Thanks to my dear Twinlet North, I had fifty bucks to blow. (I could make a truly disturbed joke here, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the perverts in the audience.) Unlike last month’s debacle, I figured, this time I’d have no trouble at all spending that gift card money, especially when the venue is upgraded from Fred Meyer to Best Buy. Right?

“Wrong!”

First I looked at headphones. (The better Sony pair? $100. No thanks.) Then I looked (briefly) at computer games and came to the same conclusion I did last month, namely that what I most assuredly don’t need is another massive time-waster when I’m already paying a monthly fee for one (or two, depending on how you count it) major gaming experience(s). I looked at speakers, but I don’t really need a surround-sound set for the A/V computer since it’s not like I really have a room that properly supports the set I already have on the “gaming” rig. I looked into a RAM upgrade. Too damned expensive, that turned out. I thought about a sound card upgrade, but the only device that looked remotely useful still lacked the bells and whistles I’d be giving up by switching to a card that doesn’t support the Live!Drive I/O bay. I considered, repeatedly, and discarded, repeatedly, the idea of buying a faster wireless card for the laptop.

Finally a solution presented itself. What if I took the ATI Radeon 9000-series card out of the living room multimedia PC and swapped it with the All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 from the A/V computer upstairs, then spent a whopping $20 out-of-pocket for a TV tuner card with which to continue the VHS capture work I (periodically) perform on said A/V computer?

Brilliant!

Let’s just gloss over the issue of how much time this dithering process actually ate up out of the evening. It’s not terribly important, anyway. Ahem. I did manage to finish in time to dissuade my (very patient) shopping partner for the evening from buying purple rhinestones for her iPod. Not only that, but I bumped into something of an old friend, namely Wendi’s best friend Amy’s husband, Michael. Spending a few minutes catching up with news from that quarter improved my evening a bit. Having them come over for Diablo II gaming sessions was among the highlights of the later years at the old house.

If I’ve learned anything from the combination of this experience and the last one like it, and I probably haven’t, it’s that I need to have a much clearer idea of what I want to purchase before I enter any given geek-toy store. We’ll see if I can take this lesson to heart, eh?