This may have came and went without you even noticing.

On 31 Dec 2008 all 30 GB Zunes locked up and stopped working. If you think that MS doesn't make a 30 GB Zune, your confusion is understandable. the 30 GB models were the original Zunes which had the circle style navigator instead of the touch based squarish navigators all the new ones have.

(quick side note: I like the new Zunes. I got my Mom a 4 GB Zune for Christmas and I hadn't realized until I played with it that the little square is touch sensitive. I thought it was just a square version of the circle joystick that mine had but its actually very nice upgrade. It was new to me even if this feature has been out a while. Now back to my main point...)

I use my Zune quite a bit. In fact I had just used it on Tuesday when I went running. But I hadn't used it yet on Wednesday when I saw an article on Slashdot about Zunes mass crashing. I said to myself, "That's weird." and turned mine on to see that it too was locked up.

Turns out there was a bug in the original Zune in how it dealt with leap years. 2008 was a leap year and the Zune got confused because it was one day longer than it expected.

I was wondering how long it would take for a fix to come out but it was pretty quick as it turns out. In fact I didn't have to do anything except let the battery run down. See here for the details from MS, but all you had to do was let the battery die then wait until after the new year started in GMT and re-synch your Zune and the leap year problem went away.

So I guess it was mostly a much ado about nothing unless you were using your Zune for your New Years party music.

(another side note: Over my Christmas break I've been reading about XNA Game Studio 3.0. Thats MS tools to write games for Windows, XBox 360, and your Zune. I mention this here because I remember reading that if you want your game to work correctly on the old 30 GB Zunes like mine that you had to be careful how you used the joystick/navigator because it only has up, down, left, right, and click while the new ones have a much more precise control which can detect a greater degree of movement in every direction. Kind'of interesting, to me at least.

Here is the XNA book I'm reading now. It doesn't get into super complicated aspects but it covers all of the basics so I would recommend it as a good getting started book.

Here are some other XNA 3.0 books that are coming out in 2009 that I'm interested in. When I bought the above book there were only a few other 3.0 books slated to come out soon. Now it looks like there are quite a few so I'm only listing a few of the most interesting looking ones:

)