Merely weeks after my laptop died, my Xbox 360 has suddenly succumb to the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Fuck. Murphy's Law is catching up to me in the run up to PAX... Right now I'm borrowing someone else's laptop to do game development on, but I had counted on my Xbox to help me continue to test. Now I can still work on the game but my ability to test gameplay has just diminished.
On more positive notes I've managed to get some good work done in the last few weeks and I think the game is more ready than ever to be demonstrated live. There are still plenty of things I'm unhappy about, but lately the list grows smaller everyday. It needs a lot more testing than I've given it, but I'm trying to work on that, too.
I'm also very grateful for the extended RRoD warranty on the Xbox. Quark's death was a huge unexpected setback with a large impact on my wallet. I'm thankful that the Xbox shall be replaced on Microsoft's dime and I couldn't be happier with how smooth the customer support calls went to get things ready to repair the system.
These are the setbacks of the small developer, assuredly, and times like these make wish I had a CIO and IT staff just so that I could yell at them that they aren't doing their jobs well enough or fast enough.