If you live in Greater Los Angeles and are fed up with Time Warner Cable, there’s probably not much you can do about it (unless you’re the L.A. city attorney, in which case you can sue). The frequent outages, slow customer service and small number of high-definition channels are a fact of life. But the next time your Time Warner Internet goes down, wait a moment before you shout expletives at your modem. There may be a solution, albeit an unauthorized one.

via Lose your Time Warner Internet connection (again)? You could try Open DNS | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

Do want.

Remember IBM’s ThinkPad 701 with the butterfly keyboard? This isn’t it, it’s better… conceptually anyway. Instead of two halves of a keyboard magically jigsawing themselves together, Kohjinsha achieves a similar result with its DZ-series using a pair of 10.1-inch TFT displays with 1,024 x 600 pixel resolution (each) packed into an otherwise svelte 1.02 x 8.26 x 0.74~1.65 inches / 4.09 pounds (1.84 kg) portable. Best of all it’s on sale now for ¥95,800 (about $1,110) with a Linux pre-load — add another ¥5,000 (about $58) for 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

via Kohjinsha’s dual-screen DZ Series laptop now for sale — Engadget.

On the Time Warner Cable front, it appears this morning that some of their internet service customers are still experiencing DNS problems.

Over the weekend TWC television subscribers were offered a special on the OnDemand movie rental service. The One Cent Movies On Demand offer was supposed to allow subscribers the chance to rent a romantic movie for one penny. Unfortunately, our favorite cable company was not adequately prepared for the enthusiastic response to this offer. Their content delivery network was overwhelmed by the demand.

So, if you tried to take advantage of this over the weekend and looked bad in front of your girlfriend, you are not alone.

At least they offered an official apology. No word yet on nookie reimbursement.

Since they’re being such good sports (and Twitter is down for scheduled maintenance right now), I thought I’d go ahead and recap some of the better news appearances Time Warner Cable has made lately.

I just want to take a second to state that I know that most of the good people of this company are intelligent and diligent workers. It’s the upper level managers running the company that we should hold responsible for the appalling performance of this technical behemoth.

Don’t want to rent a cable box? Suck it!

Can someone explain to me how cable companies are competitors when the markets they cover never overlap?

They reported a loss of more money ($15B) in 2009Q1 than than of all their profits from 2008Q1 through 2008Q3.

Ever seeking to reinforce their appearance of ineptitude, Time Warner Cable has stopped resolving DNS requests again today. It must be that time of the month for them. One month ago to the day Forbes ran an article about how their DNS servers are still vulnerable to attack.

I’ve bypassed this by using public DNS servers, which are usually fast anyway.

If you want to use these their IP addresses are 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2.

After years of providing some of the nation’s most famously dissatisfying customer service, it looks like Time Warner Cable may have maxed out its subscriber base.

Also, their ad revenue seems to be down. Bwaaaaaah!

What’s interesting is that their service is so notorious for suckage that said suckage has actually spawned a secondary marketplace. There is a measurable amount of ad revenue generated web content dealing with complaints.

See also: Time Warner Cable: Your Internet Isn’t Working So We’re Sending A Tech To Disconnect Your Cable, this actually happened to me on more than one occasion.

For a while a couple of TWC guys (@JeffTWC) started stalking me on Twitter when I sent a tweet about the colossal suckage maneouvers when I moved. I’m still stumped at how they can rent me an HD DVR with the HDMI port disabled.

They made need to take evasive action like Blackwater just did.

Time Warner Cable plans to cut off your internet when it thinks you’ve had enough.

From el reg.

They do seem to have added a new group of CSRs. That, or they’ve stepped up the training regimen at one of their call centers. Ugh, Steve Ross is rolling in his grave. How tarnished the Warner name has become!

So, the cable television package I subscribe to gives me one free premium channel. With HBO’s mid-season premier tonight, I wanted to change my free premium channel from Showtime to HBO. I conveyed this to the CSR. He replied that it would be, “no problem.” I then informed that I was moving next week and I wanted to set that up. He proceeded to take down my new address and we set up a time where I would get to take the whole day off from work to wait for a technician to show up and authorize the cable box (the box is a whole other issue I will have to post about separately).

After we were done with the relocation transaction, he asked me if there was anything else he could do. I asked him about the Showtime to HBO switch and he replied, “Oh, yeah.”

Wait, wait, wait. Typing. Holding. BRB.

“Okay, so I can’t do it right now, but I assure you that within a few hours you’ll be able to watch HBO.”

“Really? Okay, great.”

“On a scale of 1 – 10 how would you rate my service?”

“Based on my previous phone calls to Time Warner? I’d give you a 10.” Big mistake.

So the next morning I check and wouldn’t you know it, Showtime is disconnected. Know what other channel I can’t tune it? You guessed it. I call back and explain everything to the CSR.

“Oh, man. I’m sorry – when we put in a location transfer request it locks out changes to the rate plan. We can’t modify the channels until after the move date.”

After I’m settled in I’m switching to Dish Networks. I’m way beyond being tired of this crap.