Becky and I are vacationing with her family up in Cape Cod.  We've been up here since Friday evening, but I haven't blogged about it because the trip got off to a horrible start.  I may tell the whole story some other time, but right now, I just wanted to get everyone up to speed.  It's been raining since we got here, but that's fine with me.  We're just hangin out.

Here's a local.live.com collection of places of interest from the vacation.  I'll keep updating it as things happen.  Be sure to check out the bird's eye view images of the house and such.

I'm fairly frustrated.  I got a replacement console back from the XBox repair center last week after mine died.  It seemed to be a fairly quick, relatively painless, and reasonable procedure.  However, when Becky popped in a DVD and got a region code error, I was pretty upset. They had sent a console with the wrong region code setting.  Now, setting arguments against region coding aside, this is riduculous.  Now, I have to go through the procedure of sending the box back AGAIN, and there's no guarantee I won't have some other thing wrong with it. 

I might be less upset about this if I had been given some compensation for this stupid mistake like some complimentary Microsoft points for the marketplace (especially since I have to buy my arcade games again so my wife can play them on her account) or even a sincere apology would have been nice.  Instead, the "technician" simply read a pre-written apology to me without the slightest bit of feeling.

Becky sent me an IM earlier today to let me know that my XBox360 just arrived.  I had to send it in for repairs after it died a week or so ago.  The repair process was pretty simple.  They sent me an empty box.  I took off all the accessories and put the console in the box and dropped it off at the UPS store.  And now it's back! I'm hoping that there aren't any more problems.  I can't wait to download the new system update and try out 1080i DVD playback with my new VGA cable!

If it does everything it says it does, the update fixes every single complaint I had about the dashboard and system software. yippee.

[UPDATE] The VGA settings do not have a 1080i/p compatible setting, so no 1080i DVD playback for me.  Looks like the VGA cable is useless for me.  Back to Best Buy it goes! Here's hoping for DVI support.

I had a conference call with some people in one of our facilities in China.  My manager is currently over there and I was going to run a presentation and demo from over here.  I VPN'ed in from home and waited for the call to begin.  Evidently, the conference room they were in had a broken telephone, so they were unable to call in.  After a while of trying to fix it, my manager said he didn't think they were going to get it working and did I have any ideas.  We were already communicating via Google Talk, so I just hit the "call" button.  A couple of rings later, we had a perfectly clear and relatively delay-free voice communication channel.

I was running the demo via netmeeting, but the netmeeting voice chat is horrible quality and there is a sizeable delay.  I was able to give the whole presentation and demo via Google Talk.  Well, until someone kicked the network cable on the other end and disconnected the whole thing.