Living With a Nerd

I got my first Xbox 360 in the early winter of 2006.  About 2 months after I got it, our house in Germantown was broken into.  They took my laptop, my room mate’s laptop, and some random other stuff.  Oh, and they also took my 360, all of my 360 games, and 15 games from my xbox collection.  Luckily, they left the PS2 with the 160 GB hard drive.

We obviously informed the police of everything that had been taken, and I provided the police with the serial number on the back of my 360.  They took fingerprints, but there really wasn’t much they could do.  I had just gotten the 360, and still really wanted to play it, so I went out and bought another one.

3 Months later, we got a call from the police saying that they recently arrested a guy, and among his stolen stuff they found my 360, matched by the serial number I provided.  So, I managed to get back my original 360 (amongst most of our other stuff as well.)  I ended up selling the second 360 I had bought to my buddy Mike, and was able to play on my first 360 once again.

Today, two and a half years later, I got the red rings.  For the third time.  The first time (about a year and a half ago), I put some arctic silver 5 on the heatsinks, and that worked well enough for a while.  The second time (about a year or so ago), I got one of those bolt and washer kits off eBay that replaces the x-clips; this fix worked perfectly.  For a while.

This afternoon, I got the red rings.  I took it apart, lapped the heatsinks, replaced the arctic silver 5, and cleaned the whole thing up real nice.  It worked…for about 20 minutes.  The game froze, and after restarting the console, the three red rings were mocking me with their winking.

It’s for the best, I suppose.  I modded my 360 a couple months after getting it back, and for the past year I’ve been having DVD drive issues.  (I’ve also had game freezing and crashing issues for about 6 months, so I knew the rings were on their way.)  As a result of doing this, they banned my 360 from Xbox Live.  Now though, I can pick up a Jasper Arcade unit and just use my old hard drive…not only will I get a cooler, quieter, and more energy efficient 360, but I’ll be able to get on Live again (finally.)

I plan on doing this the next time I get paid…I just bought Sacred 2 and I haven’t even had a chance to play it yet.  Oh well, at least now I’ll be able to play it on Live

So, the new music project is coming along well.  I have completed two full tracks, am almost done with the third, and have the beginnings of the fourth completed.  The album, titled The Transient Unknown, is a spacey and trippy ambient album that will hopefully have nine tracks once completed.  I’m producing the entire album using nothing but an Axiom 25 MIDI controller, ReBirth 2.0.1, and Reason 4.0.1.  The Thor synth that is built into Reason 4 is PERFECT for doing ambient stuff, as long sweeping sounds are amazingly easy to program.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do once I finish off The Transient Unknown…I would love to do another ambient album, but I find ambient to be surprisingly difficult to create; trying to write a four minute song that has zero beat and is very cerebral that sounds different from the other 8 songs on the album that have zero beat and are very cerebral, while staying within the albums theme…well, you get the point.

In other news, I FINALLY found a way to convert videos in a way that maintains their quality, yet will play on my Creative Zen…and without using the crap software that came with the player.  I have ordered an 8 gig SD card, and intend to fill it to the brim with Internet/TV shows, movies, and stand up video.  Video looks pretty sweet on the Zen, despite the minuscule 320 x 240 resolution.

June is going to be a super busy month for me…I have about 8 articles waiting to be uploaded to the website, which I’m going to do slowly (so regular updates for the next couple of months, at least).  The music project is taking up a lot of my time right now, so that is where my focus is…but I intend to continue working on the site.

A long term goal is to work towards putting together a Living With a Nerd podcast, which will likely just be a mish mash of everything…from gaming, to movies, to music, to just general banter.  Equipment is more of a factor rather than time at this point, but a couple of decent USB microphones, a round table for everyone to sit at, and a couple of decent topics are all that I realistically need.  This is more of a “cool idea in the future” rather than a “dude let’s do this tomorrow” kind of thing.

Eh…update, stagnate, update, stagnate.  It seems to be a horrible pattern with me.  I know I’ve said it before, but I really am gonna try to keep up with this blog.  I really should…it’s a place for my thoughts and happenings (of which I have plenty) and I haven’t done anything with it in a while.

Recent news:  seriously getting back into music production.  I’ve done some stuff here and though, primarily for personal use, but I want to get back into it more than ever before.  With recent hardware (Axiom 25) and software (Reason 4) upgrades, this should be easier than ever.  I’ll post some stuff on here once I have some Internet-worthy tracks laid down.  Until then…