Lord d'Eath's Stuff

Here we go again.  It appears that Ebuyer have taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book, with regard to sucking.

Last Saturday I spent far too much money buying new computer components and stuff and, in order to make sure that they were delivered on a day that I wouldn't be at uni, I selected "Priority" shipping - Wednesday 22nd November.  For reasons known only to themselves, Ebuyer split my order and decided to dispatch it from two different warehouses.  That, in itself, is no problem - it should still all arrive on the same day, just in even more boxes than if it was sent from one location.  The problem is that warehouse #2 appears to be totally and utterly incompetant.  I would go so far as to say braindead.

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So, last Saturday my Xbox 360 finally died.  Ever since I first bought it almost a year ago it's done the infamous 3-red-lights trick when first being booted after a long period (a few hours) of being turned off, but it would boot fine on the second or third attempt.  Not so, this time.  It booted maybe 10% of the time, and even when it did manage to get to the Dashboard occasionally it would crash after a few minutes of trying to play a game.

Luckily Microsoft's Xbox 360 customer support line is open on Saturdays, so we phoned them, told them (an Indian woman - now isn't that surprising?) what was happening, she went through the usual troubleshooting routine containing all the exciting things that I had already tried, then fairly quickly (by customer support standards) said that they'd take it in to be fixed.  Hooray!  I then proceeded to spend the next forty-five minutes trying to give her my address details.

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I suppose I should follow up to my rant against Microsoft and Sony to say that Microsoft have realised their stupidity and changed the EULA for Vista to be what you'd expect, really.

Sony still suck, however.

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Okay this is basically copying Daniel Rutter's blog post on the subject but I consider both to be worthy of me posting about as well.

Firstly we have Microsoft decided that after paying a small fortune (£190 for Vista Home Premium - the non-useless Home version - and £325 for Vista Ultimate - the version with Remote Desktop server enabled) for Vista in the first place, you'll only be able to upgrade your computer once, and on your second upgrade you have to buy another copy of Vista.

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I have recently been receiving a lot of spam comments on this site; in the region of 20-40 per day. I don't know what they were advertising and I don't much care - all I know is that I don't want them.

As such I have implemented a handful of anti-spam measures, some partially stolen from Matthew, some ideas were my own. I even surprised myself by making it possible to post comments without having JavaScript enabled in your browser while still hopefully making the behind-the-scenes procedure complicated enough to baffle spam bots. You can't reply to a specific comment without JS enabled, but you can create a new comment thread easily enough.

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