Red Ring of Death

The first pain is the infamous Red Ring of Death. My youngest son was in tears when I told him that his xbox 360 had failed.

“Can’t you just fix it Dad?”

I googled the Red Ring of Death and showed him several of the results. He insisted on following all of the troubleshooting steps from this site before he would accept that his machine was simply not going to work.

I have no idea whether Microsoft will repair the box. We’ll call support and find out. Although it could be viewed as a positive development, fewer hours in front of a video screen, I know he really does enjoy gaming on the xbox.

Uncategorized

Almost all of the posts on this blog are now uncategorized.

I have been working on a new design for the blog. It will be quite a departure from the last few styles. And I have built this one from the ground up. Everything from the design to the code. I took inspiration from Smashing Magazine. That site has some great resources for web developers and designers.

The design looks great and should be up and running in a few more weeks.

I have been coding the site on my local machine running the latest revision of WordPress. And, to get my site ready for the new design, I decided to upgrade the blog to the latest version of WordPress as well.

A new feature in this release is tagging. As part of the update, I was able to convert all of my categories to tags.

Big mistake. I lost all of the categories assigned to posts except for the category called general. I have 1,252 posts that no longer have categories. And many of the categories are quite popular with readers. For example, I have a set of posts with pictures of high-end recording studios. They were easily accessible via the category of Recording Studios.

Gone for the time being. Over the next month or so, I will repopulate the category fields. Likely as I am watching the CBC news. I have to do this manually, one post at a time.

Cellphone Contracts

There is no more difficult task in the modern age than canceling a cellphone contract. I had three cellphones under contract with Telus and one of them expired the end of January.

We only need two cellphones. The task seemed simple enough: do not renew the expired phone. The only twist is that we needed to switch the number from the canceled handset to another.

How many hours did this take? 5? 10? 15? I’ve lost count of the number of telephone calls to make this simple change happen. However, the icing on the cake was when I finally got Telus to cancel the contract. There. Finally. Everything all set.

My wife called a couple of days later to confirm and Telus had no record that I canceled. I had to call them. Again.

So I did.

“I understand that I need to call and confirm the contract that I had canceled previously should be canceled.”

“Yes, Mr. Cleaver. That is correct. Can I ask why you are not renewing the contract?”

Lots of blah, blah as we replayed the dozens of hours of prior discussions, switching of agents, etc.

“Mr. Cleaver, everything is all set. Your contract will be canceled next month.”

“Next month?”

“Yes. We require 30 days notice.”

We started the process six weeks back.

Sigh.