They’re all conspiring against me! All of the retail stores. Aiiigh!

Lets start with my 360. No, it hasn’t crapped out on me – I’m just having trouble with one of the accessories… but because all of the accessories are in the Limited-Edition-Halo 3-Green, it sorta screws me. In this case, it’s been the wired headset. I haven’t had to use it often – really only when I forget to charge the wireless headset – but I’ve had problems with it on two different controllers… I called 1-800-4MY-XBOX, asking for a replacement; they want me to return the headset first and then they’ll replace it. Uh, the thing is $20 in stores – $30 if I get a ChatPad with it – and I know it’s not going to be repaired… but the problem is that I can’t buy the green headset in stores.

*sigh*

Because of this, I said “ya know what? It’s defective, let me see what Target has to say” and so I talked to Target. I have another month before I can return it to them as defective. If they don’t have the limited edition, I can pony up some extra cash and switch to the Elite. Which I would probably do at this point, since the black Elite cases matches my HD-DVD drive (we were offered a black version of internally, it to celebrate the release a while back). However, because of a Testing Effort, my 360 is… well, it’s a foot raceto see if I’ll be allowed to return my 360 before my receipt expires. Should be fun.

Zune. I want a Zune 80, I think. I’ve been punking around with a Zune8: the ZunePad is brilliant. It’s got the feeling of flicking the list but it does it without smearing fingerprints all over it’s screen. I’ve played with the new UI on the Zune 8 and the Zune 30: I dig the new stuff they put in there. I tried out the wireless sync this morning: was smart enough to tell me that I had the wrong WEP password or hadn’t added the MAC address to my router, which was true. After that, it worked perfectly.

Zune Desktop Software: vastly improved. And I mean vastly improved. I’ve heard some backlash at them getting rid of play-counts and stars: I’ll thank them for that because I never liked it on WMP or iTunes. In fact, I’m still bitter that iTunes quietly uses the play count to seed your “random” shuffle order. Meh. Anyway, the Zune software still shares music with the 360. It’s much better looking than WMP and iTunes – very easy to navigate.

Wait, wasn’t this Rant about a bad retail experience? Has anyone seen a Zune 80 in the stores yet? Yeah, me either, and I work down the street from the team that designed it. In addition to that, I found out this morning that while the Zune 4, Zune 8, and Zune 80 all support MP4/H.264 natively, the Zune 30 does not which means I’m still in transcoding land (and that I won’t be keeping the Zune 30 long term.) And of course, both the device and the desktop software still don’t support Shuffle By Album!!!!

So, I want the Zune, but can’t have the Zune, yet.

Oh, and I bought a new pot & pan set a week and a day ago from Fred Meyer – not only did they have it $10 cheaper last week but Target has the same set at that same lower price + a $40 gift card.

My second guitar from Guitar Hero III still has a loose connection.

The demo kit of Rock Band at Best Buy was completely boned – screwed up guitar and one broken drum pad – so I still don’t know how good that’ll be.

My attempts at hooking up my Mac mini to my TV in my living room… it started with a $20 adapter, but that gives so-so results: to do it properly I need yet-another-switch box, a new receiver, or a new TV.

What a mess.