Shiny Things
One of the hardest things for me as a geek is forcing myself to walk past shiny new games with large pink SPECIAL OFFER PRICE stickers on them. Please supermarkets, don’t put cut price games on the way to checkouts where you can ensnare sun-starved and fragile geeks.
Point in question, yesterday I went into the big red shed to buy a printer for the office and only through sheer willpower managed to come out without Wii Fit Plus, C&C 4 and the new God of War game. I’m getting better at walking past these evil stands of money grabbing games, though yesterday I did pick up C&C 4 and start walking towards the checkout before thinking twice. I stopped myself, turned round taking out some teenagers with my umbrella (quite by accident – it was a comic turn the Marx brothers would have been proud of) and put the game back on the shelf. If I’d bought it there would have been that wonderful rush of instant gratification that comes from buying something new and shiny but I know that once I got home the guilt and self reprisals would have started, well, that and convincing myself that now I have a new shiny game I really, REALLY need a brand spanking new graphics card to go with it and just a liddle bit more memory.
PC Upgrades are a slippery slope. First it’s the top of the range, mega-spiffing graphics card with more on-board memory than most work PCs have as RAM, then it’s the RAM upgrade from the measly 4GB to the maximum possible amount that you can cram into your PC, which in my case is rather a lot; 4GB corsairs x 6 slots = nice! Gotta love those motherboards with loadsa RAM slots. Then you start to look at the quad core i7 and wonder if there is possibly a faster version you could sneak into the machine, you trawl through blog posts and processor reviews and pre-order the next best thing then wait on tenterhooks for it to arrive, and when it does you bounce around the house like Tigger on acid and the office ends up looking like a PC factory with parts lying around everywhere. Ahhhh.... happy days....
Point in question, yesterday I went into the big red shed to buy a printer for the office and only through sheer willpower managed to come out without Wii Fit Plus, C&C 4 and the new God of War game. I’m getting better at walking past these evil stands of money grabbing games, though yesterday I did pick up C&C 4 and start walking towards the checkout before thinking twice. I stopped myself, turned round taking out some teenagers with my umbrella (quite by accident – it was a comic turn the Marx brothers would have been proud of) and put the game back on the shelf. If I’d bought it there would have been that wonderful rush of instant gratification that comes from buying something new and shiny but I know that once I got home the guilt and self reprisals would have started, well, that and convincing myself that now I have a new shiny game I really, REALLY need a brand spanking new graphics card to go with it and just a liddle bit more memory.
PC Upgrades are a slippery slope. First it’s the top of the range, mega-spiffing graphics card with more on-board memory than most work PCs have as RAM, then it’s the RAM upgrade from the measly 4GB to the maximum possible amount that you can cram into your PC, which in my case is rather a lot; 4GB corsairs x 6 slots = nice! Gotta love those motherboards with loadsa RAM slots. Then you start to look at the quad core i7 and wonder if there is possibly a faster version you could sneak into the machine, you trawl through blog posts and processor reviews and pre-order the next best thing then wait on tenterhooks for it to arrive, and when it does you bounce around the house like Tigger on acid and the office ends up looking like a PC factory with parts lying around everywhere. Ahhhh.... happy days....
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