Daily Post - Saturday

It is with sadness that I have to report that a member of the family is gravely ill.

At approximately twenty past seven last night I went to switch on my trusty xbox 360 in order to play the Friday night game of 1 vs 100 when disaster struck. Instead of a cheery startup fanfare I was greeted with the sight of three sickly looking red lights around the power button. Oh bother, I said, or slightly more profane words to that effect.

Still, at least it is still covered by the warranty, so I've downloaded a shipping label from UPS and I am now awaiting a van to ship my pal away to darkest Germany where the Microsoft doctors will do their best to bring it back to life in whatever high-tech version of ER they have over there.

One thing puzzles me though - when I saw the dreaded red ring of death, I went a googling (as you do) to see what could be done. I found all manner of guides to fixing the problem yourself which seemed to involve doing things that would permanently invalidate the warranty or paying 39 dollars before they would tell you the secret of fixing the machine. Now, as far as I can tell, all but the very earliest machines should still be covered by the three year RROD warranty, so why mess about trying to fix it yourself? If all else fails then you could probably buy a new one for not much more than the cost of a bodged up fix on your old one.

What else?

Well, Bea went as expected in Big Brother last night, although I very nearly slept through the whole thing after nodding off half way through the Kevin Bishop show. It will be interesting to see how the dynamic of the game shifts as it heads into the final couple of weeks. The new series of X-Factor is starting tonight, but it really doesn't appeal to me. Mitch Benn had the last word on this genre of talent show with his song Sing Like An Angel, as far as I'm concerned.

Podcast of the day is The Bugle with the long awaited return of the correspondent known only as 'The American' with the absolute last word on the health care debate. I'm still not sure that guns and jet-skis are a good combination though ...