I'm trying to raise a support ticket for a piece of hardware I bought from Microsoft. Firstly their UK support page is 404. Then I eventually give up and go through their US site. Their support system talks about credit cards and £46 per support request, eventually I realise that you get 2 "free" support requests before they start charging you. I am trying to report a faulty piece of hardware - should they ever charge me to contact them about that?

I go through their system which has a few entertaining bugs like a textarea where the font colour and size change when you mouse out thus changing the format of the page and making it impossible to click the "continue" button without using the keyboard to tab through the buttons. When I do finally submit it I am greeted with a page that just says.

  	
Error:
	An unknown application error occurred. Please try again in a few minutes. 

Handy! It doesn't say whats wrong or that anyone will try to fix it - just chance your luck again in a few minutes. I can't find an email address to mail my query too either. As with almost all sites that don't seem to work in Firefox when you try in IE you find it is just as broken.

This isn't the first time i've found a companies support page not working and have to wonder if they are quite happy to leave it that way.

I know they have to hack some of these apps to get them to work with RAP while it is still being fleshed out but I think this could well be the shape of things to come - here's the latest thing they have (kinda..) got running PDE. Personally I love the idea of not having to distribute tens or hundreds of MB to user's desktops and worry about how their desktop environment is set up.

Next time you see someone espousing nuclear power remember that they are still trying to clean up Windscale 50 years on.

I'm getting an increasing amount of car related spam from sites hosted on fasthosts. I'm sure i've spamcopped the same sites before but they are still being hosted by fasthosts.

This seems to indicate that fasthosts are now friendly to spammers which is sad for such a big host.

So first TF2 and now the UT3 Demo is out. Nothing good for ages and now too many to play at once. And I never did find time for ETQW even though I liked it a lot.