I have mostly given up on material goods, keeping an attitude of “I should only buy something if I really need it, not because I want it or it would be cool to have”. It certainly has helped me keep my finances in line, that’s for sure.

So when Boxing Day slowly approached, I told my dad that maybe we should get a new printer now. Our old black and white laser printer, the long-lasting NEC Silentwriter 95 that isn’t really all that silent, finally broke down after a good 10-15 years of use. Attempts to revive an old Epson Stylus Color 800 that we did not use for at least four years failed due to us avoiding to buy new ink cartridges instead of refilling them. Turns out old used catridges would have its ink solidify.

I’ve also managed to pursuade my dad to avoid the stupid irrational consumerism that happens when big sales go on, buying things that are just cool to have but aren’t actually all that necessary, such as LCD TVs and all those other fun, nice to have, but not all that necessary gizmos. He still got some stuff from NCIX nonetheless, but at least those had some good reasons as to why he wanted them, namely hard drives and a keyboard/mouse combo for one machine (my server) that doesn’t have any input devices on it. Yes, I can ssh onto the box and all, but when I restart, it needs a keyboard attached and there’s no BIOS option to disable that check.

So we woke up at around 10 in the morning, long after the initial rushes of Boxing Day that my dad and I had gone out for during Boxing Days past and went to Future Shop to get ourselves a new printer. We ended up getting a Minolta PagePro 1400W, which I have been spending some good amount of time trying to get working with the network via CUPS and samba. Still working on it now, but I think I’m almost good on getting it working.

Of course, I did not end up empty-handed without getting something for myself.

If you are thinking that I bought myself a DS Lite, you’re wrong. Yes, it is one of those things that I would like to have. However, at the same time, I know that if I got one, I would be failing everything because I’m one of those obsessive types when it comes to playing games – and when a portable system comes into play, I’ll be screwing myself over big time.

Besides, they were all sold out at the Future Shop I was at. They were selling at $129.99 after all.

Rather, I found myself deciding between two strategy game collections, both selling for $49.99 and both extremely epic games in their own way.

• Sid Meier’s Civilization Chronicles, which consists of Civilization I through IV with all the expansions except for Civilization IV: Warlords, as well as a Civilization card game and various other things.
• Total War: Eras, which consists of every single Total War Game and their expansions. Also came along with the Limited Edition of the recently released Medieval II: Total War.

A tough call really.

I ended up getting the Total War collection. The battles of the series are absolutely impressive.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Games, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.