Things to do while the Social is down

Microsoft is doing wonderful and perhaps needed maintenance on the Zune Social. If you happen to own a Zune and the thought of having no access to the Social for up to 48 hours is giving you the shakes, perhaps the following tips may help:

1. Your newly updated/purchased Zune has two games: Texas Hold’em and Hexic. They won’t last you too long, but try them out anyway. I’ve caught myself playing both for a wasteful amount of time, so it’s not like they’re bad games.
2. Stock up on music and podcasts from the Zune marketplace beforehand. Your Zune likely came with a 14 day Zune Pass trial, so you could use it now and stock up on as many songs as you can. If your conscience is telling you that blowing two days of free Zune Pass time on maintenance is a bad idea… it’s probably right.
3. Hit TWiT (specifically Windows Weekly) or gdgt for some podcasts you can add to your Zune hassle-free to keep yourself from chewing your nails at the lack of tech.
4. Play games on your Wii, PlayStation 3, or Xbox 360. Better yet, go play some games online via Xbox Live! Oops, Xbox Live will be down as well.
5. Stick around on our forums. You’ll find many people who, like you, are interested in awesome and interesting Microsoft news and developments.
6. If none of these are suitable for you, go outside and get some fresh air. It’s probably not a bad idea. You shouldn’t be that addicted to anything anyway.

On that note, should we open Zune-related forums? How many of you guys own your own Zunes? Feel free to peg me your thoughts either via a PM on the forums, the contact form on the about page, or here as a comment.

You’ll survive the outage.