• 8 weeks
• 20 phone calls
• 4 promises of callbacks that never happened
• 2 faxes
• 7 hours on the phone
• They hung up on me twice
• I hung up on them twice (kindly)

All for about $33 worth of stuff that Jessie can’t use under her account anymore because Microsoft makes crappy hardware.

For those interested in keeping score at home, I moved my personal notes from Backpack to a page here.

Well, it has been about 6 weeks now and I have spent over 8 hours talking on the phone with Microsoft Support. It is my understanding now that the investigation of my case has completed and the license should be updated in the next two week. Awesome.

If you are interested in the issue, there are a bunch of other people with this problem and 95 (and this point) pages of discussion over on the Xbox.com forums.

Big Money no Rings

Prior to getting the red rings of death you often have a randomly freezing system. This game is played by crossing your fingers every time you turn your system on and hope that it does not freeze and you don’t get red rings. It is a pretty short game. For us it was about 2 days.

Best Buy Inventory Searcher

We had a replacement plan from Best Buy. The game was to find a premium system with HDMI at any Best Buy in Austin. The systems that were not premiums with HDMI were manufactured over a year ago and would be prone to the RROD again. This game is made more difficult by some quality Best Buy employees. “Xbox Premium with HDMI? Oh, you mean the Elite. We have those.” This game took us about 2 weeks and numerous phone calls.

DRM Fighter

The most difficult game I have had to play has to do with Microsoft’s Xbox Live content DRM system. Content is locked to the system you purchase it on (that system is in a big pile at Best Buy) and to the account that purchased it (my account, not Jessie’s). So Jessie is not able to use the content I purchased and we can’t use it when our internet connection or Xbox Live is down. There are multiple mini-games for this game.

Call System Master

Mastering the automated system to shorten the time to get you to talk to someone. “Xbox Live, Xbox 360, Give me the list, None of these”

Lost in Translation

Seems to be in India call center reading a script. See if you can actually talk to someone you can understand.

Pants on Fire

See how many times Microsoft will tell you that someone will call you back or some other story to get you off the phone. And then when they call you back they know nothing about it.

So far I’ve been playing this game for 4.5 hours over the period of 2 weeks. I have talked to 13 different people and only one or two of them have had any clue. I’m gonna keep plugging away until I get access to what I paid for.

Here is the list I got from Time Warner today. The list was a lot longer than I expected. Hopefully Google will pick this up and it will help others in the same situation.

Jessie and I just got back from a 7 day cruise and we very much enjoyed the trip. It’s the first trip in a long time where we were not ready to come home at the end. We were trying to figure out the best way to stow away for the next week.

We took a bunch of pictures and I put the best ones up for general viewing here. I’m pretty happy with how a lot of them came out and I’ve even used a few to make new headers for this site (one showing right now, others may rotate in).

We used the Canon AW-DC30 All Weather Case for the SD400, SD200 & SD300 Digital Cameras for our

Canon Powershot SD300 4MP Digital Elph Camera with 3x Optical Zoom to take a bunch of pictures while snorkeling and swimming with stingrays. It was a lot of fun.

For those interested in redirecting using the Typo redirects table should check out this diff to make sure the redirects are working correctly. I went a little further and added a default page rather than the standard “Page not found” text. Here’s what I added to Jessie’s redirect controller.

from = params[:from].join(”/”) if params[:from].kind_of?(Array)
r = Redirect.find_by_from_path(from)
r = Redirect.find_by_from_path(”*”) if !r

And then I added one of her standard pages for the * (default) redirect.

If you are interested in trying it out, be sure and grab the new version of SharpDevelop. It’s got built-in support for Boo projects (including Windows Forms editing).

I’ve heard good things about SyncBack Freeware and decided to try it with Strongspace over the ftp bridge and I’ve been quite pleased.

The first step is to setup Tunnelier. Setup was fairly easy. I turned everything off except for the ftp to sftp bridge. Another advantage to using this method is that it provides quick access to a pretty good SFTP client from the task tray.

Setup Tunnelier to point to your Strongspace account and include your username and password.

Next, setup the FTP to SFTP bridge. If you use 127.0.0.1 then you can only connect to the FTP server from that computer. There are some other options if you want to bridge for other computers on your network.

Turn off the other services in Tunnelier.

This is the standard setup screen for SyncBack. I choose to backup a directory and subdirectories.

Point to the FTP server on the local computer. This will be bridged to Strongspace.

That’s it. Now just setup the backup task schedule in SyncBack and it’ll backup to Strongspace on a schedule.

Here are the things you’ll need:

• WinSCP (Nice client for SFTP/SCP. Supports syncronizing folders.)
• You’ll need the installer for WinSCP3.com for command line.
• Pageant (Used if you encrypt your private key on your local machine)
• PuttyGen (For key generation)

Copy pageant.exe, and puttygen.exe to a tools directory. Copy WinSCP3.exe and WinSCP3.com to the same directory.

Setting up a key

First, you need to generate a key so you won’t have to login to Strongspace each time the update runs. Run puttygen.exe to setup your key.

Once it generates a key, you’ll want to set the comment (I use username and password of the computer I’m using). And a passphrase. You don’t have to set a passphrase if you don’t mind your private key sitting unencrypted on your disk. But I think it’s a good idea to encrypt the private key. Save the private key to the same directory that you were saving the above apps.

Before closing PuttyGen, log into your Strongspace account and create a .ssh/authorized_keys file and paste the contents of the “Public Key” of PuttyGen as the first line of the file.

Next, you’ll need to setup Pageant if you set a passphrase for your key. Pageant will prompt you for your passphrase and then enencrypt your key in memory. Putty and WinSCP3 know how to get the key from Pageant. You’ll probably want to start Pageant when the system starts. I created a batch file that contains this line and added it to my startup folder:

c:\strongspace\tools\pagent.exe c:\strongspace\config\strongspace.ppk

Configure WinSCP

Launch WinSCP3.exe to configure your session. Want to set the following information:

• Host name: username.strongspace.com
• User name: username
• Private key file: location of your key

Then hit “Save” and give the session a name like “Strongspace”.

Sync script for WinSCP

WinSCP3 has a pretty good scripting environment set up. There’s a lot more information in their scripting documentation. I use a really simple script to sync c:\strongspace\shared with a directory called “Shared” in Strongspace.

option batch on
option confim off
option synchdelete
synchronize both c:\Strongspace\Shared Shared
exit

Save this script file in the same directory as the above tools and run the following command to start a sync:

winscp3.com /console /script=winscp_script.txt Strongspace

Where “Strongspace” is the name of the session you saved in WinSCP’s setup. The important part of this script is the “synchronize both” section. This does the two-way sync.

Automation

You can set this up to run at certain times with Windows Task Scheduler (Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks). Since my collection of files is fairly static (small utilities)), I created a batch file with the above command and put it on my desktop so I can run the sync any time I know something has changed.