Missing the house, shopping for a video card, iPhone games

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It pains me every time I think about it -- my parents have sold their house. They've done so many renovations in anticipation of it going to the market, you'd hardly recognize it now. Well, the interior anyway -- the kitchen is completely redone, upstairs is all hardwood, as are the stairs. The cobblestoned backyard patio they've had for a while but looking at it now I'm amazed anew at the result that my dad put so many hours into. I really should visit them more often.

I've just about picked out a new video card, and am aiming for either the XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 ($280) or the XFX ATI Radeon 5870 ($380). I'd forgotten that there are so many flavours of each GPU these days. I used Ars Technica's system picks to help me get to my decision, which I've always found useful in the past. My current card, a Sapphire ATI HD 4870 x2 (2x1GB), conks out whenever I start doing anything that tasks the 3D GPU stuff, though at times (and more frequently with each boot-up) it will throw ugly vertical stripes down the screen, so that I have to resize/reposition my browser so that I can read things! And so, I'm being denied Civ 5, StarCraft 2, Dead Rising 2 and Fallout New Vegas.

Yeah, with this glut in home PC gaming, I've taken to playing more iPhone games, especially now that I am able to use my gift card money towards app purchases (and that my phone has a zippier processor). In addition to 10PinShuffle, I've taken a liking to BeastBoxing, Pocket Frogs and Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. With the exception of the frog game, I recommend the rest -- they make excellent use of the iPhone interface. Pocket Frogs is just this dumb bug-eating thing which I strangely get a kick out of.

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