I've been keeping an eye on this Hanns.G HG-281DPB Black 27.5" monitor for a while now. Thinking how good of a deal it was and I finally pulled the trigger on it tonight after seeing the additional instant rebates. I was thinking it was a good deal at $350 a day ago but for $310 today, it's a real steal I couldn't pass up any longer. I was considering a 42" 1080P LCD from Westinghouse, which was about $580 at Tiger Direct, but I'm just not a big TV person.
I have a 32" LCD 720P from the family I use to watch my daily news with, but aside from that I just don't like laying down and watching TV. I much prefer being at my desk doing stuff on my computer, so I'll be able to have the monitor there and hook up the 360 and keep it close by. I have a nice recliner near my desk I can use for gaming as well, which would be nice.
Come to think about it, I need to get another long Ethernet cable since my router is on the other side of the room. Darn. Actually it might be better just to get a switch for my desk and then run the desktop and 360 from there to the router. Oh well, still plenty of time to order before Monday. I usually over think all my purchasing decisions and 99.9% of the time decide to pass, so this time I just ordered and will not look back.
Hopefully this gaming break on a console and then shifted development to XNA and C# will help me a lot. I'm really struggling here with a lack of focus and it's killing me. I need to enjoy myself for once, which lately I have been doing in the form of playing Final Fantasy 7 on PC. I've actually almost gotten to where I was when I had last played it on PS1 many many years ago in about 1/2 the time. It sucks though because the window resolution is a crappy 640 x 480.
I'd love to make my own FF7ish game, that's definitely on the to-do list, along with bomberman, a gta like clone, you know, the good stuff. Maybe I should just play games and not worry about trying to make one or tools for them anymore. Doing this stuff on your own is hard, so I have a lot of respect for all the indies out there that are doing it, regardless of how successful they are or not. In theory, I should be more than capable of making a game, but something is holding me back and I don't know what yet.
Anyways, that's about it for now. Hopefully I can get something going in the upcoming months playing around with this new stuff. I do plan to spend a couple of weeks zoning out on games to clean out the system, but after that more hard work!