Technology Hates Me

It's been an eventful week this week, for all the wrong reasons. First of all, we've been noticing that our satellite TV reception has been steadily degrading, to the point that sometimes we get 0% signal on the status screen. So I phoned up Viasat and apparently we're within warranty, so it's a call to the local people who installed the dish in the first place for them to come over and tweak it. Skitz tried to help me wobble the dish around to see if it was just an angle problem, but we couldn't get anything more out of it, so it's going to be a cable problem methinks.

After the fiasco of my router deciding to give up last week, we've found that there's something more sinister going on. My Xbox kept logging out of Xbox Live at random times, and freezing in the middle of a game, but I thought it was just a WiFi thing and I was going to tweak it this weekend. But when I was trying to get ready for my radio show on Wednesday, I discovered it was a lot worse than that. Every time I started the stream or even just loaded up the IRC chat window, after a while the modem dropped the DSL connection for a couple of minutes, then logged back in. A panicked call to Tele2 support five minutes into when my show was supposed to be broadcast confirmed the worst - the support guy was also sending data down the line and it was regularly disconnecting. He ticketed a support request for me and engineers should fix the problem "within 48 hours" (which is this evening). Fingers crossed that it's just a quick fix.

The Xbox freezing, on reflection, should have warned me. I thought it was just that the internet connection was going down, and the game coding didn't know how to handle it. But NO. Last night it froze again, I rebooted and got... yes... the Red Ring of Death. (This was when I was trying to play the new Bionic Commando game, by the way. The short time I got to play it, it's great!) Specifically, it's three red lights on the ring on the front panel - usually they show which joysticks are "logged in" to the console, but these turn red if there's some sort of problem. The 3 rings (top-right quadrant missing) means "hardware problem" and it also means you have to send your Xbox off for repair. So, that's another thing that I have to do over the weekend.

Three technology-based things going wrong in one week. Oh joy.