I got home on Friday night to find that FedEx had dropped my Playstation off… with my neighbors. And not just any neighbors, but the ones who park in the fucking fire lane.

Jenn tried to get them to answer the door twice, but had no luck. Their TV was on far too loud for anyone to hear the door.

I got home, rang their doorbell (they’ve installed one themselves; our apartments don’t come with doorbells) and a few minutes later the door opened and I was accosted by the stench of freshly pissed pants. I have no idea how they live in that, but it almost knocked me out. Only my dire need for my Playstation kept me conscious.

The lady of the house gave me my package (it took her a second to remember that, yes, just a few hours ago she did, in fact, sign for a package) and, after making sure it wasn’t going to pollute the air supply in my apartment, I returned upstairs to unpack my console.

I took it straight into my room and opened the box. I pulled out the work order description and it seems Sony saw fit to replace the entire laser component in the unit. Fine with me, man. I hooked it up and put in Time Crisis 3, the game I was having trouble with in the first place.

It still doesn’t work.

I tried it all different ways, but it doesn’t work. Other games work, and I even watched a movie on it (which didn’t work too well before), and that works. Everything works except this game.

What’s puzzling me now is that the game worked for me for a while, but stopped. It worked for my friend/boss Greg (on his newer hardware version of the PS2). So is it a disc problem or a hardware problem? I have to assume it’s the disc now, since everything else works and it’s been freshly repaired.

I’ve now sent a note to Namco support to see if I can package up my disc and send it in for a replacement. Hopefully I can get my replacement disc and try that out before my 90 day limited warranty on the console repair runs out. If the replacement disc doesn’t work, then it’ll be confirmed a problem with the console. If it works… well, at least I have a new laser component in my console, right?

I’m takin’ off from work now. Next time you hear from me will probably be next week during training… after that, who knows?! If you email me (or leave a comment) and I don’t get back to you, that’s why.

I woke up this morning and saw the Tub Cat was in the Christmas spirit, so I figured it was time for me to get there, too.

As such, I decided to send out a quick email pseudo-personal card to folks that I talk to and folks that I don’t normally get a chance to talk to and catch up with people. A few might be coming in to check out the site, even, which would be cool. (Plus, I get to see who has changed their email addresses and NOT TOLD ME. I’m already getting bounces.)

I’ve gotten a comment already on how sad this tree looks. A little background there… It’s a small, plastic tree that we’re using as a test for our Tiny Cat (not pictured). We want to see how well she handles this tree - how many times she knocks it over, how much of it she eats, etc. - so we can determine what kind of tree we could get next year. Every morning we wake up to the more plastic pine needles all over the floor, so the chances of getting a nicer, larger tree next year are not looking good.

I’m in training next week, so I’m out of the office. The following two [holiday] weeks, I’m on vacation, so I’m out of the office. What that yields is not unlike a month-long mini-sabbatical from work. The anticipation is killing me. Freedom from the ridiculous commute. Freedom from the daily grind. I can hardly wait.

Of course, I’ll be missing the company outing to Lord Of The Rings next week, but I suppose that’s the price I pay. If I was on vacation, I’d actually come back just to see the movie… but I’m in training, and I can’t really skip out on that. It’s for my last MCSD test, and I want to get it over and done with.

I’ll do my best to continue posting to the blog while I’m out, but don’t expect daily updates. I mean, I’m on vacation for goodness sake. What do you expect?

Some of you (but probably not a lot) have read Max Barry’s novel, Jennifer Government. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it.

For those who have read it, there’s a web game out, written by the author, that’s based on the novel. Check it out: http://www.nationstates.net

After a nice call to Microsoft Developer Support, I learned the root of some of my web part development troubles and thought I’d share the [undocumented] wealth with the community.

Web part properties can only be:

• string
• bool
• int
• float
• enum
• System.DateTime
• System.Drawing.KnownColor

The reason for this is that they use their own custom XML Serializer, not the standard one that .NET Framework ships with. (That’s why I keep getting errors when I try to save custom classes as properties. Even if they’re marked Serializable and have all the XML Serialization info attached to them, you can’t do it. This is all you get.)

So I guess my way around that’s going to have to be to XML Serialize my custom class, then save that as a string in the web part. What a pain.