Nicholas Pike

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I have been religiously  checking the Xbox Service website ever since I sent my Xbox to Microsoft for repairs (Nov 15th).  If you’ve been following my blog, you’d be well aware that my Xbox was struck down with the famous Red Ring of Death (Affectionately referred to as RROD by the Xbox community).

Xbox 360 console experiences a “general hardware failure”, on the front of the console three flashing red lights appear. This is reported to be caused by multiple systems failing simultaneously

(Xbox 360 Technical Problems)

This morning, to my ultimate surprise, the status on my xbox changed from “Device received” to “Device Shipped to Customer”.  Whoa, fast turn around time batman!

The UPS tracking number isn’t active yet - but maybe its time to go out and purchase Mass Effect and prepare for an early return to NY.

Finally got a chance to beat Portal this weekend on Jenn’s roommate’s Xbox ( or I could just say Kevin’s Xbox, but thats not nearly as confusing.)

The following youtube video is for the credits at the end of portal, with an awesome song sung by the antagonist in the game (the computer).

… and with it, took my Xbox 360 and my laptop.

More or less my Xbox has decided to start red ringing and working intermittently - it will soon be shipped back to Microsoft in a coffin if it doesn’t straighten its act out.

Last night I tried to install my shiny new copy of Leopard retail, only to discover that my Macbook dvd drive refuses to read dvd’s 19 out of 20 times.   I really don’t want to bring that to the Apple store, because it will definitely result in my trusty Macbook being shipped to Apple for repair - which could take awhile.

In the mean time I will just have to live vicariously through upgrading other laptops to Leopard.

Quick Rant

I HATE it when people use the urinal in the mens lavatory and feel its okay to leave without washing their hands.  I mean, come on people!  I takes 15 seconds to wash your hands, and another 15 seconds to dry them.  Heck, Thomson is even paying for you to wash your hands - for the sake of everyone else that has to touch the door handle to leave the lavatory Please wash your hands!

So who would have thought, that a bottle of tasty purple vitamin water was created by the rapper 50 cent?

He[50 cent] worked with glacéau to create and market a grape flavored Vitamin Water drink called Formula 50. In 2007, Coca-Cola purchased glaceau for US$4.1 billion. 50 Cent, who owns a stake in the company, was estimated by Forbes to have earned $100 million after taxes.

Honestly, they didn’t create something different here… its grape flavored water!  But oh it tastes good, and because its owned by Coke, is available just about everywhere.  The bottle itself gives no indication of its affiliation (if you don’t think too hard about its name anyway: formula 50).

I noticed yesterday afternoon, that under the bottle’s wrapper (ooh, there could be a clever pun here!) (which is unbelievably impossible to peel off) is a 50 cent promotion:

i’ve got your digits.  and when i speak… people listen.

So with every bottle of grape vitamin water, you get a code to send someone a sweet 50 cent message on their cellphone - sign me up!  Really. Do it.

I am quite tired of all these “stars” that think its cool to change their name to something ridiculous… I mean, 50 cent?  What?  How is that even remotely considered a name?  Retarded - use the name your mom gave you.  From now on, I will call you Curtis James Jackson III, and your stupid (but tasty) drink will be Formula Curtis James Jackson III.

(In all fairness, “50 cent” is his stage name - and his name is still legally Curtis, but do you ever see a star with a stage name referred to by their real name?)

For those about to rock… I salute you

The latest installment of the Guitar Hero series comes out Sunday,  Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.  For the Xbox 360 it will be retailing at a gentle $99.99.

Ninety  nine ninety nine.

What?

Guitar Hero I and II for PS2 were each $75-80, including game and peripheral.  GHII for the 360 was $89.  Why must GHIII for 360 be a hundred bucks?  Outrageous.  But I will still buy it.

The game sports a very impressive track list, and some new multiplayer features that really have me drooling.   I’ll finally have a chance to win a few 1vs1 playoffs against my friends that are too good to be playing the game in the first place.

Hit the link above for the details on this fine game.

Dive Into Greasemonkey, at Thomson West’s Weekly Developer Forum

This afternoon I’ll be giving a quick presentation to a bunch of developers on the Firefox extension Greasemonkey, and some of the scripts I have written for it to aid my work here at Thomson.

Should be fun.

So where are my iPod Touch / iPhone applications?

Short story:  I’ve been busy!  Life is crazy, I no longer am a geek with too much time on my hands.

Long story:  I’ve reinstalled 10.4 (from Leopard dev build) - and have compiled the iPhone toolchain.  For some unfortunate reason my gcc is refusing to compile UIKit applications, but console applications seem to compile just fine.  I hope to get this resolved soon, and in the near future there will be some native iPhone / iPod Touch applications available here on npike.net.

Some of my ideas:

• Google Calendar.app (duh!)
• GMail Notifier
• Jezzball
• Audiofications  (Audio notifications for events the operating system doesn’t handle on its own)