Apply where needed

Oh my, this could be said about so many things I won’t even try to list them all. Apply where needed, so to speak.

Also, don’t forget to check out their latest over at Despair Blog.

On Xbox 360 failure rates

James Robertson has brought up a topic of consoles again. While I totally agree that reported failure rates are absolutely unacceptable and point to a problem in either hardware design or shoddy assembly, the other important side of the story that often gets overlooked is how Microsoft deals with these failures when they do occur. To be honest, I was a little concerned about the perceived failures when I bought my own Xbox 360 for Christmas, and those concerns grew into uneasy anticipation when I started seeing intermittent error messages during bootup before network adapter died completely. I pretty much expected the repair process to cost me a couple hundred dollars and countless hours spent on the phone, but actually that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s how the process worked (in my case, other’s may differ, but the chatter in blogosphere indicates similar experiences),

1. Call 1-800-4MY-XBOX
2. Hold for less than 5 minutes
3. Provide your name, address and console’s serial number
4. Describe the problem
   1. It’s worth mentioning that they will try to troubleshoot problems that don’t report error codes back, but as long as you have a Red Ring of Death they won’t bother you with meaningless “let’s unplug the hard drive and try again” scenarios, which is a relief
5. Confirm your name and address
6. They will ship the empty cardboard box with packaging material immediately via Purolator
7. Once the cardboard box arrives (about 5 days later), take your concole (just the console itself, no hard drive, controllers or power supply), tape the box up and stick the included return label on top of the original shipping label (remember to tear and keep the small tab with tracking numbers from the return label)
8. Take the package to closest Purolator outlet (one was right in the building next to my office)
9. Drop off the package, no paperwork required, you don’t even need to wait in line in most cases, just make sure you hand off the box to someone who looks like customer service
10. About 10 days later another box will arrive via Purolator, this time with a repaired (or refurbished or brand new) console and that’s it, you’re back at it spending countless hours trying to get those pesky multiplayer Gears of War achievements
11. Also included in a box you will find a free 1-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, which works well for those who are already subscribed so they don’t feel ripped off by not having a console for about 3 weeks, but it also works well for those who are Silver subscribers as a bonus type thing to go and play online for a while, a win-win thing IMHO

So, all in all, about a 10 minute phone call and less than 3 weeks waiting was all it took, and I’m mighty pleased with how professionally it was handled. Suddenly, I don’t feel as bad and that’s one heck of an important lesson other companies could learn from Microsoft right about now.

Update: I bet these failures have something to do with Decepticons…

Seaside going places

I’m personally not against a principle of constant critical evaluation of one’s work, but its also very important to sit back once in a while and look at the bigger picture. Is what you do important? Does it help people get stuff done? Do they enjoy getting stuff done with your application? If all the answers are ‘Yes’, then you must be doing something right, so give yourself a pat on the back, go home, forget about work for the weekend and chill out. Which is what I’m going to do now, but not before leaving you with this graph of all our visitors since the official release about 4 months ago. Perhaps not as impressive as Dabble DB’s graph would be, but since they aren’t bragging about theirs I might as well throw mine out to set a precedent… ;)

Great gadget holder for your ride

Via Engadget comes this innovative gadget/garbage holder from Renault,

I want one in my Jetta!

It’s been a while…

… but I’m still at it working hard as there’s no end of exciting projects and plans at work. The guilt over neglecting the blog had finally caught up to me.

3 x 8 =

24 , of course! Which means its time to start the Jack Bauer Kill Count again.

Santa’s been good to me

Looks like I haven’t been too naughty this past year, so Santa dropped off a new Xbox 360 at my door. He asked for my credit card for some reason, though, so I’ll have to check into that at some point… Other than that, its cool.

Few initial thoughts,

• Xbox Live is the most thought-out thing I’ve seen coming from Microsoft camp: its a breeze to use and playing co-op is too much fun and should be illegal in most places
• It blogs
• AppleTV is not as innovative as Steve would like to think, because Xbox streams media from my PC out of the box in 1080i and not just 720p
• Gears of War is l33t – all hail CliffyB!

More later…

How manly are you?

According to The Gender Genie I’m not as manly as I thought I was, how about you?

Putting things in perspective

If the world’s population were reduced to 100, it would look something like this.

The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the differences in the world.

One of those rare things that may just make you appreciate small things you have in life a little more.

Back in Business

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Having been through a vacation, move, business trip and important demo I’m finally able to declare myself back in business, but I do have quite a bit of catching up to do here on the Leftshore…