Busy like things that are Busy

The family is going nuts trying to get things done quickly so that the house will be impressively clean when Ryan and Molli get off the plane and they can go “What a lovely home, with impressively few death-traps for toddlers!”

On Saturday, Annie and I spend the day house-cleaning our own place, trying to get stuff put away and cleaned up a bit so that our last-minute house-cleaning before the party we’re throwing on Saturday won’t be quite as bad.

Then Sunday we went over to my parents’ house and I helped my dad and brother erect the skeleton of a playstructure/swingset (photos forthcoming). This is how I discovered that my back, accustomed as it is to long hours of sitting and staring at a computer, is not overly eager to spend all day Lifting and Holding and Screwing and Bolting. My back and neck have spent all day today going “See? Didn’t I tell you it was a bad idea? I waaaaaarned ye, Didn’t I Warn Ye? BUT DID YE LISTEN? NOOOOOOO NO ONE EVER LISTENS TO TIM, OH IT’S JUST A WEE ‘ARMLESS BUNNY RABBIT…”

(A suprising number of my internal monologues sound like Monty Python characters).

Anyways, tonight we go to pick up Leilani and Co. at the airport, and we’ll hang out with them tonight, and then I’m hoping that in between the cleaning and hanging out with prodigal brothers, I’ll be able to put in some time on the server, and miraculously restore it to life.

Hey, it could happen.

Oh, I nearly forgot: I bought a shiney new X-Box yesterday to replace mine, which is starting to not want to read certain game discs. I was going to wait until the theoretical price break around Christmas, but between the fact that I can give my old X-Box to Sean for his birthday, and the fact that they just released the limited edition translucent green xbox, I went ahead and did it early. It looks sweet, too, even though you can’t see anything through the translucent case because the innards are enclosed in metal.

The only problem? The only way to transfer your saved games and stuff from one xbox to another is using a memory chip (sold separately). It’s not expensive, but it is pretty small, so I’ll have to be doing a lot of swapping the chip back and forth to transfer all the saved games and game settings. But there is absolutely no way to transfer the playlists I made on one xbox to the other. The song files are too large to fit on the memory chip, and the system link cable apparently isn’t capable of seeing the other xbox.

Can someone explain to my why a system with ethernet built in is incapable of doing a freaking file transfer? Is it really too much to expect that the hours I spent ripping CDs onto the xbox so I could play music in games wasn’t all for waste now that I have a new xbox?

This is the first serious disappointment I’ve had with the xbox, and I guess it’s not very often that you would have to do this, but I work with computers all day long and the ability to copy files is so fundamental to the operation of computers, that it’s hard not to hold this as a major strike against MS, since they would have had to go out of their way to set up an interface that allows you to copy from xbox to memory chip, but NOT from xbox to xbox.