Friday, November 5, 2010

Humor: Bed Intruder Song

This is a classic in my book and had to be put in the BD.com archives. Even though the original story is not so humorous or entertaining, this Auto Tune the News spin on it is cool as hell. Go Antoine Dodson!

Friday, April 2, 2010

Two Fisted Leroys - Friday, April 23, 2010 !!

Big news from the base camp here at the Ducklow Estate. I'll be firing up the tubes and slicking down the slowounds this coming Friday, April 23rd 2010 at The Buck (I know, horrible website design) located in the lovely college town of Menomonie, WI. I'll be teaming up with former H block 10 drummer, James Kinsey as well as former bandmates of Attict, Jeremy Carlsrud and Doug Faffler in a new project called the Two Fisted Leroys. Where did the name come from? Honestly I don't recall who, but it was a fan-driven, fan-chosen name...and I stand here today... proud to say I am at least one of the fists in the Two Fisted Leroys group!

The guys in the band are old friends and were offered an opportunity to play with a few other bands from the tri-state area. Seeing our schedules were free, we all jumped at the opportunity to get together and take the stage...er, bar floor, once again. We won't be doing any 3 or 4 hours setlists like we used to in the past but rather a more condensed 30-40 minute show featuring some classic songs like Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" or "99 Red Balloons" by 80's star Nena. Not only do we cover those, but we'll put our spin on many punk and metal hitz by bands such as Metallica and the Alkaline Trio!

So if you're in the area or want to make the trek out, hit me up!

PS: Check back here for some pics of the event and aftermath!

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Xbox Support = Crap. (a short story)

UNBELIEVABLE. Yep. If I had to summarize my experience late last year with Xbox customer service and support, it would be UNBELIEVABLE.

It all started when my original Xbox 360 took another 'dive' (aka: Red Ring of Death) when I went to rawk on some Guitar Hero: Van Halen. The console/screen/picture simply froze and the buttons and controller would not work. Once I manually powered it off and powered it back on, I got the dreaded Red Ring Of Death. If you recall, this happened to me before as blogged back in January of 2008, so I was really surprised it happened once again. Thankfully, my console was still covered under an extended warranty and was able to get it shipped in for repair/replacement.

During this time, I was able to arrange a buyer of my soon-to-be-fixed console so I could take advantage of a deal for the newer, Xbox Elite system. This console is a nice elegant black unit which blends well with the rest of my A/V equipment and includes a much bigger hard drive to downloading games, content and more. The day I made that Xbox Elite purchase, I made a call into the Xbox support team to place an order for a data migration kit, so I could transfer all the games, gamertags and downloaded content from the old hard drive (which I kept while the old one was being repaired) to the new drive. The order itself was easy as pie. I was told I would have it within 7-10 business days. Cool.

Well, those 7-10 days turned into weeks and eventually over a month! Yes, a month! After placing a call shortly after the 10 day period, I was told the item was on back-order and that I would get one within 5 days or so. "Thanks for the call and/or e-mail on that Xbox."So the next 5 days came and went with no e-mail or notice so I called back in. I was given a runaround yet again; the item was still on back-order and no ETA of when it may be in!

With this botched order along with a warranty confusion/issue on my old console (a whole other story), I had enough.

I took my issue to the interwebs... more specifically Twitter.

I tweeted (a term known for 'a post from Twitter') about my frustration and CC'd a very prominent, social-facing representative and employee of Xbox, Larry Nelson, aka: Major Nelson. (As a side note, I 'follow' (another Twitter term) Major Nelson on Twitter as he often 'tweets' about Xbox news, deals and promotions.) I was truly shocked/surprised that Larry responded back to me almost instantly giving me his e-mail address asking for details on my issue/complaint.

I quickly drafted and sent Major an e-mail stating my issues (both with my botched data migration kit as well as the warranty expiration date on my old console) and within a few days I was contacted by someone at Xbox support! This wasn't the 'typical' tech support person, this was a true customer service representative whose sole purpose was to resolve high-priority and escalated issues. I must say that I was treated pretty good and was eventually shipped out a working data migration kit (it took 2 tries as the 1st data migration disc was in a different language).

I could go on and on and may have missed a few details but the bottom line is this: Xbox technical support = CRAP.


PS: On the positive end, they gave me a free Xbox Elite game controller free of charge. (+.5 for them)