My company paid out the first half of its yearly profit-sharing, and it was a pretty nice sum. Now that I’m flush with all that cash, I’ve felt the urge to spend, spend, spend.

Should I blow it on monitor speakers like I’ve been threatening to do for more than a year? I’ve been thinking about getting some more comfortable headphones.

How about more studio software? What can Ableton Live do for me that Cakewalk doesn’t? SONAR 6 is out now — maybe I should upgrade?

The partition of my hard drive where I store MP3s is filling up — I should really consider another external hard drive. Or maybe a new internal hard drive and a separate hard disk enclosure?

Expedia is having a sale on flights to Hawaiʻi — maybe a visit is in order?

So many options, and the truth is … the money is already spent. It’s called a credit card balance. (D’oh.)

I did, however, make good on a plan I hatched a month and a half ago. I upgraded my old Dell Dimension to Windows XP using an academic discount, thereby saving me around $120. I also maxed out the memory on that machine to a whopping 512MB, so it can run reasonably well for another year or two. I couldn’t have done either of these upgrades without the profit-sharing payout.

I spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning getting the upgrade to work. A USB 2.0 PCI card I installed recently was causing XP to freeze up, so I removed it, reinstalled the drivers and put it back in. No problems so far, and the extra memory seems to have put a slight kick. Not by much though — a 500 mHz processor is still sluggish next to 2.79 gHz.

I did receive a bit of bad news yesterday — the Kawai K4 I bought on eBay back in 2005 is officially dead. The repair shop said it would cost more than the keyboard was worth to repair it. Well, I don’t have to spend money on that repair, but that means songs which depended on those timbres are effectively screwed. Has no one attempted to create a software emulation of that board?

[UPDATE, 11/12/2006, 23:12] Best Buy put Seagate 160GB external hard drives on sale today. No, I couldn’t resist, and no, I didn’t resist.