"I have summoned you here for a purpose."

• 24May 08

  Live from San Francisco

  Greetings from the West Coast! We came out here with 10 days to find a place (in advance of our move in late June). Who'd have thought we'd end up with a lovely apartment on Day 1. Happily, this means nine days of exploring the city and the region. We've been every where from Point Reyes and Napa to San Jose. An there are still three days remaining! Tomorrow we venture to the Rock. I've had my feet in the Pacific, we've driven down Lombard Street -- and have only scratched the surface. It'll be a good place to live for a year. It's only too bad I can't change my user name to something like Frisco or SanFranCA.

  • Posted May 24, 2008 9:24 am PT
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• 6May 08

  RRoD... the long wait is finally over

  So, it happened. What MS likes to call the Red Ring of Light; what the rest of the gaming world knows better as the Red Ring of Dealth. I had it. Two months, two consoles crap out. Oddly, I'm far more forgiving of the PSP than I am the 360, simply because I knew that one day my Microsoft console would die. Add to that the terrible customer service experience I had with a woman, bless her, who couldn't understand me and forced me to repeat everything to the point I could barely contain my exasperation.

  I bought my 360 not quite 2 years ago, in September of 2006. According to the console itself, it was manufactured in 2005. This demise was, sadly, inevitable.

  And when did your 360 first red-ring?

  • Posted May 6, 2008 4:11 pm PT
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• 21Apr 08

  PSP Returns to fanfare and rejoicing

  Not even a month ago I posted about the hardware difficulties I was having with my PSP. It's a long story, but I can make it short: Display key janked, Select and Home keys useless, Browser out-of-comission, device returned to Sony for in-warranty repair.

  And now here it is, less than a month later, and I have a new PSP in hand. And when I say new, I do mean scratch-free, new-car-smelling, solidly, brilliantly, brand-spanking, out-of-the-box new. But here's the best part: it was only last Monday that Sony received the device. By Wednesday I'd had an email come with a UPS tracking number, and here today, just four days later, a PSP rests quietly on the desk beside me. Frankly, if I hadn't been so lazy about getting the thing to UPS in the first place, the turn-around for this whole thing would've been less than two weeks. (Note to self: less fainéant, more diligent, greater happiness in life.)

  Now, I hate to sound like a corporate shill, but it has to be said: Sony did do right by me. Really, from start to finish, from the initial, hopeful trip to Gamestop to try to get my hands on a copy of the receipt to the UPS driver and the Sony service center, it's been a pretty positive consumer experience. And those, my friends, are words you don't very often find in blogs and forum posts around the web. Yeah, sure, it's not so positive that the thing broke in the first place, but I have to be candid here: I dropped that poor thing at least three times and dropped it hard. I almost -- just almost -- feel a pang of guilt about having a replacement at all.

  When's the last time you dropped your PSP?

  • Posted Apr 21, 2008 6:08 pm PT
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