Not So Famous…

We found out on Tuesday of this week that we’re going to be having a little boy in mid-December.  I’m excited and apprehensive.

I could go into all kinds of emotional detail about whether I feel I’m ready to or possess the capability to be a good father, etc.  I’ve gone through it all, and all it does is bewilder Kim.  lol

I just don’t see me as a dad, to be honest. It’s weird to think I’ll be holding a baby.  I don’t know if Kim knows this, but I don’t remember if I’ve ever held a baby.  It helps that I scare most children I’m near…they don’t much want to be around *me*, so I usually get out of being forced to hold them.  In hindsight, this was perhaps not such a good thing.  lol.

We’re playing some Hackmaster tonight, which should be some fun.

I can’t think of anything going on this weekend, so I guess it’s going to be nice and calm.

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about this, but my XBOX 360 has been giving me some problems.  When I consider my problems against the vast majority of 360 problems, I suppose it’s not too bad, but it’s still annoying.

I got the 360, Rock Band, and GTA IV a couple months ago, and within a month or so, the 360’s video and audio was blanking out sporadically when I played GTA IV.  GTA is a MUCH more graphically intense game than Rock Band, so I figure it’s overloading some bad circuitry in my XBOX.  I set up a repair online and sent my XBOX in to have it repaired.  Well, they didn’t repaired it…they replaced the whole darn thing. I thought my problems were gone.

They were not.

After a couple hours of playing, the same thing happened, and it actually seemed to be worse!  So now I was faced with a problem possessing a couple different variables.

1. It could be the 360 Console, itself. – I didn’t think this was very likely, since no one else was reporting the same issue as I was, and I’d been doing a lot of searches online for people reporting the same issue.  It seemed very unlikely that I would get a new console with the same problem.
2. It could be the GTA IV Game Disc. – I didn’t think this was very likely, either, since when dsics fail, they usually can’t be read, or they freeze up, etc.  This seemed more like a hardware error.  Something was causing the output of the XBox to fail, and I didn’t think it was software.
3. It could be my TV – I don’t THINK this is likely, since my TV doesn’t really do any processing of the video signal.  In terms of the TV’s perspective, it’s all the same, whether it’s a graphically intensive game being displayed at 720p, or a pretty graphically simple game being displayed at 720p.
4. It could be the Component Cable that came with my original 360.  I didn’t like this option, since it’s rare for cables to fail.  The more I thought about it, though, the more likely it seemed for the following reasons:

• Aside from the disc, it’s the only part of my 360 that is left from the original setup.
• It gets quite warm by virtue of it being plugged into the rear of the 360.
• It’s got a switch on it to switch between Standard TV and HDTV, as well as a digital audio output.  i.e. it’s more than just a cable.  There’s some circuitry and logic built into this cable, and more complexity generally means that it’s more likely to fail.

So, given that I now believe the cable to be the most likely culprit, I’ve borrowed a cable from a friend.  The bummer thing is that this is a different type of cable.  It’s a VGA cable, which means it hooks up to a different input on the TV.  So this doesn’t eliminate my TV as the suspect entirely, even though I didn’t think it was very likely that it was my TV in the first place. The VGA cable seems to work with no problems, however, so I’m thinking I’m going to try and get a new cable from MS.  If that takes care of it, I’ll be happy, as this problem is rather maddening.