Plane of NonConformity

I've made a lot of trips to my local UPS store this month.   Most of them dealt with the normal shipping and receiving of Christmas gifts.  But I've made five trips for warranty replacements of Xbox related items.  I've picked up my empty box for the racing wheel so it doesn't start my house on fire, an empty box for my broken Xbox 360, a box ...

This weekend I updated GamerScoreGoal(GSG) with my latest code.   It didn't change much visually from the version that has been online for the last month, but there are a lot of improvements in the back end. This project has really been teaching me a lot about myself as a programmer.  Mostly that I don't have much experience in creating UI and ...

It's happened again.  My Xbox 360 froze up when I was playing Assassin's Creed.  Then when I rebooted the 360 it started playing the opening animation but never made it all the way though.   It did this a couple times then I let it rest for about a half hour disconnected from the power supply.  I reconnected the power ...

I set a goal for 2007 of getting a total of 20,000 Gamerscore on my Xbox 360.  The last couple months I have become obsessed with reaching my goal and I needed a good way to track my progress.   I was also coveting the API Samurai badge on 360voice.com, you know that place where you Xbox 360 blogs about what games you have played.  That and ...

An update to the 360voice main blog back on Oct 24th had a comment that they were working on a new feature.   I had a sinking feeling that it would be related to what I was doing at Gamerscoregoal.com.  360Voice.com has announced their new Challenge system.   It's a system were you invite a few of your friends to a timed Gamerscore ...

This is going to be the first holiday season in the last couple years where I actually had to limit myself and decide months in advance what game I'm going to pick up.   Well this Call of Duty 4 comes out and I'm going to pick it up.   There was a great beta test for the Xbox 360 a couple months back that really sold me on this ...

In 1995 when I first got onto the Internet I could immediately see the potential.  A single network where anyone can publish their work and share it with the rest of the world. Where the world's knowledge would be at everyone's fingertips.  Where everyone was free to express and debate their opinions. It was going to be a happy place. Since ...

July has been a busy month for me.   At work I've been involved in what can best be described as a failed attempt to launch a new product.   You know a product is doomed when you just have a small role in it's launch and the product manager swings by your desk to ask you basic question about the product function.   Apparently because I can ...

Hello.  My gamertag is Carsinigin and I'm obsessed with video games.   I just bought Shadow Run at full price. I swore to myself that I would wait until it was reduced or I could get it though GameFly.  As I got back into my car, in the Best Buy parking lot, I realized that I had just purchased Forza 2 from GameFly and that ...

I got the dreaded red ring of death tonight well I was in the dashboard voice chatting.   WTF????   I wasn't even stressing the Xbox's cpu with a game.  The hard drive was not under strain of I/O.  There was no DVD disk in the drive to spin.   After one year and a month my 360 gave up on me.