Is that not the most epic title of all time. I can’t take credit though, I stole it from Something Awful. Still, epic. Which is my word of the day. Mostly because my vocabulary, while extensive, trends towards the obnoxious. “Epic” fits that category.

Trendy words are not why I’m posting. I felt that a general life update was in order.

First off, Mircosoft assures me that my console is in the repair process and I’ll have it by next week. I’m not holding my breath. I just realized that I didn’t explain the issue with the box when I last mentioned this. You see, last week they issued me a repair/RMA ticket and said they were sending a special box to pack my system in to send to them. Inside said box, according to their own instructions, was to be a pre-printed UPS shipping label. I got the box, I opened the box, I found no such label. Maybe I misheard them. Nope, according to the instruction sheet IN THE BOX, there should have been a label. I called them up, thinking surely they could just send me a PDF of the label, or a link to print the label from. Nope. Not only is the LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANY ON THE PLANET not capable of sending me a fucking label, they can’t figure out how to let me print the label myself. No, they have to send me a whole new BOX! I wait another 3-5 business days. receive me second box and luckily this one has all it’s pieces. I pack up my xbox, send it to Mexico, well, close enough. Apparently the only Xbox repair center in the US is located dead center on the Texas / Mexico boarder. I’ve been down to the area and lets just say that restaurant menus aren’t exactly in English. Anyway, that was a week ago. Calling them yesterday to see if the system was going to be repaired or replaced, just out of curiosity, they inform me it’s been marked for repair and should be on it’s way to me soon. This should also be a good time to point out that the original rep I talked to indicated it would be a good 3-5 weeks, and most likely after Thanksgiving, before I got my system back. Either they’re over estimating and over achieving to look good for the consumer, or someone is lying to me.

This time without my system might turn out to be a good thing. I’ve actually had a chance to let these games come out, be played and reviewed, and add all these factors into my purchase decisions. I might end up waiting on Guitar Hero and Assasins Creed until post-holidays, and picking up CoD4 and Mass Effect, which I think will give me more actual playing time.

Enough games. I always talk about games.

Life itself is going well. Work is keeping me busy, which is always a good thing. My case is coming along nicely. I have to repair the lower front panel because I’m retarded and took off the painters tape with paint covered fingers, leaving big finger prints on the freshly painted stripes.

My folks were thinking about coming down for the holidays but it looks like that won’t be happening, which is sad because I was really looking forward to seeing them. My brother will be starting school back up in January. He had taken a long double semester internship at Standards & Poor’s (aka, what you hear on the news all the time as the S&P 500), the investment firm. Apparently he’s doing quite well there, enough so to buy a 360 in a whim. He called me at about 2am one night to tell me how right I was and how much it kicked ass.

Other than that, not a lot going on. I’m being constantly reminded about how much Comcast sucks all, especially now that they took over Houston from RoadRunner. RoadRunner, despite being morons, actually worked quite well. I never had any problems with them service/speed wise. The instant Comcast took over, I had 3 modem outages that week. No joke. My speed has also been cut in half, and I’m not talking about my bittorrent traffic either, I mean surfing and checking email. They advertise something like 4mbps down/512 kbps up. I think I’m getting 1/4 of that. It’s basically DSL now. Hell, I might as well switch to DSL. For the same shitty connection I could be spending $20 a month instead of $60. Actually, now that they “apartment monopoly” law was passed, I’m not forced to use Comcast anymore. I could technically get OpLink, which for $44 a month, I could be getting 6 Mbps up / 768 Kbps down. Either that or that AT&T UVerse thing looks kinda interesting.

Oh, and one last thing. The new Streetlight Manifesto CD is the most brilliant piece of music I’ve heard in a very very long time. It’s ridiculously good. I’ve got a bud here who isn’t a big ska fan, who thinks it’s unbelievable. Even Lauren doesn’t mind it, lol. Jason, back me up on this one bud.

Matt out.