Xbox Lives

A good friend of mine recently received a subscription to Xbox Live for his birthday from his good lady wife. As a relatively non-techie computer user, he saught Xbox Live connection advice from the numpty at the local computer store. Which is where, unfortunately, things started to go wrong…

Xbox Live requires a certain understanding of computer networking which, due to uninformative packaging, can come as quite a shock. Needless to say, the bad advice I refered to above resulted in my friend being sold a rather dodgy ADSL modem router at a suspiciously high price, failure to get the blasted thing to connect to the intermaweb and, subsequently, several days of good old English cursing.

Having been notified of the problem (not before another of my good friends had screwed things up further - a great man once said “a man without a clue is infinitely less dangerous than a man with half a clue”), I set about attempting to decipher the intracacies of said crappy router. But alas, to no avail.

Thankfully, Xbox Live presents a number of ways to achieve a connection and it was through explaining and helping to implement one of these (cheaper) alternatives that I solved Dave’s problem this evening.

Needless to say, the router will be taking a swift journey back to the numpty at the computer store. Possibly with some choice words, I should imagine.

In closing, I am reminded of yet another excellent quote from the late, great Douglas Adams:

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."