How does this thing work again?

Hmmm... Been almost two years since my last post. Time really flies when life goes to hell. Not really sure where to start, but I hope to be back on a semi-regular basis. More than likely there will be some of the following: - Venting about life in general in a Duckman type of way (Love that cartoon!) - Tales of good or bad dates (Contemplating a separate "Sex in the City" type blog for that) - Random pieces of life that are currently not categorized, and - Gaming, of course. To be continued...

The Money Pit

I have an xbox console that has turned into a money pit. And it's really ticking me off.

To make a short story long, I'll start from the beginning. I bought an original Xbox 360 - console only - off of the web. Knowing the mortality rate of Xbox 360 consoles, I wanted a spare console just in case mine went belly up and had to be sent in for repairs. Paid about $80 for it at the time, freight included (Pay attention - these numbers will mean something later).

A while later, I had a disc drive issue with my original console so I switched to my spare one and decided to keep the other one - which was off warranty - as my new back-up. The console I bought online worked for a few months and then red-ringed on me. Typical. I took it to the local fix-it place where I was dinged almost $120 (with taxes) to get it fixed. Had I known that it was going to come to that, I would have scrapped the thing. What really added fuel to my flame was the fact that no sooner had I sent it in, the arcade console went on sale for $129. I had seriously thought of pulling the console out of the repair place and buying a new one with controller, memory card, and three-year warranty for only a few bucks more. I didn't do it because the repair place would have charged a hefty penalty, so I stuck with the repair. Kinda burned my a$$ when the guy at the repair place handed me my console, my bill, and asked me "Hey, aren't 360s on sale this week?"

I used this console for a couple of months with no problems. Then I bought a slim model and put the repaired console back into storage as a spare. I passed on the other console (with the disc drive issue) and all applicable components. Cost invested in this "spare" console so far: approx. $200. That was a little over a year ago.

This week, I had the itch to get this thing up and running. We had cut back on our TV service at home so I wanted the spare 360 for a media extender. Between movies on the PC and Netflix, I could hook it up and we would still be well entertained for a considerably lower monthly cost. Sounds good to me. Now all I need are all the components to hook up the console.

Upon first glance, piecing it together seemed a little expensive. But my search led me to a kid who had a complete RRoD system that he wanted to sell for $50. Came with the cables, power bar, one wired controller, and a 20 GB hard drive. That was enough to get me up and running. I pounced on the deal and proceeded to start setting things up at home. About 10 minutes into my test run, THE DAMN THING RED RINGED ON ME!!! It had barely been used since it was fixed and it was well beyond the warranty period to have any type of recourse. I still have nothing to show for the approx. $250 total shelled out so far.

But wait - it gets better. Everytime I touch this thing, hardware seems to go on sale. This week, 250 GB slim consoles can be had for the amazing price of $197 plus tax. That would be $50 less than my total investment so far, and it comes with all the goodies and a three year warranty to boot. I just can't catch a break.

I'm cutting my losses with this thing. I'm scrapping this demon console and I'm going to try and re-coup some of my expenses by selling the components piece by piece. I'm considering grabbing a bat and going all "office space" on it. If you've seen the movie then you know what I mean. And if you've ever had a RRoD issue with an Xbox 360, then you know how good it would feel.

The List

I made a pact with myself this summer - "work hard, play hard" I told myself. Well, I'm definitely working hard. In no small part because of "the list".

"The list" is my list of tasks that I wanted to take care of this summer before September when I'm back in school and hockey season starts again. Once those two things happen my free time fills up really fast. The list helps me to stay focused. I've been able to remind myself from time to time of the things that I have accomplished - feels good to cross something off, keeps me motivated - and of the things that I have meant to do but forgot about. Some things were simple but I just kept putting them off. Some things were just about biting the bullet and paying for them to be done. Some things are small goals I've set for myself. Some things are big projects so I'm stretching them out and working on them a little bit at a time with the hopes of finishing them by the end of the summer.

The one over-riding problem with the list is that it's not exhaustive. As I keep thinking about things that I want done, I add them. This means that it never seems to shrink. It almost seems to be a bottomless job jar. A moving target, if you will, as the end never seems to be in sight. We are in a long week-end here, and I spent almost all of today either working at one of my two jobs (see next blog) or working at home. Tomorrow looks bad too. The day after - not much better. So much for a long week-end. Productive? Yes. Relaxing? Not in the least.

My new plan is to stop adding to list and try and catch up with what I have. I keep being reminded of the other half of the promise to myself. Mostly by others, but sometimes by me. I've made a conscious effort to do a few things this summer, but it's not at the level I was hoping for. Maybe I'll add "do something fun" to the list. Then I just might do it.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

This week-end was to be a productive one. I had places to go and people to do. Err... things to do. In particular, things around the house. I had a light bulb to change, a speaker to fix, a minivan to get running again,... The list of things in the job jar was growing. Included in that list was the chore of emptying my old computer. We got a new computer three years ago and we never transferred any of the movies/music/pictures/office documents/etc. over to our new system. In hindsight, this was good because we had a hard drive crash about a year ago that would have wiped it all out. But we wanted to set the old system up for the kids, so it was time to get started.

There were some early pictures of the girls, some pictures of a very pregnant Rhonda, some music that I forgot I had, and a few things that should have been cleaned up years ago. Once anything and everything of any value on the hard drive was transferred over I realized that my job wasn't done. I had about a dozen or so 3.5" Floppy diskettes (Yes, you read that right) with stuff on it that I had to get things off of. Since my old system was the last system that I would probably have with a disk drive in it, I thought it best to do it now and get it done. I seemed to remember saving goofy emails and funny things that I came across in my early years of web surfing. But I soon realized that I had found something more important that. It was my "virtual shoe box".

These diskettes contained memories of the period of my life between my two big relationships, with a little overlapping. What should have taken about 15 minutes to simply transfer took over an hour. Things that were erased from my memory suddenly came flooding back as I poured over the disks one by one. The first disc had pictures of a girl that I had met over the web years ago. Her name was Theresa. She lived in Ohio. She was married with two boys. I had forgotten how cute she was until the pictures surfaced. We never had an online affair or anything like that. We were company for each other. She used to tell me that she and her hubby didn't talk much. We used to chat for hours until one day she just stopped coming online. I never did find out what happened to her.

Then there was April, a full of life, hockey-loving Texas girl that had a huge crush on Boston Bruins forward Joe Thornton (now on San Jose). I found a few pictures of her on a different disc. She was fun to chat with. We lost touch years back and it had been a long time since I had thought of her. I tended to socialize online a lot then, perhaps more so than I do now. Between a full-time job and my MBA studies, I didn't get out much.

I found pictures of the waitresses at the local Hooters washing my car, as a couple of buddies and myself went for their annual charity car wash. My car looked worse after the wash than before it but it didn't matter. We all know it wasn't about the wash itself anyways. I found a picture of the team I played for in the Western Canadian Ball Hockey Championships, the first and only time I played in the tournament. We lost all three games, but fought hard in all of them. I found some of my old MBA coursework. I opened up some of it just to see if I could still follow what I did. Damn. It's been so long that I forgot how good I was. I used to be able to make Excel sing. I'm not sure I could do anyhting that intense now. I thought about some of the good people I had shared that experience with, most of which I've lost touch with years ago.

And I found pictures of Baba, my Mom's mom and the only Grand-parent I ever really knew. The pics were of her on her 90th birthday. She was already pretty blind and her memory was starting to fade, but she always had a smile for us. She had passed away before the girls were born. She had lived a good life. It had been a while since I had thought of her too.

I wasn't prepared for all of the feelings to come back. It caught me by surprise. I started to feel sad about all of the good people that I've lost touch with over the years, as that seemed to be the one common thread. If life is the sum of our relationships, then I think I'm a "C" student at best. I'm not even sure where I'm going with this, how I'm going to end it, or why I wrote it in the first place. I felt compelled, as if writing it might help me to sort things out. Maybe I was just always too busy to keep in touch. Maybe they were too. Maybe in the long run those fleeting relationships didn't mean that much to me. Or them. Maybe. I don't know. I need to think about this one.

Kijiji

I have recently discovered Kijiji, a website where you can post and browse local classified ads for free. I always knew it was there but I've never really used it before. I used to always default to eBay when looking for anything I needed but had trouble finding locally. Like eBay, some things are terribly overpriced, but there are deals to be had if you take the time. I’ve managed to purchase a few under-priced games that were then quickly traded in for a decent profit. I also managed to pick up a wireless network adapter for a song. I also missed out on a couple of items because I didn’t find them in time. The inventory of ads changes constantly, so you have to act fast when the real good deals come along because they don’t last long.

Based on my success in purchasing a few things, I thought I would try my hand at selling. I have a lot of original Xbox games that I put up for sale in an effort to thin out my collection, as well as a few Xbox 360 titles that are collecting dust and have terrible trade-in values. The good part is that the service is free, so there is no cost in using the website. The bad part is that the service is free, so there is no cost in using the website. Free, it seems, is the key for bringing out everyone and their weird requests. Why not? It’s free.

I was contacted regarding a few of the games on the list but as of today, none have ever sold. People have wanted things at ridiculously low prices. Sorry, but I don’t give Black Friday deals. If the request is reasonable, I’ll entertain it. And my games are in way better shape then most of the ones found at the local Gamestop (I'm terribly appauled at how some people treat their belongings, but that's a whole other blog). People have no idea if the games are backwards compatible with Xbox 360. I'm not Wikipedia so do some homework before contacting me, please. People have asked for free games because they can’t afford them for their kids. If I’m not getting a tax receipt for my donation, then the answer is no. Someone wanted a $5 game on my list and asked if I would consider a trade. Seriously? For $5?

I have since pulled my ads from Kijiji because the headaches were not worth the few bucks I could have made. Maybe I’ll just have a garage sale in the spring. Until then I’ll continue to scan the ads from time to time in search of deals. Why not? It’s free.

For the Fallen

November is here once again. That means another Call of Duty game is released and another Remembrance Day is close by. Yeah, it’s a great time to release a game with Xmas only being 5-6 weeks away. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Call of Duty comes out so close to Remembrance Day every year.

To everyone out there who thinks that a career with the armed forces would be a piece of cake because they just got 13 kills and 4 deaths in their last round on Call of Duty, remember this: In real life, there are no respawns. You don’t get to come back – you get buried. You can’t adjust the setting of the war from “realistic” to “easy”. And you most certainly do not get to blame your getting shot on “lag issues”.

On November 11, remember to wear a poppy and take a minute of silence for those who fell to provide us the freedom to live the lives that we do. When they answered the call of duty, the gave a lot more than the $60 that the game cost.

How short is too short?

So, I'm finished Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. What a short game. I have a few challenges to do, but the game itself is finished. I could replay on a harder level or go back and chase some achievements - either or both of which I still might do. But for a single playthrough, IT IS SHORT!!! There's no multi-player or co-op play to extend the experience. I'm feeling a tad disappointed. And ripped off. Not just once, but twice. I bought a copy for myself and the boy. Fortunately, I traded in against them so I didn't feel the direct hit to the pocketbook for two copies... But still.

Games with short campaigns should have a multi-player component to it, like Halo: Reach, or Medal of Honor. Games without multi-player should have wicked campaigns. Mass Effect is a prime example. Or Fallout. Gears of War is the best of both worlds - a challenging campaign with both co-op and multi-player gameplay to really extend the experience. I miss the old Star Wars games - Knights of the Old Republic, the Jedi Knight series - Those games had real substance to them. We should get some free DLC just to make up for the tiny campaign. That will never happen, though. Lucas doesn't give anything away for free. A full price game needs a full price effort put into it.

If you're not a die hard Star Wars fan that must own a copy of it, then rent it. Or wait for it to drop in price. Or wait for it to be rebundled with all of the inevitable DLC which might make it worth the full price. Any way, it's not a $60 game. And with the large selection of new games out this holiday season, it's not like we're short of choices.