Bought Something Day

So I’m a little frustrated that there’s this pervasive thought among the hipsters that spending money on things, especially on "Black Friday" is a great sin against humanity. (among these naysayers are the same hipsters, by the way, that have no problem at all splurging on every new gizmo, fashion accessory, web hosting service, Macintosh, and double-priced organic thai take-out… but I digress).
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Well, I don’t see anything inherently bad with shopping for things which make my life easier or just more interesting. I like to think I sometimes manage to "game the system" by playing around with rebates and froogle.google.com to get the best deals possible. (realizing, of course, that no matter what I do, I’m overpaying… but at least I’m not overpaying as much as the average joe).
And yes, I indulge in irrational impulse buys from time to time.

So I guess that makes me a Bad Person.

However, while the hipsters were smugly not buying anything today, I managed to snag a Western Digital 160GB hard drive from Fry’s for 40 bucks (with a free paper shredder to boot). Most people were paying 60 for the same drive and thinking they were walking away with a steal. (retailed $180!!)

Nyah.

I’m going to use the hard drive to build a File Server (running Subversion source control) to help me manage multiple machines / contexts / locations.

It’s a big problem / headache / life energy tax for me to constantly worry about whether the version of a document on the laptop is more or less current than the version on my desktop.

That project also gives me the chance to try out the SuSE Linux distro since Red Hat evaporated.