I hope everyone out there had a merry Christmas. Our Christmas was the fairly standard trip to the Schubert ancestral home, complete with opening some presents and watching the Dallas Cowboys choke on national TV (which is fast becoming a holiday tradition).

The big Christmas gift for me was the XBox 360 – yes, I am finally part of the next-gen generation of gamers. Normally, my gaming habits are more PC based, but as a designer, you gotta keep relevant. Although I swear to god, I will never be able to play a shooter on a console. Last night’s Rainbow Six episode was almost comical, with me taking about five seconds to line up every shot, as bad guys rained hellfire upon me unmolested.

Of course, this gift wasn’t was all encompassing awesomeness as it could have been. Sure, playing Burnout: Revenge for 8 hours straight was so awesome that even my father, the original luddite grumpy old man, was enraptured by the visions of repeated car crashes in slow motion. But other than that, I’ve been kept from playing. For one thing, the wife has been seduced by Viva Pinata, a game she described as ‘Animal Crossing done right’. She is, in fact, playing it as I type this. As near as I can tell, it’s a game that involves trying to get various cartoony critters to make sweet love, while helping ensure they avoid predators who like the taste of papier mache. Note: if the predators kill your critters, you can, if you’re fast, sell the sweet, sweet candy within them for a quick buck. There’s no place for sentimentalism in Viva Pinata.

When it was my turn to play the machine, I spent all my time trying to get the thing to connect to XBox Live via wireless router. After much trial and error, it was concluded that my router simply does not play nice with the 360’s wireless thingamadohickey. Working through this involved pretty much calling everyone I knew who displayed any semblance of network proficiency in the past and disrupting their Christmas break with streams of profanity broken by occasional queries about DHCP servers and whatnot.

Finally, of course, I caved. Various web sites suggested many possible scenarios, including setting up full wireless networks with dedicated access points for each room or machine or whatever. I chose a decidedly simpler solution: buy a router that has the word ‘gaming’ in it’s name. (It helped that said router got reviews of 10 out of 10 on various gaming sites). Sure enough, I took it home, plugged it in, and was laborously typing in XBox Live access codes within 10 minutes.

As a humorous aside, one of the friends I had hassled for help later called me back, and I told him I’d solved it via said ‘gaming’ router, and his response was ‘YOU DICK! I totally begged for one of those for Christmas, but my wife didn’t get it for me.’ This may tell you something about the sorts of people I hang out with.