Toothpaste. A magical drug?

Posted on October 12, 2007 by tehdiplomat

Well, lemme start with this. My girlfriend has been wanting me to get Guitar Hero for the 360 ever since she played the PS2 one a few months back. “Gasp!” You might say. “TehDiplomat has a girlfriend? How could it be?” Alas, it’s true. She’s been bugging me not terribly, but every once in a while. And since I’m the one with this totally famous website, and pretty awesome job, it’s my responsibility to bring new toys in the house.

So I cheaped out. I got one refurbed from Surplus Computers.  It came about a week later (last Thursday). I opened it up, through the DVD in, plugged in the guitar, and got ready to rock…. on easy. I would consider myself as good as rhythm games as I do at FPSs. Mediocre. Now the moral of the story, was the DVD was scratched, and the only accessible part was practice. That’s unacceptable to me. So another moral, Surplus’ customer service is terrible. They have a bunch of different email addresses you can send emails to. But you have to start up an RMA, first you have to go through customer service AND have your subject line be an exact string. Talk about archaic. How bout just have your tech guys have their own email address. It quickly spirals into a loop of customer service hell to prevent you from getting a refund/rma.

Finally, yesterday I emailed them again saying I haven’t gotten anywhere with my request and haven’t been able to play the game I ordered and was very frustrated. This manages to get through and I get a different link on how exactly I need to send a fax to get an RMA number. I really don’t want to send this whole package back to possibly get it messed up again, or get store credit.

So for a long story. I decided to see if I could clean off the scratch. It didn’t seem terrible, but it was enough to deflect the laser. I heard about the toothpaste trick, and watched a few videos online of people doing it. A few attempts of it, the last a direct buffering by q-tip and the game magically works. The ladyfriend has been playing for the last hour. I think she’s halfway through easy already. I have a lot of catching up to do.

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Robert Jordan

Posted on September 17, 2007 by tehdiplomat

So I’m sure those of you traveling the internet that happen to see my Blog already know. But Robert Jordan died yesterday. For me, it was very bittersome hearing about this. Robert Jordan really vaulted my reading from simple fantasy to epic fantasy and spawned into new authors like George RR Martin.

His books were ever lengthy and the amount of characters and different POVs was simply frightening. He had been suffering from his illness, amyloidosis, for years, but as many have been saying, his confidence that he would finish the last book even if it would be 2000 pages, left the news very shocking.

There had been times I had cursed Jordan, never for the length of the novels, but for the unmoving plotlines. While I’m the type of person to stick by my words, even when they are wrong. You feel the amount of pressure he must have been under and most of the stress and fatigue he would have encountered in the last few years.

But alas, hopefully some of his family members can release a final version after their grieving period for the rabid fans.

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Partial Success?

Posted on September 3, 2007 by tehdiplomat

This is why people say when doing New Years Resolutions that you should only say you’ll do something you can start in that month, and actually afford time to. Well, as you can see the progress was limited to the blog, basic layout on the site, and finishing the Object Oriented “new” Gskirm. Now I don’t want to say that’s a failure, because I was never a person that got pumped by telling myself I sucked. So we’ll call that a partial success.

The Rules right-up is in the works. But for some reason it felt like this August was much busier than my average month. It seemed every weekend I had some busy times (including some DS playing and spending a large amount of time on Two Worlds this past week). And I always like to be able to get as much entertainment in the different forms that I consume. So.. yea the summer is pretty much over.. We’ll see the colors start to change in the next month which is always nice. I hope I can find one of these days, that I just decide to knock out the rules writeup. Once that’s done, I think I’ll at least be able to write up the early parts of the tutorial. Not sure exactly how I plan on creating the tutorial, but I have a few ideas.

I’ve had some ideas lately for a new icon for ASoOJ. Of course I’m not much of an artist; at least when it comes to drawing. Well no matter. No more promises from me now that football season is starting. But I’ll see what I can do. Maybe I’ll be forced to watch a crappy Jets game, and have some time to code.

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