i’ll admit it – i’m cramming in a few posts to try to get my monthly total respectable.  on the other hand, microsoft’s pricing for hard drives is absolutely absurd, and now that i’m up against my 20gb hard drive’s limit, i’m going to have to make some tough decisions.

i don’t download movies.  i don’t buy a ton of arcade games.  i definitely don’t install games on my xbox.  however, my drive is full.  i get a lot of demos.  i do have a few full arcade games.  but the killer for me is the DLC – i religiously buy DLC for games i like, because why wouldn’t i want more levels of rainbow six or call of duty 5, but these things take up a ton of space.  so, my decision to 1) buy multi-platform games on the xbox and 2) spend money on xbox live’s marketplace has caused me to run out of hard drive space.  of course, it seems pretty obvious to me that this behavior is something microsoft would want to encourage, so maybe they wouldn’t take a huge markup on their hard drive upgrades.

to be more plain, the only reason one would buy a xbox 360 hard drive upgrade is so one can spend more money on xbox 360 games and xbox live’s marketplace.

and yet a 120gb hard drive, something i can get on newegg for $65 and on ebay for even less, sets me back $135.  a full 100% mark-up on a device that will almost always be purchased by someone enthusiastic about using the system and spending money on the system.

so i think for multi-platform games from now on i’m going to just stick with the playstation 3 – it has more capacity out of the box, and hard drive upgrades are encouraged rather than blocked off by proprietary technology.  this plan will go into effect once i get my ps3 repaired.  which is a whole other story, which i probably won’t post, because it’s even more boring then this post and the previous one.

in my own personal attempt at having a mid-life crisis at 28, i have replaced my 1998 toyota camry with a 2010 audi a4.  i got the car last monday.  so far, it has been a great decision.  after one week, i drove the car 336 miles, or 48 miles a day.  if i maintain that rate, i will drive 17520 miles this year, and 52560 miles in 3 years.  my lease is for 3 years and 45,000 miles, so, sustaining this driving rate, i will be 7560 miles (or $1890) over my miles limit at the end of the lease.  of course, i will not sustain this driving rate – i drove every day the first week, including a very unusual 80 miles round trip to the buffalo wild wings in dublin, california and a pretty abnormal 55 miles round trip to benihana in burlingame, ca on a weeknight.  a weeknight!

so as you can see, my life is not at all interesting.