New (and last) Addition
Cassie finally arrived!
Amazon vs. iTunes
If you’re a user of iTunes, I’d recommend checking out Amazon’s MP3 shop as an alternative. I had looked at it when it first launched, but they didn’t have many tunes so I kind of blew it off as another loser.
Then I visited it again yesterday, and they’ve improved their library greatly! The biggest advantage to Amazon is that you’re buying DRM-free music, in the mp3 format. This means you control and own the music forever, and it’s as portable as you want. My biggest complaint with iTunes is that you don’t get a real mp3 (it’s an iTunes-specific file with DRM protection). About every 6 months my iTunes client decides that my iPod is new and asks me if I want to copy my purchased music from iPod to iTunes; you can only do that 5 times. After your 5 “copies” are used up, you can’t play the file anymore and have to buy it again, if you want to listen to that song in the future. To add a little icing, most tracks on Amazone are 89 cents instead of the standard 99 cents on iTunes.
The biggest drawback to Amazon is that they’re website is no match for the iTunes client, so you’re not going to get recommendations based on your current music which is a nice feature. And you can’t play sample tracks and browse at the same time. They do have a “downloader” utility, which you install locally and it downloads your purchases and automagically inserts them into iTunes.
If you haven’t tried the Amazon MP3 store, you really should!
Red Ring of Death…
I bought GTA4 today, got home and popped it into the Xbox and absolutely nothing happened! Then I see 3 flashing red lights, so I look it up online and turns out this is a notorious issue with the XBox 360 console. The so-called “Red Ring of Death.”
It’s been a few months since I played any games, so it’s frustrating that it seems to have died randomly. However, logging into the MS site and pulling up my warranty information was a breeze. This is the first time I’ve tried, but I just popped in the serial # and away it went. It turns out I’m out of warranty, except for this specific issue. seems they extended the warranty for everyone with this issue. That’s good, ’cause I’m not spending another $300 on a new console!
So I entered a repair request, they auto-generated a ticket and will mail me a box with a pre-printed shipping label. Then I get to take it to a UPS store and off it goes, should be back in a week. I’m cautiously optimistic…
Update: box came, I shipped it and got it back within a few days and it works like brand-new! So while it was very annoying that it broke, it’s incredible that it was so easy and relatively painless (and free) to get it repaired. I’m really impressed with Microsoft! This just reinforces my belief that a product/service defect presents an excellent opportunity for a company to build customer loyalty. It doesn’t always work of course, but if a company can take a problem and do a stellar job of resolving it, I firmly believe that they can actually come out ahead with that customer. But you only get one or maybe two of those chances; if you build a shitty product no amount of resolution is going to save you!
Networks
