I made a post a couple of years ago about how frustrating my experience was when trying to cancel my XBox Live subscription.  The post still gets hundreds of visitors a month so I thought I would update it with some new information from a comment at the end of the post.  Thanks to David for his comment!

You can cancel the auto renew of the Xbox live gold if you go to xbox.com and login to your live account, click you gamertag, click contact information, click membership level, and where it says automatic renewel, click where it says on. You will then have to click through a few screens where they are trying to keep you but then you will finally be able to set it to off!!!

Here is a blog post from jquery discussing the move to Google’s API.

Every year we go with some friends to a cabin on probably the cleanest lake I have ever been in. The only way to get to the cabin is by boat.  We have to ferry all of our supplies over on the boat and carry the trash off each day by boat.  You have to do the trash daily or you may wake up with a bear eating you or your food.  It is a small price to pay for the relaxing atmosphere.

Well what about the important stuff, like my online bank accounts?  My banking account you say, funny you should ask.  My bank limits my password to 20 characters.

The first reason is taking the pressure and stress off traffic. I live south of Atlanta, the asshole of the world, and I have to commute into the city every day. Atlanta traffic is horrid and you would do better to ask a homeless man to cure cancer than ask everyone using the interstates heading into or out of Atlanta to pay attention and JUST DRIVE STRAIGHT! There is however, no better feeling than being stuck in traffic and not giving caring because you are so wrapped up in a book you can’t wait to hear what happens.

Another reason is it allows you to listen to books that improve you. You can listen to books that help your career, make you a better parent, or any number of topics you would like to improve. Anything is better than listening to absolute crap ( IE The regular FM stations that pollute the radio dial. If you are in Atlanta fire up star 94 for a taste of the biggest idiots to ever pollute the airwaves. Those people make Howard Stern seem like a good counselor). Cut the FM cord. It is worthless and will never help you.

Just sit back and look closely at the amount of time you spend in a car. An hour a day is a lot of time that could be better spent either entertaining yourself or improving yourself.

UPDATED: Canceling My XBox Live Gold Membership

It came time to cancel my Xbox 360 Live Gold Membership tonight.  I have no problems with the service or the cost of it, but I just don’t use it.  I haven’t played my Xbox 360 in months much less logged on to play someone else.

So, I log into my game console and look around for the cancel button.  I went through every screen on the account management tab but nothing.  I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Me being a naive Internet user ( 16 years and counting) I assumed Microsoft would make canceling the service as easy as it was to start.  I mean it took me 2 minutes and a credit card to start my account right on my Xbox 360.  Why should canceling be so hard?  We know why they make it so hard, but damnit I am ranting here.

So anyway, I hit Google with “how do i cancel my xbox live subscription” and about the second one down was the number I had to call to cancel my membership.  So I dialed it up and after 4 Indians, 3 Holds, and 2 reference numbers I finally got it canceled.  If I gave out a weekly you suck ass award, Microsoft would get this weeks.

Need to repair your Xbox?

The funny part is, after finding and buying WP Remix, I found WP Premium which is a free theme offered by the same author. I downloaded it and have it running on my music blog. After some customization, I am really pleased with the way it looks. It is exactly what I wanted, 1 main column and 2 sidebars together on the right. Excellent theme and you can get WP Premium here.

My main hosting experience has come from Windows Servers NT 4 through Windows 2003. I like Windows but I also wanted to expand my Linux abilities. Linux is easy to figure out from the GUI so I decided that wouldn’t really teach me the proper way. I also wanted to make a server that was blazing fast and as secure as possible. Common sense tells you the less you have installed the faster and more secure your server will be. With that thought in mind, I decided to go with a minimal install that only has what I need installed.

Working from the terminal window was certainly an exercise in patience for me. It was pretty frustrating at times to know what I wanted to do, but have no idea where the file I needed to change was located. That is where the wonder of the Internet came in. The wealth of information on the Internet is just incredible these days. It was very satifisfying though when I finally got the hang of everything and got the website up and running. I am also very please at the improved load times versus the old server. The hardware this is running on isn’t that impressive so it is certainly an improvement.

When I finish up a few loose ends, the next phase will be redoing the design. The old design went south when I updated WordPress, so I decided to simple start over. The current look is a blank wordpress template from refueled.com. It looks good for a blank template, but it does need some livening up. That will be the next around here.

With that in mind, I was all set to make the switch to DirectTV. I called up AT&T and picked out my programming, selected my hardware, and picked an install date. I went ahead and took a day off from work to stay at home and wait on the installer to show. It certainly felt like the day before Christmas. The day progressed and about 30 minutes early the installer showed up at the house. He started looking around the house and took out his compass to try and find a location he could put the dish.

My house is really unique to be in a subdivision because the back of it actually faces some woods. The house has some very large trees in the back yard including some pines and an oak that are easily 100′ high. We can be sitting at our kitchen table and actually see deer or wild turkeys behind the house. This has always been something we loved about our house. It really is the perfect house to be in a subdivision. You couldn’t ask for a better location.

So the installer climbs up on the roof and continues his measurements looking for a spot he can mount the dish. He gets to the very top of the roof and the heads back down. He then proceeds to tell me he can’t get enough clearance to put the dish anywhere on the house. My tree line is about 5 degrees too much. It seems the only place he can put the dish is right in the middle of my front yard. Needless to say, the HOA would and my wife and I did veto that idea. It would just be way too tacky. I did however start thinking about a way to run one up a 100′ pole in the backyard. I haven’t given up that idea just yet.

DirectTV was also very nice and apologetic and of course they refunded my hardware purchase. It is just one of those things.