I got Disgaea 2, new and sealed, for a mere $5 at Wal-Mart this evening! And you dipsticks are always telling me that Wal-Mart is evil, ha!
I bought all 4 of the copies they had. I’m keeping one for myself, sending one to Steve (that’s Dead Lantern Steve, not BeerOrKid Steve 
) and the other two copies are going up on good ‘ol eBay.
As I mentioned a little bit ago, I had a physical failure on my primary hard drive and had to re-install my operating system. I had a legitimate copy of Win XP that came with my PC but, of course, I never bothered to burn the restore CDs that they nag you about. So I didn’t have a copy of the OS to install. I downloaded an nLite’d version of XP and installed that on a spare 200 gig drive I had, making that my primary hard drive.
I don’t know if it was a vagrancy of the nLite-ified install of the OS or what, but my PC was just not the same. It was hella slow for no reason, like I’d open a browser and my mouse cursor would chug and stutter across the screen, like the PC couldn’t handle the task.
Granted, my PC isn’t some hot rod. I’m not playing Crysis on it. It’s an AMD64 CPU, 1.5 RAM, cheapish PCI (plain PCI, not PCI-E) GeForce FX 5500 with 256 RAM, 200GB IDE hard disk. A pretty average PC but plenty of power for the non-gaming stuff that I do. There’s no reason XP should chug and stutter.
So I was like, screw it, if I’m gonna reinstall the OS again, I may as well give Vista a try. The install was pretty painless and it saves all your existing crap in a folder called “Windows.old” so that’s handy. I’ve only had it on there for a couple days, only used it for a few hours but my sluggishness seems to have gone away - and that was my main gripe. I know it’s been out for a while but I personally have never touched Vista so I’ll have a learning curve.
Irritating problem right out of the gate: My Linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter was not Vista-compatible. If I had a later hardware revision of the same model number, it would have been supported. Oh well. So I went to Wal-Mart and dropped $40.00 on a newer Linksys PCI wifi card and I got Vista online with that pretty quickly. Optimally, if/when we move in the next month or so, I’d like to go back to running a cable between my PC and the router so it’s sort of wasteful to buy a wifi card that I may not need in the near future. But whatever, as I often say: If that’s the type of thing I’m worrying about, then my life must be pretty ok.
I ordered an MXL990 USB microphone, which will hopefully be delivered on Monday. Mat, Steve & I are going to try to do some podcasting from Grand Island on Christmas Day so I wanted a microphone that would pick all three of us up as we sit around a table. The MXL990 is the same microphone we use in Spooky McPhee’s haunted studio (although his aren’t USB) so I’m hoping we get good results with this one. The USB and non-USB versions look identical aside from the connection on the bottom, of course. We’ll hook it up to my laptop and give it a try.
Assuming it all goes as planned, you can look forward to a special Christmas Day edition of The Splattercast. But then, I guess I won’t be uploading it until a couple days later, so don’t plan your whole holiday around it 
I thought I had kicked the G.I. Joe habit a couple years ago, but these new 25th anniversary figures have destroyed my resolve. I’ve been disciplined enough to not buy every single one, but I have bought several. New sculpts of the traditional designs for Snake-Eyes, Shipwreck and Firefly, just to name a few, and all on retro-styled blister cards… who can resist that?
The only frustrating part (aside from being a grown man addicted to toys) is that it’s been somewhat difficult to find the ones I want in stores, and the prices vary quite a bit; single figures are as low as $4.88 at Wal-Mart and as high as $7.99 at Shopko. Usually stuff like this has an MSRP that’s the same everywhere.
If you see a Zartan, grab him and I’ll pay you back