That other Zune issue

“Z2K9” they’re calling it over at Gizmodo. (or maybe “ZY2K9″… I get confused)

And Microsoft finally acknowledged there’s a problem, but last night I spent the first 35 minutes of 2009 trying to determine whether my son’s Zune was broken.

Somehow Jay slept until almost lunch time on the 31st. (It probably didn’t help that we stayed up watching movies until midnight the night before.) But, anyway, New Years came and the ball dropped, and Jay was wide awake. I would’ve normally stayed up with him another hour or so since there’s no school today, but he’s got a sleep-over planned for tomorrow so he needed to get some rest.

I figured… I’ll let him listen to his Zune for a while until he was sleepier. All was good, and then… “Dad?  My Zune is frozen.”

I’m disappointed to say that my first thought was that he had done something wrong. I tried the standard two button reset combination – no luck. Tried to plug in the Zune to my computer (after 10 minutes of grumbling at Jay that he should know where the cables were – again, out of line on my part) – no luck. I decided to search online to make sure I was using the right key sequence to reset… yup. So then I searched “Zune reset doesn’t work” and I found a blog post dated February 2008 indicating that on Dec 31 all Zunes would fail.

Weird… it had a conspiracy/hoax sound to it. If it weren’t 12:20AM I would’ve searched Snopes.com or other sites to verify the story, but instead I clicked a few more links… “all zunes fail on Dec 31, 2008” was the topic over and over. Still, it could easily be one of those viral hoaxes… so I went to the source: Zune.net.

At 12:30 AM, there was nothing on the homepage indicating a problem, but I clicked the support tab just the same. There, I found a short paragraph acknowledging that word was getting back to Zune of a problem related to the leap year, and it would resolve itself on January 1 (after your Zune completely burned through its battery and you recharged it).

This morning I see they have a single line link to “Trouble with your Zune 30?” – which I would bet money is gone by January 4, if not sooner.

So, it’s not a big deal, I guess.  A minor nuisance, and as my wife said to me as she left for work this morning (yes, work on New Years Day… my fault… *sigh*) “please don’t sweat the small stuff so much.”

That’s one of a dozen or so things I’d like to do in 2009. I find myself with a lot of misdirected frustrations and tensions and all. It’s time to let some things go, come to terms with others, and make sure I continue to do all I can to minimize the effect my mistakes have on those I care about.

So, Z2K9 is here…. it’ll pass – if it hasn’t already. And if all my issues can be this minor, it’ll be a good year.

Contributed by: Scott Copperman (Guest Author)

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