In the previous post from 13th of November (Repaired XBox 360 Returned Today) I mentioned that Mario won the race about getting his XBox 360 back. Quick summary, my XBox died and so did Mario’s. We both got in contact with Microsoft on the same day so we had a little race about who would get the XBox 360 back first. Mario got his back earlier, probably because they both got sent to the same place in Germany, so mine was delayed a bit due to customs.

So all were happy, just until yesterday where Mario told me that he YET again had problems with his XBox. So he contacted them AGAIN and is now he is waiting for his fifth XBox 360 within ONE year.

They did mention they would give him a total new XBox 360, with the latest chips and cooling. But if you ask me, then they should give him a XBox 360 Elite, with 120GB HD and the HDMI port.

So what does Mario do while waiting for his new XBox, he buys Super Mario Galaxy for Nintendo Wii. Reminds me, I have had the game for close to two weeks now and I didn’t even try it.

Hope the new XBox will return soon to him and that he will no longer have problems with it.

As mentioned some weeks ago (XBox 360 repair time) my XBox 360 had entered the Red Ring of Death and wasn’t working at all. So I got in touch with the XBox support people and got arranged for the XBox to be repaired.

All roads of Broken XBox’s leads to Teleplan Germany

My friend Mario from Germany had the same issue (again) with a broken XBox and also contacted Microsoft the same day as I did, his got picked up earlier than mine and arrived at the repair center pretty quickly after. It turned out that my XBox also got sent to the same place as his, so to Teleplan in Germany. It seems that Teleplan is the company handling XBox repairs for Europe (I did some searching and saw that people from none Germany speaking countries also got their sent to Teleplan in Germany), but this does not mean that the repair is handled there as some people wrote that their XBox got resend to Prague.

The Repair Race

So we both contacted Microsoft on the 23rd of October; he in the morning and I in the afternoon. He got his returned Thursday the 8th November and I got mine on the 13th of November. So with all the customs delays mine went through I find it went pretty quick after all; just 20 days including weekends. But Mario won the XBox repair time race.

Microsoft paying up

Microsoft once mentioned that extending the world wide guarantee to 3 years would cost them 1.5 billion USD; if I just think about all the costs for UPS then I get scared. I mean, they send an empty box; they pay for shipment of the broken XBox and of course the repaired XBox. The invoices I have here gives 52 EURO for the empty box and 60 EURO for the returned XBox, so all in all around 170 EURO just for shipment. Oh, they also gave a one month member ship to XBox Live Gold, guess that’s pretty fair as I did pay for the time the XBox was away.

Back to gaming

Never mind, I got it back and so far seems to work without problems. Just hope it will continue to do so; as I’m not in the mood to return it yet again.

So time to check the latest XBox games I got (Halo 3 & Sonic the Hedgehog) and see what else have appeared on XBox Live Arcade.

I recently started playing Super Paper Mario on Nintendo Wii and got to say that this game impresses me more than any other game have done for a long time.

Sure you should not compare the game to World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online as it is rather… Hmmm… Different.

Guess you can only compare it to other Super Mario games but even here it is different and I’m not only talking about the flipping between 2D and 3D (got to love that) but the visuals and the story is brilliant. I sure understand why the game got 10/10 some places. I’m sure that I will be playing this Mario game more than any other previous Mario game; until I get Super Mario Galaxy.

Anyway, I only played the first 3 worlds and just had to show the games to the kids the other day. Here I ran into one issue, the game got SO MUCH text; both as introduction; story telling and while you are playing. I told them to skip it as quickly as possible and told them what they needed to know. They had no problem with this and I’m not sure they would have followed the concept of dimensions and the whole void taking over the world.

So here we are; playing the first levels. My son understood the good old digital controls right away and often checked with the Wiimote if there where hidden objects. The flipping between 2d and 3d was also no issue for him, sure I do have to remind him from time to time to check in 3D but he got it sorted. Now with controlling two characters, having 2 Pixi’s to choose from it starts to get more tricky.

Then after awhile we got to the first real big end boss. Do not continue reading if you don’t want the solution to passing this end boss (flying dragon). I showed him the big red flying dragon and told him the story about it when I played it earlier. I spent don’t know how many hit points trying to hit the antenna on the head of it; NO success at all.

So I ended my first day with Super Paper Mario been annoyed and just turned off. The day after Google helped me ;-)

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Anyway, as I said, I showed the dragon to my son and he was like: “yeah, that’s cool… How about you jump up on his back” I just froze in motion; put the game on pause and looked him deep in the eyes. I told him that I’m impressed with his logic thinking and that I never got that idea myself. Either that tells something about him and games or it tells something bad about me and games.

So we did this and got pass the dragon; played some more yesterday and finished the hamster part ;-)

Point of the story is ‘never underestimate kids and their thinking/logic’. They keep on surprising me again and again, not only in games but in all areas.

Guess I’m pretty lucky at the moment, first the great review by Valerie and now Blog A Day by Beth.

Seems Beth liked my blog, so why don’t you head over to her ‘review’ of it and read it yourself. She got some great comments that made me simile ;-) oh, and she subscribed to my RSS feed, thanks to Beth. Guess this puts some pressure on me for writing more good posts.

She claims that she is good in poker and can win it any day; who knows, I might challenge her and of course keep her in mind if the system from the 30K per month book works. Then I can always sponsor the book for her :-)

I’m always interested in hearing what people think of my blog, both design and the content. So recently when valmg offered to do blog reviews I just had to grab the chance.

She wrote what I consider a rather positive review, which can be found on one of her many blogs, just go over to her Cats and Coupons blog to have a look at the review.

One thing she got right was that the right sidebar are cut off but it all depends on the resolution and probably also the browser, only one of the items are cut here when running 1024×768 (Which I just happen to know that she is using), but if the resolution is lower or if the browser is not full-screen then yes, she is correct. Oh, I just checked with Internet explore 6 and more was cut off, time for me to fix that.

Another thing she noticed was my About page, that it gives a good few details. So I just had to double check her own About pages and I was not able to find her real name on any of them, so she will continue to be known as: valmg

Anyway, thanks to valmg for taking the time for the review, appreciated.

I just can’t believe it; I’m going to get SO rich. Already doing my shopping list: Two Apple 30″ screens, iPod Ultra Nano Touch, PS3, 52″ HDTV screen, surround set, extra car.. Hell why not also a house with pool. I mean, with $30.000 pr month it should be possible.

Of course this is not for real, but I just received the 9th poker book to my collection and do check the title of it Earn $30,000 per Month Playing Online Poker: A Step-By-Step Guide to Single Table Tournaments.That sure does sound promising, right?

The title almost sounds like an online scam and due to my skepticism I’m very skeptic :-)

I had a quick read through the book when I had lunch (only 120 pages) and it actually does look alright. The book assumes that the reader knows about Poker (fair enough), only 2 pages about poker odds. It is most of all a strategic system that can be used for single table tournaments. They also write about various hand/player tracking software, so that’s something that can’t be used offline.

The plan is not to use their system 100% (yet) but I will read through the book a few times and then evaluate if I should give it a try. Just need to get some other online poker sorted first (for some bonus) before I might have time for it.

I will report back if the system in the book really works.

Do note: I do not agree with the subject of this post :-)

I just came across this YouTube video of a guy who made a song/video with that subject, how he failed in all parts of a relationship and just puts the blame on Halo 3 and Halo 2. (Hope it was not a true story).

I had to laugh when I saw the movie but the sad part of this is that some games DO take over people’s life and they forget the important things in life, such as PEOPLE and communicating with the people around them. I would still not blame the games but it is more about the people.

Oh, and it is not only Halo 2 and Halo 3 that have that effect; guess games like World of Warcraft also counts as a ‘I forgot life’-game.

Watch the video, have a good laugh (I just love the last part) and think about it…

I recently signed up with PayPerPost (Now part of IZEA). So what is PayPerPost; simple you get paid/sponsored to post (blog) about certain subjects. What you can write about depends on your location, the categories of your web site and Alexa ranking and Google’s PageRank. So the better ranks, the more and better priced options you got.

This is not a get rich quick system; actually, it is not a way to get rich at all. Some of the options I have range from $5 up to $15; they also have rules that have to be followed so it would not be possible to make a blog that is based on the paid posts.

The subject of the posts varies a LOT and no, I will not write about them all. Don’t see any reason why I should start writing about mortgage, estate agent in NYC, garage furniture, alcohol rehab in Florida or garden furniture since I got no interest in that (got no garage or garden anyway) and I doubt the reads of this blog wants to read about that.

I have so far written 3 blog entries that are sponsored and I wrote about them as I felt they where suited for this blog and the readers and so it will continue. I will also continue to stay 100% true to the posts, so I will never make something up just to be able to make it sound good. So when I wrote about the high tech binocular and that I’m considering buying them, then that’s the truth.

Each sponsored post will be marked as a sponsored post either by text or by graphics; see the bottom of this post for how it can look. PayPerPost actually require this which I think is a great policy to have. Just have a look at their disclosure page: payperpost

So will this bring in a lot of money for me; nope. I hope so find interesting enough options to get around $25 to $50 per month and I plan to use them well. I need to improve my grammar so I will be looking around for online courses and they will be paid with any income I get from PayPerPost. I might even look for some real-life courses here in Switzerland.

Of course it is not for real but it is part of the game Ghost Squad. I never considered to check out the game Ghost Squad (For Nintendo Wii, to be released end of November 2007) nor was it my plan until 10 minutes ago where I saw one insane in-game video.

This should be from unlocked Paradise Mode. The movie features guns formed as Dolphins, shooting water bubbles, killing with banana (down the throat) and jet skies looking like swans. If anyone thinks this is the ’soft’ version of the game; then think again as it actually rather brutal.

So did this make me consider getting the game; nope… I need to see more from the ‘real’ game. I wonder if the developers had a good laugh when they did this part of the game; must have been a good change in the normal boring work.

Watch the movie at your own risk. Do not blame me if you end up having nightmares or wet dreams because of this…

I got to admit that I have been a fan of doing backups for a long time, sure it was not always like this but I learned it the hard way, so ever since the late DOS days I have been doing backups on a regular basis.

I did fail some years ago with the backup and that was a rather expensive experience as I had a hard disk crash, that hard disk contained ALL our family photos. So we had it restored at one of the few companies that takes the drive apart and replaces any mechanical parts. I hope that this will never happen again as that money could have been spent on many other things (Such as a good backup system).

I have been through several phases: I bought a DVD burner when they where expensive, used a noisy tape streamer, I used the 100 MB ZIP disks, CD backups and of course backup on floppy disks.

I’m now using external hard drives and DVD for backups but my problem was always to find the perfect software for it. I tested many, bought some and ended up with a few programs. So let me go over the ones I’m using at the moment. This will not be any in depth review but will just go over the software quickly.

All the software mentioned here is for Windows, I will cover Mac backup at a later stage. The plan is also to write about online backup another day.

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