chuma.org

Okay. It’s time for the post-Xmas report. Brace yourselves.

First off, I’ve decided to stop saying Christmas and start saying Xmas (as in EKS-mas). For one, I’m not Christian, so Christ doesn’t enter into it for me, so I should stop pretending. Two, there is lots of evidence that Christmas was really a pagan holiday co-opted by the Christians in order to make it more acceptable to people. So I shouldn’t have to accept Christ in order to have celebrations around this time of year. Instead, it’s just a nice time to spend with friends and family, to reflect on the year past, marking the passage of time (I’m not a big New Years party person) and making people (and me) happy by doing nice things for them, or buying nice things for them. (And yes, Wes, I do feel happy.) Sure, X really just stands for Christ, but I don’t care. Pthhhhhh.

Next up: I always end up buying more things for myself than people get for me. But on the other hand, other people always buy me things that I would never go out and get for myself, stuff I need. Like sweaters. I got three sweaters for Xmas this year, which was great because my winter wardrobe was in dire need of some variety. But I never go clothes shopping, ever. So that was great.

The buying-stuff-for-myself-department: well, probably went overboard here. Way overboard. But I did get some things that I had been pining over for a while: a new DVD player that supports SVCDs (and I gave our old one to my parents, thankyew). Ever since getting my GBA I’ve been looking at getting a backup system for it. This is composed of a GBA cartridge that has flash RAM on it, and a PC interface to write to the cartridge. I bit the bullet and got my Flash Advance Xtreme 128M on the 27th. My primary use for this is basicially going to be playing ROMs from the Internet, yes – I don’t intend to buy another GBA game again. But you can also do other awesome things with it: right now, for example, not only do I have three GBA games loaded onto it but also an NES emulator to play my old 8-bit classics! This kicks ass: I played Tengen Tetris on the train this morning, right on my GBA. And I’m just a menu away from Super Mario Bros. 3, or flick the power off and on and I can play F-Zero Advance, or Super Monkey Ball Jr.

Oh, and I picked up a Canon PowerShot S230 the other day as well. Heh heh heh. I won’t be buying ANYTHING for a few months, but that’s just fine. We went to Future Shop on Saturday and they just happened to have gotten some more stock. They didn’t have the S200 doorcrasher ($449) anymore, but for not too much more, the S230 has a 3.2 megapixel CCD, better digital zoom (hey, it’s useful occasionally!), and a new image processor for better full-auto shots. After standing there for a while Sandy convinced me to stop waiting to get it and just get it. So I got it, I’ve been using it, and I’m not disappointed in the least. It’s a hella nice camera. And I even got lucky and got a 128MB Lexar CF card for the $49 special price! Schweet.