Xbox
Xbox back, again
My Xbox has finally come back. Not a replacement this time but then the last one was only 4 days old. Hopefully it will last a little longer now. I have been playing on it a bit but I’ve only been back from work an hour. We will have to wait and see.
Xbox back
Yesterday I got my Xbox back from the repair centre. They have just shipped me a new one so it’s all shiny. It is just in time for ODST, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but we were playing it last night. I will write a mini review when we have completed it although it seems to be good so far.
I am quite impressed with the repair process Microsoft have put in place for the Xbox. Despite it being nearly 3 years old, they sent a courier to pick it up, take it to the repair centre and then send me a new console in under a week and they throw in a month of gold membership for live. I was hoping that I would get a new one with a HDMI connector, mine predates the first ones to have them but alas no, it identical to the new ones. I am tempted to get a bigger hard drive for it although £90 for a 120gb is quite steep. I only have a 20GB one and now with more DLC, game installs, arcade games etc. it all adds up to needing a lot more space. I am forever having to clean up old videos and demos, I can only have one game installed at once maybe 2 if it is a smaller one.
Hopefully ODST will arrive by tomorrow so I will be able to play it over the weekend. We also have Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 coming next week so we will be playing that as well. The autumn games schedule has started at last and there is a lot of good titles coming out in the coming months to keep us busy. There is at least 7-8 that I want and a couple more that I might get as well.
Red ring of death
My Xbox has developed the red ring of death. 3 little red lights flashing away. It took a few days to get to this after it started crashing. Since it is nearly 3 years old I thought I would have to pay for a repair, then, while on the phone to the repair line, it started to red ring. The only reason that I had phoned was because while filling out the repair request on the website I couldn’t have a German address with a UK billing address. Originally it would just beep and freeze, it was only while on the phone and going through all of his diagnosis steps that it first red ringed, fortunately, this means that no billing information is required so that solves that problem.
My Xbox did need to go for repair last summer as well, at the time they also extended my warranty by a year, this has now just ran out so I would have had to pay if it wasn’t the red ring problem. I am now waiting for the UPS shipping label to arrive so that I can send it off. I am hoping that it will arrive before I leave work today so that I can sort it out on the way home. I want to send it off as soon as possible in the hope that it will be back for the release on Halo 3: ODST next week which I already have on preorder. I have also just bought Trials HD on XBLA. Didn’t get much chance to play it but it seems like a good game.
1 month
We will have been here in Munich for one month tomorrow and are in the middle of our fourth week of work. Still haven’t had much opportunity to go out and enjoy Munich as funds are a little short. We are still waiting on being paid. It should have been the day after my last post but it seems they didn’t get our details in time and so we got nothing. We managed to get an advance on our salary but that barely covered this month’s rent so now we have to get by until the end of the month.
Two Saturdays ago we went to Feldmoching See to the north-west of Munich, we took a barbecue and enjoyed the weather. This map shows where it is in relation to the city, the centre starts just south of Olympiapark. We had a great day although I didn’t think to take my camera so no pictures of it.
Feldmoching See
This Saturday was Michael’s birthday, he and some other’s from work went back to the lake but I didn’t as the weather didn’t look as good and I was feeling lazy. I didn’t really do anything all weekend other than watch TV. I will go out more once I get paid and hopefully I’ll remember to take my camera with me so I can get some pictures of it.
I haven’t really been doing much else except for working. I am going to get my Xbox 360 shipped over in the next couple of weeks so I will be able to get back to playing some games. There are a lot of new games coming out in the next few months. I will have to get them shipped over here if I want and English box but that shouldn’t be too much hassle if I buy them online. Halo 3: ODST is probably the next one to come out, according to that page on Wikipedia it is September 22nd so I will definitely have my Xbox over here before then. Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 are out in November. There is probably some more that I have forgotten about as well.
I keep thinking that I should start doing something about my FYP soon but then I also think that it is nearly 2 years away before it has to be finished. I think that I will get settled into the job a bit more yet before I start, although not having any money to go out, now would be a good time to do something. I am considering using C# for development rather than C++ because it should save be a lot of time and trouble on C++ issues by having a managed environment. I thought this for my physics and AI assignment back in March but ended up having problems, I can’t remember what now but I ended up using C++ anyway. At work I am using Java, I didn’t really like Java when we did it at Uni in the first year but now that I am using it again I am finding that it is not as bad as I remember. The GUIs are still annoying, messing around with layout managers and needing to use dozens of panels everywhere to get it to look right isn’t very fun, I’m sure there must be a better way of doing it but it can’t beat the drag ‘n’ drop controls in Visual Studio for C#.