{"id":169,"date":"2006-11-12T08:58:59","date_gmt":"2006-11-12T08:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/sakufu\/2006\/11\/12\/toys_toys_toys\/"},"modified":"2006-11-12T08:58:59","modified_gmt":"2006-11-12T08:58:59","slug":"toys_toys_toys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/2006\/11\/12\/toys_toys_toys\/","title":{"rendered":"Toys, toys, toys!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

Expedia is having a sale on flights to Hawaiʻi — maybe a visit is in order?<\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

I did, however, make good on a plan I hatched a month and a half ago<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

I spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning getting the upgrade to work. A USB 2.0 PCI card<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

[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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkjq-2J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}