Going for Gold

This past weekend, I participated in one of the defining moments of my life. I won a gold medal at the 2011 Bar Olympics in the Flip Cup event! Our team, Drinks on the House, simply dominated the event. So now that I am like Tara Lipinski famous I get to enjoy all the perks that come with winning such a prestigious award. No more paying for valet parking, no more convictions in murder cases and no more having to buy my own drinks at bars. Hell, I might even open up my own bar and call it the Gold Club or something where the waitresses will be miniature giraffes who have also won gold medals at some sort of animal Olympics. Also, only fellow Gold Medalists would be allowed in, so suck it Nancy Kerrigan. (Why do I have this much knowledge of early 1990’s era ice skaters?)

There were no silver medalists at these particular Olympics. You either won big or went home. Our team did have a pretty decent advantage over the competition which tended to be a bit older and less experienced in the area of college drinking games. Nevertheless, I will hang my medal proudly on my wall and recount my tale of glory to all who will listen! It was a single-elimination bracket style event with 9 teams. Our team defeated 3 other teams on our way to victory with no opponent progressing past their second player. We literally smoked all of them and they were all left crying in shame.

It wasn’t all fun and games however. Out team participated in several other events and brought much shame to ourselves and our families in nearly all of them. We lost miserably in the darts event due to the repeated failure to close out in a game of 301. The Golden Tee event was just an abysmal failure. Basketball? FAIL. Blackjack started off well and then turned into what Blackjack always inevitably turns into: FAIL. IN 9-Ball, we actually advanced to the second round and then lost in spectacular fashion. At any rate, I don’t care because all I wanted to do was win a medal! Did I mention that it was a Gold Medal? I did? Tyte.

So I guess next year we will have to defend our title. It should be an easy task as we won the thing while having an inebriation level of moderate to high. So as long as Jimmy Carter doesn't cancel next year's games, I figure we are a shoe-in for a repeat.

Achievement unlocked

Thats right, I have achieved what Microsoft Support wanted to charge me 100 dollars for: Fixing my broken Xbox 360. This is more or less a follow-up to my salute to power tools post. For those of you interested, here is the story of what went down.

It all started about 3 weeks ago. I was playing the Point Lookout DLC pack for Fallout 3 when the hue on my screen changed to a bright green color. Immediately chalking it up to a glitch in the game, I powered down the 360 and turned it back on. Everything appeared kosher at first until the same green hue enveloped my entire Xbox dashboard. It was at this time that I began to realize that there might be something wrong internally. I turned it off for the night thinking it just had to cool down for a while or something.

The next morning before work I turned it on just to see if the problem was still there. Sure enough, it was. The strange part of the whole thing was that the Xbox was not Red Ringing. Everything appeared to be working normally save for the green hue on the screen. After fiddling with it later that night, the video output from the Xbox cut out completely. Still no Red Ring, however. I could tell that the Xbox was still working because I could still hear the audio in the background.

I started to look up on the internets if anyone else was experiencing a similar problem and discovered that very few people were. In fact, I was only able to find maybe 6 or 7 posts on random forums with folks who had the same problem that I did. Apparently Red Ringing is very popular, green hue/loss of video output not so much. It was at this time that I began looking in to sending it off to Microsoft for repair. After all, from what I have heard, they have to fix nearly 1 out of every 3 Xboxs that were manufactured.

After talking with a service rep, I was told that since my Xbox was not Red Ringing, it was not covered under the warranty that had been extended to those who had the Red Ring problem. Therefore, since my Xbox was out of warranty, I would have to cough up 100 bucks plus shipping to get it fixed not to mention take up to 6 weeks to get back to me. Ya thanks, but no thanks. Surely the internets had a better solution...

I scoured the intertubes for a couple days to determine what the best solution to my problem was. Eventually, I found a kit on ebay that looked pretty legit for only 6 dollars. The kit consisted of 8 screws, 16 nylon washers and 16 metal washers. The idea behind it is that these screws would replace the crappy x-clams that were holding the heat-sinks down on the motherboard. The instructions also called for "baking" which involved turning the Xbox on for about 2 and a half minutes without the fans on until it overheated. Supposedly this re-melts the solder under the chip and forces it back into position permanently.

So after doing all of this yesterday I was pretty hesitant to get my hopes up. In all honesty I fully intended on going to Super Target later in the day and purchasing a new Xbox if my plan failed to work. You could not have imagined my surprise when I flipped on that switch and saw the Xbox logo on the TV. Sheer jubilation ensued, I once again had a working Xbox. This goes to show you what a few power tools and kits on the internet can get you. I cannot possibly imagine how people got stuff done before the internet was invented.


Anyway, after dealing with the screws that led me to use the power tools I described in an earlier post, I decided to not put a single screw back in the stupid thing. My Xbox is now held together only by the outer plastic shell. Hopefully the fix I made was permanent and I never have to open it up again. If it does end up breaking again I will just probably go buy a new one. Either way, it was pretty fun to fix it myself. Now if only there were achievement points to be had for doing this....