I dropped off my XBox 360 at the UPS Store this afternoon.  As this is the third time I’ve had to send the unit back in two years, I thought I’d make a joke as I walked into the store (we have a mailbox there, so the guys there know me).  Brandishing the unmarked box I walk in…

"I bet you can’t guess what’s in here…" says I.

"Oh sure.  Sixth one today." says him.

Yeah, six 360’s dropped off today alone, and this is in a small suburb of Tampa, not anywhere near the "heart" of Tampa (wherever that might be).

Wow, MS really screwed up on this version of the XBox!

I am *so* pissed.  Like everyone else, I installed the next generation user interface on my XBox when it came out.  It look pretty good, and the Netflix setup went smoothly (I already have a Roku so I knew what to expect).

Unfortunately, ever since the upgrade, the machine has been locking up.  At first it would play a game for a few minutes, then die.  There are real "intensive" games like Zuma and Jewel Quest – in other words, the machine isn’t even breathing hard.

This evening, it locked up several times before I could even get into a game to test it.  Then it locked up while signing into XBox Live.  Then it locked up before a user interface could come up at all.  Now it just gives the red ring of death. 

The best part is, when I call support, I’m going to have to go through all the stuff about where my XBox is located ("no, it’s not buried in a shag rug"), the power situation ("what do you mean it *shouldn’t be connected to a UPS?!") and all the other hoops they make you jump through when in fact, the update broke the damn machine.

Go look in the XBox forums for more people experiencing the same thing, or Google for it.

If I have to pay to get this thing repaired I’m going to be super disappointed.

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with no.  No mention of them wanting money.  I brought up the RROD and they immediately started the repair process.  They say that it can take 2-3 weeks to repair.  Ouch.

I’m not happy, but at least I didn’t have to fight them.

I did it!  After many months of keeping my inbox down to around 40-50 items, I have finally reached nirvana – no items in the inbox!

Now of course the trick will be to keep it down to that.

Keep your fingers crossed, and don’t send me email just to try to fill up my inbox! 🙂

1 – if John McCain wins, under no circumstances will this be accepted by the losing side.  Plan on screams of stolen elections.  I don’t think McCain will win, but if he does, oh boy, prepare for a heck of a show.  McCain said it best in this video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ql1RLDVWzY.  It is a hilarious bit.

2 – No matter what they say, they can’t "fix" the economy.  Ask Argentina about that, or any other country where the government mucks around with all aspects of the economy.  If the government hadn’t basically ordered banks to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.  I read a great article in the New York Times this morning that was dated before Bush took office regarding this exact problem.  I can’t find the link, feel free to hunt for it!

3 – If / when Obama wins, there will be heck of a honeymoon.  Everything positive that happens over the next 4 years will be to his credit, anything negative will be blamed on Bushychimplhitler.  Just remember, Bush got blamed for 9/11 even though he’d been in office for "only" 9 months.  I say we treat that as the benchmark.  Anything that happens after 9 months in office is the fault of the current office holder.

4 – I’m just disgusted with the whole thing.

5 – Who is John Galt?

When you don’t have children, and you don’t have much family that is close to you, it becomes quite difficult to figure out what to do with whatever is left after your own death.

In my case, obviously everything goes to my fiancee in the event that something happens to me, but not to her.  However, if something happens to both of us it gets a lot more complicated.  This is really the first time I’ve given thought to how I want whatever assets I have left to benefit friends, family and humanity.  It’s a tough balancing act, and one I’m not sure I can ever be comfortable that I got "right".

In giving some thought to this one thing I want to do a bit of is give something to charity.  That however also turns into quite a bowl of monkeys since so many charities spend so much money on administrivia and not on helping the people they claim to want to help.  This led me to thinking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – clearly they don’t need to spend a huge portion of donations on administration, but they are reluctant to take donations and request that you donate directly to the recipients of their grants.  Also any donation I left would probably just be able to pay for their daily coffee bill so… 

<sigh>

Maybe I’ll just leave everything to a grant to fund monkey fights or something.

Of course at the end of the "day", if I didn’t get it "right" I’ll still be dead, so maybe I should set it up so that whoever I leave it to has to perform some really embarrassing task to get the money.  Maybe monkey / human fights!  Yeah, that’s the ticket!  Give the monkey a gun and the human a banana and see how it works out.  Woohoo!  I have a plan!

I was happy to see that Regal Honda/Acura apologized fairly quickly (see comments in my previous post) for the misleading marketing piece.  I’ll be keeping an eye out on their physical mail to see if they mis-use the "Urgent!" warnings, but I’m still not enabling them to email me again.  I’m not in the market for a car, and I’ll get it serviced at the appropriate locations based on the service needs, so their email will just add to the clutter, which is something I’m trying to cut back on!

This morning I received an email titled: "Urgent Service Notice from Regal Honda/Acura".

Thinking that perhaps there was something in there regarding a recall or something, oh I dunno, "urgent" about my TSX, I opened the email.  Of course, based on the title of this post you can imagine that there wasn’t anything urgent in there at all.  It was just the usual pitch to bring the car back to them for service, whenever it might be due.

Now they might think this is a harmless bit of marketing, but it resulted in me unsubscribing from their email updates.  Because they were idiots trying to get me to read an email *that I would have read anyway* they have now thrown away that channel of communication.

I like the dealer, and I like Acura, but you cannot abuse that relationship and not expect it to blow back on you.

No link love for Regal because I’m not going to give them that for abusing me.

While I am intrigued by Spore, despite the mediocre reviews, I won’t be buying it.

Unfortunately, EA has decided to put really draconian DRM onto Spore.  Now, I can understand what they’re trying to do (although we all know that every single game that has ever had DRM on it has been cracked virtually immediately), but they’ve taken it one step too far.

When you "purchase" Spore, you’re allowed to install it up to three times, and if necessary, you could possibly call on them for a fourth install.  This doesn’t sound too bad, because after all, you won’t need to reinstall it all too often.

However, even if you uninstall it, you DO NOT get an installation back!  This is just stupid.  For example, let’s say I install it today, and then a month from now, I need to reformat my hard drive (let’s say I want to install Vista).  Well, most games will give you back an installation count if you uninstall.  After all, they "know" you’re not running it on that computer anymore, so why not?  Thanks to EA’s stupidity, they do not give that back to you.  So now let’s say you rebuild your computer, install Spore and then it crashes, so you restore from a backup and go back to XP.  Gotta reactivate again, thus using up all of your "uses".

I’m guessing EA is trying to prevent resale of the program.  It’s a good thing for EA I don’t ever resell my games, but a bad decision by them as I won’t have their game to even think about reselling.

Sorry guys, no gonna do it.  I’ll just play games from companies that don’t screw their customers, like Stardock’s Sins of a Solar Empire.

A few days ago I had to run one of the many Small Business Server wizards on my 2003 SBS server to repair a problem with Internet access.  As soon as I tried to run it, it came up with an error message that the wizard "can only be run on a small business server computer".  Sure, go ahead and run then!

Well, after trying to convince it run by talking to it nicely, I looked around for help.  I didn’t find too many posts about it except for those referencing Service Pack 2, but this machine had not been changed in many many moons, so it wasn’t SP 2.

Finally I found a reference to Microsoft KB article # 940318.  After downloading and running the hotfix (it took about 2 seconds to run), the problem was resolved.

This is just another one of those mysteries…  But at least I had to deal with it on one of my busiest days of the year.

I just tried to run the Zune software and it went down in flames.  I’m running a theme on my machine that makes the error message look a bit different, but I think you might see the problem here:

In order to troubleshoot, I need to enter that huge URL into a browser and make sure I don’t mistype any characters.  That’s damn near impossible.  How about making it so I could copy & paste it into a browser guys?!