McWilliams’ World

My bud Jake is giving away a monster HP machine. Check it out below.

Jake Ludington’s HP Magic Giveaway

At least till the 19th I have one before you due to my involvement with the New Xbox Experience beta.

If you want to check out my avatar, check out my 360Voice blog here. Thy guys at 360voice.com are really doing a great job churning out the new features.

I’ve stated before, the family has been having a blast with the new Xbox dashboard. The kids love messing with their avatars, I’ve taken advantage of the Netflix streaming, and I really like the full dashboard available from the guide button.

You’re going to love the NXE when it hits’ your box on the 19th.

[UPDATE] Looks like the Xbox folks are rolling it out to everyone else that signed up for the beta… have fun!

Just got an email from Microsoft stating that I got in on the New Xbox Experience (NXE) preview program.  Should be available to me by Nov 8th.

Sweet!

I’ll be sure to test out streaming from Netflix too! Unfortunately I just don’t have the HDD space to install games to my 20gb hdd (thanks a lot Rock Band!) . I’ve been looking around for deals on a 120gb upgrade… but that’s not in my plans at the moment.

I’m just excited to get in early and try out the new dashboard!

Just pre-ordered Gears of War 2 at BestBuy.com. Why there? I have some gift certificates from BB that I need to burn plus the last time I used their pickup in store for my pre-order of Ninja Gaiden 2, I managed to score $10 off since they couldn’t get my in-store pickup to me within one minute. So I’m banking a bit on that.

I’m still working off my $1000 in gift cards I got a few months back. I’m pretty much down to nothing. Just enough to cover the last of this year’s video games (Fable 2, Fallout 3, GOW2).

What happens next year? Not sure. I’m tempted to jump back in the freebie scene with some $500 gift cards, but I don’t feel like dealing with the hassle. They’re increasingly hard to finish the offers. Maybe it’s that time to finish the games I have and work the deals as games begin to drop in price three to six months after release.

I’ve known about Live Cashback for a while now but haven’t had a real need to utilize it. I’ve seen 20% and 30% back on eBay purchases.

Well, recently my wife and I decided we’d get a Wii for the family for Christmas (something I was dead set against getting – but if that’s what the family wants – who am I to argue) with our rewards points from our credit card.

So I began my deal hunt. I bounced around from site to site, check the tracker sites and ended up at eBay trying find a new multi-player bundle.

I almost bought a bundle this weekend at Circuit City for $359 (wii, extra controller + nunchuck, charger, + $50 game). I had a “friends and family” coupon for 15% off, but they wouldn’t take the coupon (even through it doesn’t exclude consoles – at least I couldn’t find that clause) plus they didn’t have Wii Play w/controller.

Over at CAG (cheapassgamer.com) they had a thread alerting to the Cashback bonus at eBay being 30%. So I figured I’d do some hunting there.

I managed to find a new Wii + Wii Play w/controller + nunchuck + free shipping for $400. So with 30% cashback I take off $120 making it about $280. Not too bad. However, I know that those eBay sellers are 1. milking the Wii market, 2. Also milking the current cashback promo. Either way, I’m still getting a good deal after all is said and done.

I’m just nervous about blowing $300 on game console that will ultimately get played heavily for a month or so then forgotten about. I have no plans on stocking up on a ton of games and if I do pick up any, they’ll be on the pre-owned market.

As of this morning the seller already shipped (made good on his promise to ship next day) and even sent me the UPS tracking code.

Now to come up with some good Christmas morning drama since this is the only thing the kids will be opening.

I’m on my second replacement Rock Band kick pedal. The first replacement didn’t last very long – snapped in the same place about two inches above the heel plate. I haven’t playing the drums – my son Jonah has and we’ve been careful.

I recently had to send my original USB hub back since the power connector never make a power connection, forcing me to jimmy it to stay on. Shortly after sending the bad hub back, my kick pedal snapped. Since EA didn’t clear my hub return, I was unable to initialize a new warranty claim on-line (I’m so glad they extended the warranty till Oct. ’08!!!). I called EA support to ensure the hub arrived and said I need to request a new pedal stating this is my second request for a new one. I asked what are they doing regarding this issue? The response? “We’ve been suggesting people buy a metal reinforcement plate to strengthen the pedal”. Are you kidding me?! I knew this from other gaming sites, but I chucked at that statement and asked if this will be addressed for Rock Band 2 and if warranty replacements will be getting the newer pedal. “We haven’t been authorized to do that yet.” I was again encouraged to purchase a 3rd party add-on. Silly.

So doing some digging I found a number of plate options, the best being on eBay. I stumbled across pedalmetals.com (sells on eBay), but didn’t like the non-flush screws (the flush plates were a few bucks more), plus $6 shipping is a bit much. So found some real nice plates from eBay ID: 68rrman with flush screws and some cool designs for $14 + $4s/h. So I ordered one to reinforce my fresh pedal. I don’t want to be stuck replacing my drums or ordering a new pedal any time soon. October is just around the corner.

I finally made the full switch to web based email. For the longest time I used Outlook to retrieve my email along with SpamBayes to sort out my spam (at least 97%). It took longer than normal to pull down mail, especially when people still find it necessary to forward 5mb+ videos via email; Hello! YouTube! I just got sick of it.  So I started testing Yahoo and GMail web mail clients. Although Yahoo has a pretty snazzy interface, GMail just gets it done for me; simple and to the point with the features I need.

I set GMail to pull my ISP mail – worked great. After a number of weeks of playing around, I finally jumped into my GoDaddy account and had my mail sent to my GMail account permanently. GMail still checks my ISP account in case any mail comes to that box but it will be low volume.

One drawback, I can’t get at GMail at work. I used a web based email service with one of the web hosts I go through, but for some odd reason, I can’t get it to connect to GMail. So I found that you can get at your email via RSS. NewsGator’s FeedDemon allows you to access secured accounts with login credentials, so I can at least see what mail’s coming in throughout the day.

So now I have GMail as my homepage, and I see a nice and virtually spam free inbox. No annoying downloading, no worrying about loosing email to a system crash, just quick, safe access. I should have made the switch a long time ago.

Wow… I just got a notice stating that the free 500gb Western Digital External Hard Drive that I qualified for over at externaldriveoffer.com, has shipped. Their terms stated that it could take 6 – 10 weeks  for the offer to arrive (which I’m used to – heck I’ve waited much longer), but this time; about 3 weeks. They even sent me the UPS tracking number; pretty nice. Should arrive Tues, Sept. 2nd.