze. I don’t even have any special plugins or custom settings on it. I’ve just freshly installed Windows 7 only a couple of months ago.

Anyhow….it certainly IS a Windows Media Failure, which is why I nearly never use it anymore, and when I do, I’m reminded why I try not to. This is why I actually un-installed the stupid thing before I re-installed Windows. I’m actually considering doing it again.

So Google, can you fix your browser? Don’t tell me it’s my fault… don’t tell me my comp has some kind of virus. That’s bull crap and we know it, because I keep my comp spotless from that junk and I know because everybody getting viruses has all sorts of antivirus apps and anti malware apps, and I don’t use but one, along with virustotal.com.

If it’s anything to do with my computer, then it’s got to be due to a flaw or something overlooked with standard compatibility within the browser related to the hardware I run on. I have a pretty typical setup, but you can’t blame it on software. It was doing this back when I was running a fresh install of XP, then the same thing on Vista…now a fresh install of Windows 7 and it is STILL wacko!

Get it friggin together Google!

I believed the background streaming feature broke the very day I upgraded the app to the newest version, but after emailing their support, they told me that they’ve never heard of it doing that.

I scoured for endless hours on the internet for a solution to this problem and found nothing…. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I couldn’t believe it. Something so insidious…just sitting there laughing at my every effort to fix it.

I tried a lot of different things, but in the end, the whole reason it wouldn’t play any audio in my safari browser anymore, was (unknowingly) the iPhone Safari setting (Settings->Safari) had been switched to OFF. Once I switched it to on, the feature immediately began to work again.

I hope that if any other soul out there had this issue, that some how my blog post could help them. I’ve been living with this for months now. Today I just couldn’t take it anymore, and that’s when it dawned on me to try looking for a Safari setting.

I have to admit that when I wrote the previous blog post that trash-talked CenturyLink, I had no idea that they would find my blog and actually try and make it right.  I wasn’t even aware that ANYBODY was even reading my blog at all, other than the occasional friend who felt obliged to read what I was babbling about.

I hardly expected that they would get to the bottom of it.  It was a cohesive effort between CenturyLink management, CenturyLink techs, and myself and a bit of help I enlisted.  I had to prove that the issue was not coming from inside wiring or anything like that.  So I got a friend’s help and we ran brand new CAT5 wire straight from the box outside to the modem with no other taps anywhere.  After that, CenturyLink was able to determine that everything looked good all the way from the central office to the modem.

They managed to discover where the problem was on their end, and they fixed it.  We got credit to our account, and we also got our speed bumped back up to the full 10mbit/sec.

If you’re thinking about getting CenturyLink DSL service, …it’s likely to be a lot more reliable than wireless service, and now that they are aware of how this problem occurred, they should be able to avoid that pitfall again.  Plus paying for the wireless equipment and install from a wireless broadband company is pretty spendy.  I’d recommend going hard-wired.

Now if only Microsoft would take as much initiative and fix the stuff I complain about on this blog…