I don't really know why I've never used Ebay before. Thinking back, I can't come up with any real good reason, except maybe it's because I've always had this thing against used stuff. I can't explain it really but buying a used item never really made sense to me. I don't even know when I came to my senses either and realized that I didn't care whether the item was used, as long as I paid less for it than I normally would. Perhaps the main thing about used items to me, actually, is the fact that I hate scuffed up and battered and scraped up (et al) stuff. When I buy something I usually take care of it properly - for instance I go nuts when my sisters leave one of my DVDs lying out atop the DVD player. For cripes sakes.

So I guess I've finally overcome my aversion somewhat, although I'm still looking very carefully at the items I'm buying to make sure they don't look to bad. Today I got some good deals - bought that KDS electronic cd organizer I was asking abotu in the Lounge a few days ago for $5.50 (not counting S&H) - that's way cheaper than the original $150 MSRP! I also bought another Belkin 4-port USB hub for $25 (total), which was a few bucks cheaper than the one I have now that I got from Circuit City. So yea. Yey Ebay!

In other news I also purchased my laptop today. I was going to wait until Jan but they had a special offer that ended today that gave me an upgrade to 512MB of RAM for free, which saved me a cool $100. It was a fiasco purchasing the damn thing tho - my parent's credit cards both were denied by Sony's site. I finally had to use my Mom's debit card. Thank god my parents are so cool. I'm going to be paying $200-$300/mo on top of my rent for it. That's about 2/3 my monthly income so not too bad.

On the programming side of things I've decided to strip out Katana's message system and replace it with callbacks. It'll still act like a message system, but instead of the messages being dispatched and then checked whenever, the message will invoke a function that's handled immediatly. I hate to do this but it's such a pain in the ass to debug the engine without spending time on building in tools to track the messages. It'll be much easier when I can just step through everything rather than having to place a breakpoint in the message handler somwhere in order to "catch" the message when it's finally handled. So it's back to Enterprise Architect - I'm going to draw up a new set of UML diagrams to impliment this new system and code it tomorrow.

I'm starting to get real impatient with the time it's taking me to do all this crap. This is my first real engine using advanced C++ techniques so I knew it would be a rocky road but I was hoping to be making games with it by now. Although I did take a long break from programming from around May to like October, so that accounts for a lot too. But still. Hmph. Ah well, at least I haven't made any serious steps backwards or anything. Everything I've stripped out and replaced has been an improvement, and I'm always learning. I just hope by the time I'm actually done with this I'll still wanna make games [lol]

So hopefully my new laptop will be here next week! YAY!!1