Customer Service

There are lots of times when you'll hear horror stories of people dealing customer service  (This Verizon incident cracks me up every time).  Whether it be the lost packages that didn't arrive when they were supposed to, the calls for tech support that leave you talking to someone in India struggling to understand the words coming out of each other's mouths or the products that are broken before they even arrive.

But this isn't that kind of discussion about customer service... quite the opposite.

MONITOR

I ordered a monitor from TigerDirect.  It's my Christmas present to myself.  I went from my 2 monitor setup to one 28" widescreen monitor.  That picture is of my monitor along with my iPod Nano and my LG Chocolate phone sitting at the base of it to try to give it some scale.  I ordered it at about 7pm on Monday and it arrived Wednesday morning with the UPS driver waking me up.  I was completely and utterly shocked in as positive a way as possible!

So, bravo TigerDirect and UPS for leaving me in awe.  And also for having a great price on a massive monitor.  Right now I play WoW running 2 copies of game so I can control 2 characters at once, but I can't wait until I'm high level and ready to play only 1 copy of the game, with the graphical settings maximized and pushing my SLI setup the way it's supposed to be pushed!

360

And in another show of some great customer service, I got my XBox 360 back waaaaay faster than expected. It broke on Wednesday night (as my post from that night points out) and I got it to the UPS Store on Thursday evening.  A week and a half later, it had been received, repaired and returned to me!  I was concerned about it not getting back in time for Christmas, but it turned out that I got it back well over a week in advance of Christmas.  Thus far it has been working as good as new... hopefully that remains the case.

So, I have no doubt that some atrocious customer service exists out there, but it's good to know that some excellent customer service exists out there too to try to counter-balance it all.

WTF, RROD, WOTLK & TGIWB

That's right, I'm throwing around abbreviations like they're going out of style... or have they already going out of style?... either way, that's neither here nor there.

WTF

What. The. Fuck. (mate) was my reaction to my XBox 360 freezing up a couple of times... little did I know, a couple of freezes would be the least my concerns a mere hour after that. A couple of freezes and weird graphical issues led to the...

RROD

That would be the Red Ring of Death. A dreaded internal malfunction of an XBox 360 console. It uses the 4 lights on the front of the console and the 3 states they can be in (red, green, off) to communicate what malady it is suffering from. When the upper-right one remains off and the other 3 go solid red, that's the red ring of death. My console is at the point right now that it doesn't RROD 100% of the time, but even when it doesn't, it's not up long enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.

So, I've begun the process of getting it sent off to Microsoft for repair. I'm out of the normal 1 year warranty, but luckily Microsoft stepped up to the plate on this issue and extended the warranty to 3 years regarding this one issue. So, I went through their process of registering my console and opted to print my own shipping label and foot the bill for my own box rather than waste an additional 2 or 3 days waiting for them to ship me the materials. The race is on to see if I can get the console to them, have it repaired/replaced and get it back to me before I go home for Christmas. Family-style Rock Band 2 hangs in the balance.

I've already gotten my game out of the console, removed my hard drive and disconnected all the wires. Now it's just a matter of getting to a UPS shipping location, getting it packed and sent tomorrow. That'll be my first order of business tomorrow afternoon when I get up... which leads into my 2nd order of business tomorrow...

WOTLK

Wrath of the Lich King. That's the newest expansion to WoW. I had already narrowed my Winter break activities down to making my own game (or 2 as I had started developing in my mind) or playing Wrath. The 2nd of those 2 was intended to be a 360 game (yeah, hobbists can make games for the 360... one of the multiple reasons that even when suffering from the RROD, I still feel like the 360 was the right choice over the PS3 for me). So, with that possibility up in the air, I've decided to leap back into that monumental time-waster, the consumer of all free time, the devourer of social lives, World of Warcraft.

I'll be leveling a class or 2 that I want to play as my first order of business. I know what one of them will be, but that's all I'm sure about... I haven't exactly researched this to the max. To my knowledge, my close friends are divided among horde characters and alliance characters so I don't even know which side I'm gonna be playing on... so much to think about. Before making this post, I confirmed that my game was as up-to-date as it could be without Wrath. I may put on some tunes and go mod hunting before going to bed... which is to say, I'll spend 2 hours looking at mods descriptions and comments without even being able to really know how they all mesh together. Well, at least...

TGIWB

Thank God It's Winter Break. I'm glad these shenanigans happened near winter break when I don't have lots of other stuff that requires my attention. I have a(n) (optional) quiz tomorrow evening (Wednesday, so technically today), a final that I'm practically all studied up for on Monday evening and one more final the following Thursday morning. I have 2 days off work in a row (including Thursday, during which I have no work and no school... which is the first time, excluding breaks, since the semester began back in August or whenever). I plan to do a lot (and by a lot, I'm talking like a metric shit-ton) of WoW playing and leveling and a minimal amount of studying (honest is the right approach, right?).

Oh yeah, and maybe some drinking during that too, your guess is as good as mine...

The Guild

So, my cousin brought his computer over so we could try to troubleshoot some Windows / hard drive issues he was having, and while it was doing some hard drive scanning, we surfed around the new 360 dashboard.

In the videos section, there was an independent video named The Guild. So, I read its little description and thought it sounded decent. Season 1, episode 1 was just like 3 minutes long so I figured nothing really lost if it turns out to suck... after all, otherwise we'd just be sitting there watching the progress percentages count up on the hard drive scan.

After watching the first episode, I was hooked! I then proceeded to download the whole first season (that's 10 episodes) one at a time because there's unfortunately no 'whole season' option. I've now watched all 10 of those (most were great, a couple were mediocre) and the one episode from season 2.

The show is about an MMO guild. Some of the things that are said remind me of WoW guilds that I've participated in... sometimes in hilarious ways and other times in more 'makes me just wanna shake my head' ways. I'd definitely say it's worth spending 3 minutes of your life heading over to the website and watching the first episode of season 1 and seeing if you are as amused by this show as I am. The website is http://www.watchtheguild.com/.

I don't know how frequently they release new episdoes, but I do know I will definitely be looking forward to season 2, episode 2.

Oh yeah, the episodes are free whether on the web or the 360... just thought I'd throw that out there too.

Winter Break

My winter break from school is approaching. Just like 2 more weeks then finals... I can't wait. But that's neither here nor there. I'm trying to decide what I'm gonna do with all this extra time that I will have. Something game related is what's going down... now just to decide exactly what.

My initial thought was an RTS. It's always been one of my favorite genres and I haven't jumped into a new since a couple of the early 2000's Command & Conquer and Red Alert games. So now I'm kind of mulling over possibly buying Supreme Commander, which is a great game by all the estimates that I've heard. Red Alert 3 recently came out and has gotten good reviews but reviewers said the story took a humorous, over-the-top story. I don't particularly have a problem with a funny story, after all Disgaea has an awesome and funny story with plenty of stereotypical cliches but I love it. Command & Conquer 3 came out last year to even better reviews. So, there's a good chance C&C3 will end up being my game of the break.

But, it's not RTS or bust... I've also pondered making a game. It could be an enjoyable month of honing my C# and XNA skills and having a hopefully fun game come out at the end. The problem with this one is that there's no type of game that is jumping out at me that I want to make right now. Not even a basic idea to start building on. Without at least an inkling of inspiration, I don't think this is the route that I want to take.

And now on to the newest and possibly most likely Winter Break time filler... WoW. The newest expansion is less than a week old right now. If I were gonna return to playing WoW, I've said for months that this is the most likely time for it to happen... sometime in December as some free time opens up. I kind of understand right now why it's so crucial to hit a holiday season release. If this expansion wasn't coming out until the beginning of January, there'd be no chance that I would be willing to reinstate my account. It would be Warhammer in this spot of potential MMO time waster.

Still not sure what's gonna fill the free time, but at least I've got some ideas... now to do some thinking and just see what I'm feeling like.