Christmas Rocks

I remember last Christmas people begging me to give them ideas of what to get me.  I actually had no interest in anything other than programming at that stage, and everything I needed was sat on my shelf or on my hard disk, so alas I was given multitudes of vouchers.  This year, however, I made an Amazon wish list and just gave the link out to my family.  Much to my surprise pretty much most of it was bought.  It was my birthday on Christmas eve however, so the list was an amalgamation of both occasions.  I think there’s only a few items left on that wish list.

The most note-worthy of the gifts that were on my list were my POD XT Live and my XBox 360 (yes, I was an XBox virgin before a couple of days ago).  I’ve had a bash on the POD XT Live, and fortunately my amplifier is geared for a setup like this.  There are FX I/O’s so the built-in effects have no effect on the POD.  I’ve yet to buy enough cables to be able to adopt this approach though as three are needed, I have two, and one is borrowed .  Some may say the POD XT Live is overkill, but as I may be playing guitar live I was hoping for something mean enough to be able to suit my needs without having to buy extra pedals, and this one looked perfect.  I can’t even remember the cost but my lovely wife surprised me with this, and I didn’t even expect it whatsoever.

I’ll give a rough list of what I can remember getting:

• XBox 360 60GB (2008) model
• Messenger kit for XBox 360 controller
• Wireless headset
• Far Cry 2
• PGR3
• Assassin’s Creed
• Fable II
• Bioshock
• Fallout 3
• GTA IV
• Gears of War 2
• Mirrors Edge
• Additional XBox Controller
• Wireless Adapter (to connect XBox to LAN)
• Wii Fit Board and Game
• Wii Music
• POD XT Live
• Loads of cool Star Wars t-shirts for the ultimate geek
• Compost Bin
• Loads of books on CSS, X Code 3, Cocoa development, PHP etc.

There was more but I literally can’t remember.  I’m not sure what was with the generous amounts of presents, but I do forget that I have two families now which we split on Christmas day.  We had a really good time, and two Christmas day roasts, we were satisfied with food that’s for sure.  I’ve still yet to have a look at most of my presents.  I’m wanting to start reading all the latest literature but I’m in the UK in February for an intense SQL developer training course, hopefully for MS SQL 2008.

NOTE: We also got my Dad an XBox 360, same model as mine and it died after about 2 hours of use with the red ring of death.  He tested it under my power supply and we had the exact same problem.  Mine’s been fine, however.