Considering I found 250,000 yen (bout AU$2600) in my bank account last week (cant believe I’m actually saving money here) I decided to upgrade a few things (and there’s still money left over for travel later).
I bought a new corded logitech g3 mouse that’s much easier to use when gaming and general use on a big screen.
I upgraded my headphones to some mega nice audio technica ATH-AD900’s. Their frequency response is huge: 5-35000hz. Music sounds amazingly more complex and alive, the bass is not overly heavy like my clipon Koss KSC-35’s, but is richly detailed and sounds like it can handle much lower frequencies than that which most music uses. I tried playing Half-Life 2 Episode 1 last night with them, and… whoa…
To compliment them and so my housemates and I can listen to two things at once (ie music or video on the notebook screen, and music or video through the tv), I got a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card. I’ve just finished configuring it such that sounds from both cards (that and the onboard sound) go through the notebook speakers if no headphones/speakers are connected, and when something’s connected, it separates the sound output to notebook speakers/headphones and either line-out, with video’s naturally prioritised to be played on the tv. The other reason I upgraded is that with the onboard sound you can hear the beeps of the harddrive working. Now using headphones it’s completely silent 
Yesterday I also got a new desktop microphone as the one on my notebook display has stuffed itself with silence and static. It seems to be a bit quiet but after messing with a few audio controls seems to be working alright.
Today I’m going to get some new work shoes - my 9 year old ones (bought for Jazzy’s wedding) have had it. This evening I’m going to Kendo. I went to Judo last night but no one showed up.. must’ve been a holiday or something.
We had some lightning the other night, and I managed to take my first photos of lightning (clouds) with 1 second exposures. I have to post those postcards and upload more photos (Gifu; sumo; Imaike intersection; sunset; lightning… coming up soon).