Saturday 11 December 2010

Xbox 360 Slims and their Wireless madness.

Hey Guys and Gals.

I know only two or three people out of the five followers I have actually enjoy video games, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

Back in October, I purchased a 250GB Xbox 360 Slim. Today, I returned that very same console to the shop I bought it from, thinking it broken. Anyway, got the new one back today, and it had the very same problem.

Turns out, it wasn't a genuine problem, just a stupid thing Microsoft have done. Now, this following problem is only wireless, it works fine if you're on a wired connection.

I brought up my network connection page on the Xbox, did everything correctly, and it still refused to connect. Me and Dad had added the MAC address into the filter, applied a static IP address, you name anything within reason, we did it. So, we rang up the ol' fellas at Microsoft, and began speaking to some Indian people. They asked us to try plugging the xbox into the router via ethernet cable, signing in, and then removing the ethernet cable. To our surprise, this worked.

Not very interesting, but a good thing to know if you're thinking about getting a slim on a wireless connection!

Friday 3 December 2010

And since there's no place to go - write a blog post!

I didn't really want to use a cliche title, but it was all too much to resist.

It doesn't seem like to long ago that I was writing my last blog post on snow, turns out it was a good 11 months ago!

That in mind, this snow really kicks previous snows cold white ass! In January/February, we got about 2 inches of snow, and everyone was please with that. Then, on the night of December 2nd, we got about 5 inches! Granted, places up North have about 12, but 5 inches is pretty good for the South Coast.

Anyway, me and my little sister wake up on Thursday morning, take a peek outside and cheer. Went to the nearest laptop, looked on H'cliffe school website, yet another cheer! School was closed.

So after that, when everyone was ready, we went for a walk up to the Rec. It was like a white blanket, and it was really surreal. Even though the sun was behind clouds, it was still strangely bright because of the snow. And there was still snow falling, so it was great fun.

But today has surpassed any activities from yesterday. Me, Dad, Mum, Esme, Ben and I went to Buckland Rings to go sledging. Buckland Rings was a settlement for a large group of people, and they had a defense system of hills to make it more difficult for people to get in uninvited. Who'd of thought that hundreds of years later people would be sledging on it eh?

There were two main hills. One that was short and steep, the most popular one. But there was another hill in the field just further on that was longer, and slightly less steep. This had about ten people in total on it, and was great.

Now, we had two pieces of equipment, if you like, for sledging. We had a skimboard, which was great for tandem stuff and going stupidly fast, and a make-shift snowboard. This snowboard was made of an old skateboard that had been left in the rain too many times, minus the trucks. This was excellent for sledging, i.e. sitting down/lying down on, or standing up. Me and Ben preferred the snowboard, whereas the others preferred the skimboard.

Where the skimboard was relatively safe, the snowboard was not. And, there was barely room to
stand on. So you get the idea. On a few occasions, whilst going on the skimboard in a tandem fashion, me and Esme managed to somersault over eachother! Another occasion, whilst on the skateboard, some girls decided to walk and stay in the path me and Ben had been fashioning for about 10 minutes. I was already half way down, so I tried to stop by pressing down hard on the back of the board. This didn't work, the board ended up hitting some less compact snow and I went flying two or three meters in front of me.

Overall, it was amazing. I thoroughly recommend it! Go sledging at your nearest hill today!