Well, my 360 got back form XBox support last week. FINALLY! I was pretty happy. While they had it, they replaced the fan and disc drive. The fan used to wake the dead, so that was definitely a welcome addition. I'm not sure why they replaced my drive though. Every once in 20 times, it didn't open right away, maybe that's it.

Well, I went out and bought GTA4 and Dark Sector to brush up on some games, but after about 3 days the drive stopped reading. it's really loud and won't read games or dvd's. So, I called Micro support again. They're sending me another box. Maybe some day this year i'll be able to play my xbox again.

I was once a proud owner of a fully functional Xbox 360. i loved it. I hated it. Mostly I condemned it for being irritating on minor issues, but it kept giving me it's love with great moments watching tv downloads and playing some good Live Arcade games. Overall, I'd say the box gave out more love than i put back into it. And maybe that's why....maybe that's why it had to end like this. This once proud 360 owner has now been bent over Microsoft's knee and "humbled". Only now do i appreciate using custom soundtracks, mostly decent arcade games, a convient download service for videos and demos and content, and 120GB of space to do as i please. Humility thy name is "red ring of death"....and i hate you.

Why wasn't i warned? It's pretty bad.

And I can only get $20 trade in credit. I can understand that. It's a piece of crap game with low resale.

day3 with rock band. about 10 hours of play time.

my 3 cousins and i played it. i switched off singing with one of my cousins, and the two others played bass and guitar. the guy playing on guitar used the explorer (with cord) while the bassist used the les paul (cordless). the les paul had about .5 sec delay. we tried every calibration preset. i finally got my internet back up today and downloaded the patch. now the lag is much more bearable, but it's still noticeable. sometimes the game won't even register some notes. especially if i went from a 2 note cord to a single note. it happens to all of us, really weird.

i hate the multiplayer world tour. you have to keep playing the same songs over and over and over and over again. my voice was to starting to fail by the time i had only played about 8 different songs - but that was in about 4 hours play time. ya it's that repetitive.

i played some single player for a few hours today. the tour is a lot better. it's the normal guitar hero style. the slight lag is irritating, but at least it isn't game breaking for me anymore. the guitar is much easier than guitar hero, so don't expect to be thoroughly challenged with it. that was a little disappointing, but i suspected they might tone it down to make it more accessible as a party game, so it wasn't necessarily a surprise.

i only like a few songs, but that's ok. i bought it to have fun with friends. i knew a lot of the songs sucked before i bought it. i just hope better songs come out soon and maybe a patch that fixes the game so we can have some fun. if they can roll out some better updates, my friends may decide to play again. as of now, the band is dead. they all said it sucks.

good things! the character customization is cool and i like the way they handle energy better (star power). if you are using energy, you can still pick it up while playing and it adds it to your pool. that's pretty much all my good notes for now.

Sorry I haven't kept in touch with everyone. Here's an update on anything worth noting in the past year:

My brother had a baby! ya i'm pretty happy. I'm finally an uncle. After about a week, he wasn't even ugly; kinda cute actually. I got to drive up to colorado to visit them for a week. He's really sweet. His name is Jordan.

Well, I went back to china this summer. This time i wasn't so much motivated by the teaching aspect though (but I still enjoyed that!). This trip I was more focused on seeing my girlfriend for the first time in a year. So, great news for me! I proposed to her the night before I left. I'll presume, your patting me on the back right now. thanks! She's planning a trip to come see me during her winter break in january. Then I'll visit next summer to meet her parents and hang out with her. ya ya. I hear your questions. Yes she's is chinese. yes she's extremely cute. hehe