Christmas has come and gone and now I’m left with roughly $100 dollars in gift cards to use at Best Buy. Normally this would be a joyous occasion, however upon thinking about it…I have no idea what I want to do with this. Most things that I want right now are well over $100, which normally would be no problem, but with my current monetary status, I really don’t have the funds to be adding a lot to my gift cards. So what do I get?

I immediately thought of an iSight Camera, which will run about $150, thats in my range, but how much will I really use it a few months from now? Unless I have other people that all have iSights and Apple computers, it might lose its luster pretty fast.

Next, I pondered a flat panel monitor, but I would only want to drop that money for at least a 17″ screen, that that pushes me right out of my range.

Finally, I thought about that graphics card (for playing Half Life 2) I’ve been talking about as of late. This sounds perfect on the surface until I thought about that fact that I can get a MUCH better deal on a graphics card if I buy online than from Best Buy and I would feel like I was just tossing money down the corporate crap hole if I spend more than a I have to elsewhere at Best Buy.

I guess I’ll hold off until after the MacWorld Expo in January to see if ole’ Steve releases anything cool I might be able to order online through Best Buy. If not, I think I’ll just go with the iSight.

Suggestions? (Other than “Give it to me!”)

Here is my quandry: I was a complete addict of the origional Half Life…Freshman year of college I seem to be always playing that game. However in recent years, I have vered away from PC gaming to become a big X-Box fan (World Series Baseball 2k3 is the best, in the play-offs for season #8 now). But now Half-Life 2 has come out and I want to play it…bad. The problem is that I’m still running a Half-Life 1 era graphics card.

Needless to say, I’ve become a bit out of touch with PC gaming and I have a vague idea on what I should get to run Half Life 2 in particular and just have a good card around for a few other games as well. I know what the box or the websites say…”Required 128 mb memory, blah blah blah…” but that rarely translates in to something that can make the game playable. So I decided to ask you. What graphics card should I get?

Before I start getting posts about how great the 6800 is, there are a few conditions.
1. I don’t have a lot of money to throw at this, especially becuase I still won’t be gaming all that much on my PC…so it would be worthless to pop in an x800 or 6800. I’m looking to stick close to $100.
2. I would prefer not to have to get a slower card and overclock the hell out of it to get any preformance. Some of that is fine, but I really don’t want to get into an extreme amount of that.
3. Umm, I can’t think of a third one, so I guess there is really just 2 for now.

Can anyone out there offer some suggestions or less obvious places to find a good deal (other than the usual: Pricewatch, NewEgg or Tiger Direct)?

Christmas night I ran out and checked out the new Scorsese film, The Aviator. There was all of 6 people in the theater with me and my girlfriend, and although she kept trying to get me to make out with her, I chose to watch the movie. The final verdict? This movie was fantastic! …all some 2:40 minutes of it. (It has to be at least 2 Hours 30 Minutes because Scorsese made it, he just can’t make shorter movies than that.) There were some problems with this movie however. The ending seemed to just drop off, not it a significant way, but a little jaring. Even though DiCaprio was amazing (I think they should hand him the Oscar now.), the film never really got you to really get into it. When it was all said and done it was a very good movie and something that you should go check out instead of going to Ocean’s 12 with all the other 15 year old girls.