Rough Saturday

This Saturday was rough, with multiple things sort of falling apart, at noon all of these items had gone poorly with no resolution, fortunately resolution has been found on all items since then..

Item 1: Friday night I went to check the forums and I noted they were down. I reviewed the website and noted that the database was corrupted. Instead of the several hundred tables and fields, it had a single table with a single field with gobbledygook in it. I talked with the hosting tech support and it was use of html. Someone either accidently or maliciously put code in that corrupted the forum. The wife and I debated if we will pay the exorbitant fee to have them give us a backup, and then we decided the cost was too much and I put up a new forum (which I am now trying to get in the mode to back it up regularly manually).

Item 2: Our hot water in the shower has been leaking worse and worse. By Saturday morning it was a steady stream, from which our cat Orpheus complained loudly and vigorously with meows and whines. This is because we normally leave a small trickle of cold water for him to drink, and for the last three days he had to settle for water in a bowl. Finally Saturday afternoon the landlord's son came over and fixed it.

Item 3: Our Xbox 360 got the red ring of death. Sadly the machine died. We were able to resolve this partially. We were fortunate, when we purchased our Xbox 2 years ago we got an extended warranty. We checked our paperwork and found that the store had not written any of the detailed info needed on the warranty. We then took it to the local Game Crazy (we had bought it in Seattle but that store was now closed) and they couldn't even find the machine in the system. Fortunately the staff determined that we had a 2 year warranty and that it didn't expire until 4/26 (it was 4/24). So we were covered.

There was much rejoicing.... until we realized that Microsoft no longer makes the version of Xbox we had purchased. Gone were the 20 GB machines. We were given a choice, downgrade to an Xbox Arcade version, get a used version (which would be covered fully) or upgrade to a 360 elite. ethicalcannibal and I talked, we didn't want a used machine, even with another year warranty. This led us to two options. We wanted memory so we didn't even consider the Arcade version. This meant we had to upgrade to the Elite for $70 (or original machine was $229, this was $279). On top of that we purchased the extended year warranty. True, normally extended warranties don't seem to be worth much, but in this case our 360 was still within the original extended warranty and saved us $229. Total cost to upgrade with a 2 year warranty? About $150.00 on the card. We considered not doing the card, but with no cash, the xbox is really the only non-rpg social thing we do at the moment. Although I do have to say, I may be annoyed at $150, its better than $380 I would have had to pay to buy one new (with an extended warranty).

So, by Saturday night all of these were fixed, unfortunately it had delayed my working on DL plot stuff, but I will see if I can do it today.