/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

So last weekend I decided that I wanted to play Forza 2 on the good ole 360. I pop the disc in and it starts, and I start going through the menus. Finally, it locks solid and I get the dreaded red ring of death. Now, this wasn’t the first time I had seen it. Bethany got it to red ring while playing Bioshock, but after some messing around it came back up. Unfortunately this time, it didn’t come back.

I called up XBox support, dreading the worst. Luckily for me, the guy on the other end was pretty decent. Within a few minutes, he determined that our 360 was eligible for the RRoD extended warranty and had a shipping box sent to us. 3 days later, the box arrived and I packaged the poor thing up and sent it on its way. I figured it would be at least 3 weeks until I heard anything, but as it turns out, they had the thing tested, fixed and sent out within 3 days of receipt. I’m happy to say that the 360 is on the way home. Whether or not it actually works is a whole other story

A few days ago, Bethany and I picked up the Wiimotes and played more WiiPlay, and needless to say it was a lot of fun. It’s so much fun to play with her, then subsequently get jumped on and attacked after beating her. All in all, though, a whole lot of fun and it just makes me happy to be able to do that with her :)

Ah tax time, the time when most people are hating the federal government. My taxes weren’t all that hard to do this year, even with the changes in my life. I did find out that my withholding was reset to 0 when I came down from PA, so the government had been taking every little bit they could. Anyway, long story short I filed and the refund has returned, which is allowing me to eliminate a goal or two from my 2008 goal list, as well as make things a bit more ‘breathable’ as far as finances go. In other words, things are looking ok. :)

On the tech side of the fence, I had to replace my old WRT54G router. It’s seen better days, and was apparently losing the routing functionality. You see, it would get a connection to the net, but all of the computers wouldn’t get out to the net. Since it was about a 4 year old router, it was high time for a replacement. Taking it’s place is the same model, only a version 8.0. Nothing too new to note on it, but at least I don’t have to do a hard reset on it to get a response. In addition to the router, I also picked up Guitar Hero 3 for the 360 and finally got a copy of The Orange Box for PC. TF2 runs pretty well on the desktop, but that machine is beginning to show it’s age, at least as far as video cards go. My laptop seems to run it just fine, but I need a bit more space to game. Touchpad FPSing just doesn’t work so well.

Home life is going just fine. The baby is growing like a weed, and it seems like only a matter of time before she’s either crawling or walking. Bethany hasn’t killed me or gone mentally unstable from prolonged Brad exposure, so that, too is a definite good thing. 2008 is shaping up to be a wonderful year thus far.

This disturbs me. A kid, hitting his mother because she took away a game. I don’t know the full story behind how this kid was brought up, but if I would have done something like this, my father would have beaten me. Where I come from, you never, ever hit your parents, no matter what. But, over a video game? That’s even more serious. The mother ended up calling the police, but if that kid grew up in my parents’ house, the ambulance would be called. However, if the mother had dealt with it herself, the kid would have gone to school and claimed abuse. This just struck a chord with me being a new dad. I really hope I teach my daughter better.

I came across this during my blog reading. Imagine two people, controlling a total of 46 WoW characters plus one server. The geek in me is like… nifty, 47 boxes, but the other part of me wonders what one would do controlling 23 WoW accounts. Not to mention, how much money are these people bringing in that they have this kind of hardware… it’s nuts I tell ya, nuts.