A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

This weekend my good friend Jason turned the “Big 30″, so he and his wife Cheryl put together a little swaree to celebrate the occasion. Guests were to arrive at their house for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at around 8:00 Saturday evening. There was also golf scheduled for the afternoon, but due to terrible weather, that didn’t happen. I wasn’t planning on golfing anyway since I’m a fair weather golfer, and I was pretty sure the weather wasn’t going to cooperate for this time of year. My predictions were dead on.

There was a good turnout for the festivities including our crew, and Jaosn’s many teacher and Rosetown friends. From my observations, everyone had a great time and were fairly well behaved…except Todd. It was good to speak to people I hadn’t seen in a while, and to celebrate this big milestone in Jason’s life. You can see some photos from the evening here (slideshow) and here (thumbnails). Enjoy.

About two weeks ago I was talking to Curtis about the XBox 360 and the three year warranty extension that Microsoft had granted all customers. I mentioned to him how he, Travis, and I had been lucky up to this point since so many other people have had their 360s pile up on them. I felt the urge to knock on wood, but I’m not a superstitious guy so I said, “screw that.”

The very next night I was trying to watch a movie with my 360, but it kept freezing. Blaming Rogers Video for their frequently scratched DVDs, I cursed to myself as I tried to clean the disc. But to my surprise, the movie continued to freeze. I decided to recycle the power on my 360 when I was greeted with the notorious “Red Ring of Death”. You can see my poor 360 below.

After calmly stating out loud, “My 360 just died”, I quickly turned it off in hopes that it was just an anomaly. I let out a sigh of relief when the the “Red Ring of Death” didn’t return, but my hopes were dashed when the 360 splash screen froze. I turned it off, not to try and turn it on again until tonight. Sure enough, the “Red Ring of Death” returned, and it was time to call Microsoft.

After walking through a couple of paltry troubleshooting techniques with the support rep, he finally agreed that I had experienced a hardware failure, and we set up the warranty claim. I’m happy that the repair process is fairly straight forward, and free to me, but I’m just hoping that I don’t have Jeffrey’s experience from hell. If this had happened at any other time, it wouldn’t really have been a big deal (I haven’t actually played a 360 game all summer). But with the release of Halo 3 tonight, I’m definitely SOL. The timing couldn’t have been worse.