Playstation 3 – Life With Adrian

That’s right, on Sunday I lost a dear friend. My PlayStation 3 suffered from the dreaded Yellow Light of Death problem. He She It died at the young age of only 3 years and 22 days. That’s 22 days beyond the lifetime of its extended warranty. Typical isn’t it. I had only been playing inFAMOUS for about 15 minutes when it gave up the fight. Beeping a few times, it rolled over and died instantly. My worst fears were realised when I was unable to revive him by any means. It was a very ignominious end for it, after all it had survived being shoved in a rucksack and thrown in the back of a van. It had probably also been dropped several times in its life, but each time it kept on going. So this was truly the end.

I called up Sony who quoted me a price of £131 to get it replaced but that it would be a lesser model. My model is an original 60GB which has all the good features which everyone wants returned to the design. This would also loose all the data stored on my hard drive (which I had upgraded to 320GB). As an aside, make sure you back up all the data regularly. Fortunately for me, I had done a backup about two weeks ago, so although this is missing some of the latest saves, it would have been much worse if I had lost everything.

Determined to preserve the dignity of my console, I found a repairer in Newcastle called Console Doctor who can apparently fix these problems. Therefore as we speak my console is hopefully flying (it’ll be by lorry – due to the volcano ash) up north with the friendly DHL man. And this only costs £70, plus I get my console back and sooner, hopefully with all the data intact and with the disc that is currently stuck inside. Just because I need to add a photo to make this article more exciting, here is a picture of my PS3 in its original box waiting to get sent off:

I guess I should probably do something useful whilst I wait for its return… like my dissertation.

The Invention of Lying

Why did I watch this film?

I was bored last night and thought I would watch a film. Since there was nothing on TV, I decided to download one of the Playstation Store via my PS3. Due to having a late evening meal, taking a while to choose a film and having to set-up my new bank card, it was getting on for midnight by the time I had actually rented the film. The download size popped up as 4530MB. Not a problem surely, we’re on unlimited internet usage. I’ll just have to let it download a bit first so that I don’t end up with a youtube situation where it constantly buffers. I decided to let it get to 20% downloaded first. In the meantime I got myself wrapped in my duvet due to the sub-zero temperatures of our living room. By the time the download had reached 20%, I was getting tired and I was also quite comfortable. This had better be a good film…

What did I think of this film?

This film stars Ricky Gervais, so it had to funny, even from his voice-over in the opening credits. The story is set in a world where everyone can only tell the truth, until one man discovers that he can say “something that wasn’t”, aka a lie (the word doesn’t exist in this world). It brings up many interesting questions of what life would be like if everyone knew exactly what other people thought of them. Sometimes this seems inappropriate though, as characters often seem to say exactly what they are thinking, rather than just saying nothing as would happen in real life.

The film also raises the question of what you would do if you had unlimited power to make people do stuff. Personal gain or helping others. As with all films, our hero starts by obtaining money and getting his job back. He also helps out some other people with their problems. This helpful stuff normally happens towards the end of a film doesn’t it? I don’t think we’re even halfway through, what else could be in the rest of the – BAM!! – Great, the download bar just popped up on screen, seems I’ve got to the end of what’s been downloaded already. 45%. Guess I’ll go to bed and leave it to download overnight.

Will I watch it again?

I still have to watch the second half so its hard to say. I would guess that I would watch it again if it was on TV or someone else was watching it. I don’t think I would go out of my way to watch it again. However I have learnt my lesson to plan ahead and download first, before I start watching. PS3Attitude gives a good overview of the Playstation Video Store and recommends thinking about the download time, I should have remembered this article before hand.

The Invention of Lying