Recently, I had a case of misfortune when my Xbox 360 began to slowly die. Had I seen the signs, and spoken to the correct people, I could have headed that bullshit off at the pass and moved on with my life. Unfortunately, I didn't know the signs were a portent for worse things to come, so I continued to play the thing expecting that, you know, it would work. Silly me.
The first sign came in the intensely difficult, but very fun Ninja Gaiden 2. There was a point in a level that I just couldn't get past. I gave up on it and moved on with my life. The next sign came while playing Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes (actually Mercenaries 2) when the game wouldn't load a saved game unless it was connected to Xbox Live, and even then the load times were unbearable. Eventually I borrowed Force Unleashed and found the load times to be painfully slow. Last, while downloading songs for Rock Band 2 the downloads were so slow I thought I might die before the bloody songs got here, but I blamed that on Comcast.
Then came the final straw, I booted the machine and, other than the splash screen at the beginning, nothing would load. No game, none of the ones I mentioned above, would load. I poked and prodded as best I could, eventually removing the hard drive to determine what the error was. As soon as I detached the oddly quiet hard drive, every game booted incredibly quickly before bitching about needing a place to save data. Put hard drive back on? No worky.
Thus I emailed Xbox Support and told them my hard drive was busted. The guy who emailed me insisted I try some steps, but, lo and behold, I did have the internet and had already done every single step already, reiterating that my hard drive was no longer in the land of the living. The email dude told me to call Xbox Support. I called, got a monumentally unhelpful shrew of a woman who repeatedly implied that I was an idiot, but eventually, after I told her my hard drive was the trouble, she told me I'd need to send my Xbox to Microsoft for repair. Just not on this call because their system was down.
I called back the next day, repeated my problems again, explained how my hard drive was broken, and I was assured that it could be fix. I put in a repair order, got all that nonsense taken care of, and, even though I would be without my Xbox for possibly a month, I was happy knowing that my hardrive would be brought back from the dead.
I got the email from Xbox telling me about how to pack up and send my box back to them and as I was preparing I noticed a little detail: "Detach your hard drive for you cannot send it in." What?
Shortly there after I was on the phone with Xbox Support AGAIN, this time just short of yelling at people, trying to find out wtf was going on. This latest support person told me, of course I couldn't send in my hard drive. Xbox only repairs the Xbox itself, not the attachments of any kind. I asked him why someone before him had told me that this was possible, and he told me I was lying because, obviously, anybody who serviced me before would have told me I had to replace my hard drive for Xbox doesn't repair them. Without telling him to go fuck himself, I asked if buying a new hard drive would allow me to keep all of my data, and he told me yes, all my downloaded accomplishments, gamer tag, and saved data would be restored when I got the new hard drive. Then he put me on hold to talk to someone to get my repair order canceled, and something like an hour later I gave up, hung up, and went off to do other things.
And, no, it's still not over. I called back AGAIN. I talked to another idiot long enough to be put on hold so I could talk to a supervisor. This was the first competent human being I spoke to. Repair order? Canceled after verifying my information. Help me recover my gamertag? Sure, just a second. Then the bitch hung up on me. Motherfuckers.
And I STILL didn't have my gamertag recovered. Rather than talk to a human I tried talking to the Xbox phone bot and he was a useless piece of shit. Eventually, out of sheer desperation, I tried using an email address on my gamertag that made sense only in a twisted sort of way and, hooray, it worked! I actually got my gamer tag back. It took a long time, but after that I was confident that my shit was restored.
I'm sure you've already guess that, yes, my shit was not restored. After a little research, I did find that I could "download again" all the things I spent money on. Hooray! And I did. One at a time. There's no "download again everything", so I had to go through every single download and tell it to download again. Also, only ten could be set to download again at one time, so it took a while. My save games? Gone. Can't be restored.
So let's recap. Can I send in my hard drive to be repaired? "Yes." Lie.
Can I get all my data recovered with ease? "Yes." Lie.
Can I restore all my data? "Yes." Lie.
Thankfully, minus saves and a lot of my patience, my Xbox lives again! I have a new hard drive, one that in theory will work better for a while, and I can play those games that I'm so looking forward to. At least the fucker plays. I should count my lucky stars.
October 23, 2008
October 2, 2008
Bloody buggering morons...
Once upon a time, there were things called third-party email clients. They were readily accessible by anyone and everyone was happy. Then mean people, known as bosses, decided that the potential risk of people downloading viruses, trojans, and worms was too great to allow people to use those 3rd party email clients, so they told their employees who liked checking their email at work to go fuck themselves. This made many people unhappy, and had the totally expected side effect of people being pissed off enough to try to find ways around this no 3rd party email idiocy.
There were two main ways of dealing with this new no-email scenario, the non-techy way and the techy way. Non-techy people were still capable of figuring out that they could get their 3rd party emails forwarded to their work email address, thus getting their emails. This was a really bad idea for a couple of reasons: 1) work addresses are easily read by those bosses so personal email via work is too easily read by other people 2) work email is usually Microsoft Outlook, also known as The Easiest Email Client To Get A Virus, Trojan, or Worm with, and therefore is a horrible idea. So by blocking third party emails, the bosses, also known as morons, basically guaranteed that Outlook would look at these emails and happily open the door for any kind of evil software that exists, thus shooting their stupid idea in the foot, the face, you name it.
The techy way to deal with the problem was to find interesting technological ways around the blocks. Most people don't know this, but there are actually two main ways for websites to talk to their readers: HTTP and HTTPS. Now that S on HTTPS means secure; it's a different protocol and one that isn't often blocked because blocking sites that are already secure could be viewed as idiocy. As such, many third party email clients still had HTTPS sites up that had not been blocked by bosses/morons. The techy people, knowing that these secure email clients had all sorts of protections against viruses and whatnot, used these HTTPS sites, secure (ha!) in the knowledge that they were both getting to keep their email and also doing their boss/morons a solid by protecting the company from being raped by the evils of the Internet.
Sadly, even the morons eventually caught on to the HTTPS sites, and tried to block them. This didn't bother the non-techy people who were busily filling their companies with viruses; only the techy people started getting boned by morons. Techy people, however, thrive in the face of adversity. Now there are a few new options depending on the tech available for those poor email deprived types, and few of them are good for the company.
1) Email on my phone! Many phones are now also capable of surfing the mobile net, meaning people can check and reply to their email on their phones. Why is this bad for the company? Simple. Assuming average people have an average typing speed of 30 words per minute, rather slow, an email could take a couple minutes to write. Now try that on your cellphone. If you're fast, and I mean fast, you might manage 30 wpm. More realistically you might get 5-10 wpm out of that tiny little keyboard. That's tripling or more the time it takes to reply to an email, thus hurting productivity. This also cannot be blocked unless you're willing to wrap your entire building with copper to block all cellphones, which you can't do because of work-only or on-call cellphones. Good call morons.
2) Remote access to my home machine. Though not entirely safe for the home user, it is relatively easy to set up a way for your home machine to be accessible via the internet, be that by Remote Desktop or another cool method of proxy, you now have access to your machine at home. Not only that, you have access to a machine that doesn't have a single business restriction, meaning you can email, IM, even IRC without problems. You can also browse the Internet for anything, midget pr0n if you were so inclined. Say goodbye to your work productivity. True here as well, this cannot be blocked because of the business use of Remote Desktop. Again: good call morons.
The simple, obvious, better, and just plain nicer answer here is: don't be pricks, let people check their 3rd party email for five minutes. It's safer, smarter, better for productivity, and keeps people happy.
I'm not holding my breath.
There were two main ways of dealing with this new no-email scenario, the non-techy way and the techy way. Non-techy people were still capable of figuring out that they could get their 3rd party emails forwarded to their work email address, thus getting their emails. This was a really bad idea for a couple of reasons: 1) work addresses are easily read by those bosses so personal email via work is too easily read by other people 2) work email is usually Microsoft Outlook, also known as The Easiest Email Client To Get A Virus, Trojan, or Worm with, and therefore is a horrible idea. So by blocking third party emails, the bosses, also known as morons, basically guaranteed that Outlook would look at these emails and happily open the door for any kind of evil software that exists, thus shooting their stupid idea in the foot, the face, you name it.
The techy way to deal with the problem was to find interesting technological ways around the blocks. Most people don't know this, but there are actually two main ways for websites to talk to their readers: HTTP and HTTPS. Now that S on HTTPS means secure; it's a different protocol and one that isn't often blocked because blocking sites that are already secure could be viewed as idiocy. As such, many third party email clients still had HTTPS sites up that had not been blocked by bosses/morons. The techy people, knowing that these secure email clients had all sorts of protections against viruses and whatnot, used these HTTPS sites, secure (ha!) in the knowledge that they were both getting to keep their email and also doing their boss/morons a solid by protecting the company from being raped by the evils of the Internet.
Sadly, even the morons eventually caught on to the HTTPS sites, and tried to block them. This didn't bother the non-techy people who were busily filling their companies with viruses; only the techy people started getting boned by morons. Techy people, however, thrive in the face of adversity. Now there are a few new options depending on the tech available for those poor email deprived types, and few of them are good for the company.
1) Email on my phone! Many phones are now also capable of surfing the mobile net, meaning people can check and reply to their email on their phones. Why is this bad for the company? Simple. Assuming average people have an average typing speed of 30 words per minute, rather slow, an email could take a couple minutes to write. Now try that on your cellphone. If you're fast, and I mean fast, you might manage 30 wpm. More realistically you might get 5-10 wpm out of that tiny little keyboard. That's tripling or more the time it takes to reply to an email, thus hurting productivity. This also cannot be blocked unless you're willing to wrap your entire building with copper to block all cellphones, which you can't do because of work-only or on-call cellphones. Good call morons.
2) Remote access to my home machine. Though not entirely safe for the home user, it is relatively easy to set up a way for your home machine to be accessible via the internet, be that by Remote Desktop or another cool method of proxy, you now have access to your machine at home. Not only that, you have access to a machine that doesn't have a single business restriction, meaning you can email, IM, even IRC without problems. You can also browse the Internet for anything, midget pr0n if you were so inclined. Say goodbye to your work productivity. True here as well, this cannot be blocked because of the business use of Remote Desktop. Again: good call morons.
The simple, obvious, better, and just plain nicer answer here is: don't be pricks, let people check their 3rd party email for five minutes. It's safer, smarter, better for productivity, and keeps people happy.
I'm not holding my breath.
October 1, 2008
My notes
The following are my notes, all of them, from my company's very important quarterly meeting regarding everything important we need to do.
Steal ideas from Geico.
Useful meeting, eh?
Steal ideas from Geico.
Useful meeting, eh?
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