Drive!!!

I finally got this G1 thing everyone's been telling me about.. .. ...... What can I do with it again? Oh right.. drive.... Hm.. I'm been biking so long, I don't mind not being able to drive. Everyone has told me that doing the G1 test is real easy and it's all common sense. I actually got 2 wrong on the "Signs" section, but got perfect on the "Road Rules" section (trust me, they were tricky.. or I really am an idiot when it comes to signs).. Horray, now I can spend a few hundred dollars on lessons, a few hundred dollars on insurance and a few deca-thousands on a car.... < / sarcasm >

Although I'm not as hardcore as those with slick bike tires and 2 pound bikes (they always fly past me, especially uphill), I was perfectly fine riding my bike everywhere. Everyone tells me that driving and having a car is so convenient, but once you lose it, you feel extremely uncomfortable, especially when you have to wait for a bus, and share space on the bus with other people. I really don't feel that way.... (yet?) This is just the way things are when you don't have a car, and I've really gotten used to this lifestyle which lacks luxury. I just need my mountain bike with rough tires, especially in the winter. I suppose, with a licence, I won't be needing my bike as much as I did before.

Hm.. what else did I do this weekend? Oh I.... figured out why my 2nd XBOX (TSOP modded) wasn't loading Evo-X, and finally got everything to install properly. New version of XBMC?? Damn, this means I have to install it on my 1st XBOX... Okay let's do it..! So I did, *BUT*.. I made the mistake of installing it as a dashboard rather than an Application. This totally screwed up the soft-mod and.... I had lost control, the 007 save and ftp access to re-soft mod it properly. I was getting a bit worried. I just bricked my own XBOX. This will mean I'll have to pay someone to rebuild the hard drive for me since I don't have an EEPROM backup. I can't afford to spend another $20.. Maybe I can just try it myself? I knew I should have just mod chipped it.. I wouldn't be in this situation if I did.. This is worse than my landlord's XBOX, of which his son bricked cause he can't read yet.. Oh the dangers of soft-modding..... Oh, but the benefits!!!!! Softmodding is FREEE. It doesn't cost anything (you only need to buy/borrow the tools to do it once, and you can soft-mod an infinite number of XBOXES), and you don't even need to open the XBOX. Anyways, I knew of a tutorial that shows you how to revive an XBOX hard drive (without an EEPROM backup), when everything has gone wrong. It's like the absolute last resort to restoring an XBOX hard drive. There are many out there, but this one is the shortest/sweetest/simplest. I can use this to restore both my own XBOX and my landlord's. I think I'll learn a lot from it 'if' I succeed.

Basically, The XBOX hard drive is locked when the system's not on, and unlocked when you turn the system on. Soooo, to restore the hard drive, you have to turn on the XBOX to unlock the HD and then hotswap it to your PC while both the PC and XBOX are still booting up at the same time. That way, it will be like turning on your PC, and have an unlocked regular PC hard drive plugged in. Once your PC boots up and recognizes there there is in fact a hard drive plugged in and it can read and write to it (if it's unlocked), you overwrite all the files on it at the moment with fresh Microsoft dashboard files. It'll be like taking out of it's box for the first time. I made a big mess out of my roomate's toolbox, looking for torx screw drivers, I had to break the warranty seal on 2 XBOXES (the warranty is long expired anyways), I opened up my own PC and mangled it it's insides so that the IDE cables would reach (not to mention the risk of frying my own PC), but in the end, it worked!!!!. I had to try literally 50 times before succeeding though. I was soooo close to giving up, so close. Nothing was working and I just felt like giving up. Most of the time, my timing was just off. You have to swap the cable at the exact right now, you have to make sure you turn on your PC and XBOX at the right times too. It's a scary process, but in the end, I saved 2 XBOXES from being used as paper weights or door stoppers.

It's funny how I know how to rebuild an XBOX hard drive but don't know how to drive yet..