My sad story with setting-up the xbox360 continued this morning. It's a really stupid story. But it's so dumb, I think it deserves telling.

I woke up this morning and decided to try registering for xbox live coz I wanted to access the marketplace to download demos and other stuff. As the last post stated, I had finally been able to access internet using my bridge. So I thought everything would be smooth sailing. I was so so wrong.

I tried registering for my Gamertag and after entering it, I had to enter my registered email address and password. But after entering my email & pw, it said 'xbox live cannot accept new registration right now.' So I tried a few times and everytime, the same message appeared after I entered my email & pw. So, I decided to call the helpline to see if the xbox live server was down.

I called the helpline and it was connected pretty fast. The Technical Officer (TO) brought me throught the instructions step-by-step and tried to help me troubleshoot the problem. We created new accounts... checked setup... re-registered gamertags... changed settings... checked hardware... etc...etc...etc... I was on the phone for almost one hour. I was again resigned to the fact that MAYBE my wireless bridge was the problem. Or maybe I was just fated not to play online.

Then I noticed something. You see, whenever I entered my email using the on-screen keyboard (the kind where you move the cursor to the letter using your xbox controller one-by-one), I found that the '.' always seemed a little high... but I thought it was simply the font. Furthermore, it wasn't very clear on the TV screen. Well, after one hour on the phone, I discovered that instead of typing '.' in the email address, I had been typing '-'.

sigh.

Without telling the TO, I entered the email correctly this time. And everything worked out fine.

When the TO asked me, I said, dunno why.. it just worked this time. There was NO WAY I was going to tell him that I had wasted 1 hour of his time due to a typo.

So finally, I'm connected to xbox live. And finally, I can download demos, trailers and games.

So there you have it. My fun experience with hooking up to xbox live.