xbox360 woes

about a month ago, the xbox360 at my house started acting up. It will only read one disk (Halo Reach.) Right around the same time, my son's xbox360 also took a crap, and it is having some kind of trouble with the video card. It doesn't RROD, but during game play, the screen just goes all screwy.

Without really doing any research online, I figured that since the video card in one xbox was going bad, and the disk drive in the other was going bad, I could just swap out the components from one to the other and we could have at least one working box.

Sounds simple enough, right?

WRONG! apparently the video is built into the board on the xbox, and worse, the disk drive have a serial number that is written into the bios of the device preventing people from changing their own drives!!!! So, in short, I was stuck with two broken xboxes.

My next move was to grab a couple other broken boxes off of ebay and do a little research online in the interim. This has been quite the learning experience to say the least. First, there is a wiki dedicated solely to problems with the xbox360 Second, these things are a PAIN to take apart and third, replacing the drive is fairly common, but it involves flashing the BIOS in the xbox, and I really don't feel like doing that.

I feel like I'm being slightly ungrateful, since I won my xbox through an online contest from Microsoft in 2008, but the thing that really bothers me is that we have two ORIGINAL xboxes- and my son plays games on one regularly at his house, and I just gave the other one two a friend of mine.

Anyway, I'm going to probably buy at least one new one, and maybe send the other one off to microsoft for repair. As for the other two- I know that soneone will buy them on ebay- it seems like the market for broken xboxes on ebay is still pretty hot. I'll let you know how it goes.

Enercient...um, yeah- about that

I guess its probably past time to kill enercient. I think the biggest problem was that people just didn't get it. I just wanted to take wireless sensors, put them in a few buildings, monitor equipment data, and eventually manage energy use.
I didn't really think it was that complicated. The problem was that at the end of the day people just wanted us to just do heating and air conditioning work.
The economy didn't help much either. We couldn't get investors and we couldn't get anyone who would let us beta test at their site.
I think the thing that really killed it for me, is the realization that 3 years ago this was all new and exciting, whereas now there are companied rolling out a new product like this everyday.

I'm not giving up on building technologies, and I still know that wireless tech is still going to be a big growth segment of commercial and industrial controls- i'm just giving up on enercient as a company. We tried, we learned a lot about how this industry works, got to do some amazing things and meet some amazing people, but at the end of the day, we just don't have the funding to run with the pack- let alone try to stay on the bleeding edge. Let's just hope that I can take what i've learned and carve out a niche as an expert over the next 20 years until I retire...