I took my own advice and headed to Best Buy late yesterday afternoon. In general, their Black Friday sales extended to Saturday, and while the store was packed with shoppers, that's what they all were doing—shopping; the check-out line was empty. I knew precisely what I wanted, so was able to rush to get my stuff, pop over to the cashiers, and be done in 15 minutes. I finally got a messenger kit for my XBox 360, at long last giving me a chat pad (and a second back-up headset). I also grabbed the new Ratchet and Clank PS3 installment and season three 30 Rock DVDs. The real coup was the Star Trek movie Blu·rays I mentioned before Thanksgiving. I grabbed Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Country, and First Contact. They'd only advertised the first four "even" ones, and that was all they had. I don't know if the lesser "odd" ones are even available singly yet, but would gladly have bought Generations and Search for Spock. There was no sale price label on the rack, but their website still listed them as $7.99 (I checked on my iPhone while standing next to the rack). Nervous the deal was too good to be extended to Saturday, I even asked a sales associate, who told me that as long as the website said so, even if they rang up higher they'd honor that price. In the end, the price was right and I got four great movies on the best format available for $32, which is an amazing deal. Best of all was having $75 in gift cards and a $35 Reward Zone certificate, so all that only cost me $60 out-of-pocket.

I'm nearing the end of the Circle Tower mage's quest on Dragon Age: Origins. I really though I'd finish yesterday, but I've been shunted off to the Fade, a sort of dreamland, for an extended and slightly less-fun sequence. I'm most curious to see if my chatpad will function with the game's conversation choices. They're all numbered, so it would be nice to just tap the number of the choice I want instead of selecting it with the analog stick or directional pad. I'm guessing the chatpad won't work that way, but for now I'll hope.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading, everybody!

Hopefully all my American friends had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Since there's so few in my immediate family, we hit up a Ruby Tuesday for lunch. A friend's niece was stuck waitressing the holiday, so we all joined my friend going there and avoided any cooking. And being able to have a few mojitos was a big plus. The meal was pretty excellent and enjoyable since the restaurant was at most a third full. And was really the extent of my holiday, since I had no desire to join Black Friday shopping madness, though I've got $110 in gift cards and Reward Zone certificates for Best Buy, so I might go there today. I really want a chat pad for XBox 360 now that Facebook's on the system.

My friend and I also, at long last, got to watching Torchwood "Children of Earth" that night. We managed the first three of the five parts Thanksgiving night, and that even had its own outside excitement. Between parts two and three I heard a truck pull outside and idle loudly for a long time, which is odd for any night at 9:00, let alone a holiday. I generally don't bother looking out a window since the way my house is built, there's no first floor window to look out the front; you have to go upstairs. After few minutes we heard some sirens and opened my front door to this. It was really a big nothing. I'm guessing my friend thought she might've had a (or did have a minor) chimney fire. They put a big ladder to the chimney and some firemen went around back, but they were gone in about 20 minutes and never even hooked up a firehose. Black Friday night we did the last two parts and were really blown away. It was like they spent a 13-episode season's budget on the five hours. Hopefully it's not the end of the show, and wikipedia still lists its original run as "–present". I fear it could become yet another British show where they only make 20% as many episodes as they should.

I also got a lesson on Thanksgiving in how fast even a minor celebrity can get a decent following on Twitter. Rainn "Dwight Schrute" Wilson twittered early in the afternoon that Stephen Tobolowsky was now online, and I happily followed, being around the 250th to do so. By around 8:30, he was already up around 1,500 people, which is around two followers picked up per minute. For someone who's perhaps most well-known as insurance salesman Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day (a movie that's now over 16 years old), that's not too bad. Of course, he's known today also as sweater-tying, drug-dealing, former club-directing Sandy on Glee.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading, everybody!

Just a quick pre-holiday note to ring in the holiday season. I just got an e-mail with Best Buy's Black Friday circular, and whatever you're in to, they've got great deals for you if you feel like braving Friday's early-morning lines.

Videogames: Dragon Age: Origins, Need for Speed: Shift, and Left 4 Dead 2 (and some others) for $35 each.

TV: season sets of Friends and King of Queens (among others) for $10 each

Blu-Rays: lot of titles (including several Star Trek movies) for $8. Lots of plain DVDs can be had for $4.

And as for Dragon Age, I've just wrapped up the third of the five treaty quests. I can also say that among my XBox Live friends, it seems to be a tie with Modern Warfare 2 for most-played, as 3 or 4 of my 27 friends are playing each game regularly right now.

That's all for today Have a great Thanksgiving, everybody!

Sadly, but not wholly unpredictably, it appears Numb3rs' number may be up. CBS recently cut the episode order down to 16 episodes, which is never a good sign for a show's continuing to the next season. It was a bubble show last year, and it was roughly 50/50 for CBS to keep it or Without a Trace for this season. Sadly, ratings have degraded even more. For a show whose premise boils down to 'CSI, but with math instead of science' it's done pretty well for itself, and I was always somewhat impressed that our land of 'dumb Americans' still had enough people to support a math-heavy show. Sadly, if it does go away it'll leave me with nothing to watch Friday, at least as far as 'real' shows. I'll still have Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Also, between Navi Rawat, Aya Sumika, and Sophina Brown they may have had the hottest female cast on TV, so it'll be sad to see them go.

Still, when one door closes, another opens. Like I did with NCIS over the summer thanks to USA reruns, I'm getting on the Criminal Minds bandwagon thanks to A&E's nearly as numerous reruns, and I started DVRing the new episodes about a month back. Of course, of the first five A&E repeats I caught, three were the only three I'd ever seen when they aired new. It's not always an easy show to watch, even for those with the strongest fortitude to handle violence and depravity (and they promise Wednesday's 100th episode is the most disturbing yet), but it's certainly compelling. I've not seen enough yet piece together the stuff I've missed, as I still hear about this Foyet serial killer non-stop, but have yet to catch a story related to him. Still, it's always a pleasure to have Paget Brewster grace my television screen (maybe even hotter than when Chandler spent Thanksgiving in a box over her), but this A.J. Cook girl can go right out the window. I'm sure she's a wonderful person, but her character of Agent Jareau seems to be one of the most unncessary characters on TV. She seems to rarely do more than handle press and be a liaison with LEOs, and seems very obviously to be there just to give the other actors a breather. On the other hand, add Spencer Reid to the list including Timothy McGee and Sheldon Cooper of characters I completely identify with.

I whacked away a nice chunk of Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend, completing the first of four quests needed to unite the lands against the darkspawn invasion. The sidequests are exceedingly plentiful. In each town there's multiple people/organizations offering multiple tasks, from the church, mage's guild, assassination contracts, mercenaries, and even the bartender may have some tasks. They may be complex and dangerous (seeking out baddies and eliminating them) or very mundane and safe (deliver condolence letters to cities scattered across the realm informing wives of their new widowhood). Meanwhile, dual achievements for doing the main quests one way vs. another seem to not be so tough. Even though I'd kept a few back-up saves to make sure I caught the correct 'fork-in-the-road', it was as the very end that there was a very clear, defining choice to be made, so the reload to do it the other way only takes another minute.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading, everybody!

I've wrapped up all six origins stories to Dragon Age: Origins, and am finally in the game proper. The first I did was the one I planned on keeping, a human warrior noble. All the other origins are truly different stories, though they have same end (you being recruited by the elite Grey Wardens) and any super nice items you acquire or massive wealth promised to you is stripped away. The extra achievements I collected aside, it was not bad to do them as you get practice with different skills and cla$$es that you'll need to use later anyway once you get a full adventuring party, so the extra time spent wasn't totally a waste. The story is one of demons and 'darkspawn' attacking, along with the political intrigue and treachery created by neighboring states forced into uneasy alliances to deal with the threat. Battle is very similar to Bioware's Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale PC games, with you being able to pause any time to issue new orders, and the people not under your control have default programs to govern their actions when not given an order (think FFXII's gambits) that you can also modify. I'm dying to find a rogue right now so I don't have to bypass locked chests/doors. I've only got Alastair in my party right now, who is like me a warrior. Part of the reason I went against being a rogue is I knew SabotFox is playing as one, so I'd have a different perspective on the game. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to advancing now that things will likely be less linear, and I should have more freedom.

As to Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, I'm down to 3˝ tables. I have to do the Wizard Goals in Medieval Madness (having completed the Basics before dinner last night), and then I'll tackle Space Shuttle, Whirlwind, and Pin·Bot. Then I just have to tackle the Williams Challenge and I'll be done. I'm still very impressed with how well the sounds and graphics make not just the tables themselves feel authentic, but impart the feeling of being in an 80s arcade, and the controller shaking just a tad when a ball rolls from far away on to a flipper is a nice touch that feels right. You should be able to get this new for $30, and if you're at all a pinball fan I highly recommend it.

Microsoft introduced their new goodies over XBox Live on tuesday. I don't have a Zune or use last.fm, so they're of no use to me. The Twitter interface is decent enough, though not as powerful as the Tweetdeck app on my iPhone, but if my phone were charging in another room I could see myself using it for a quick tweet. The Facebook engine is very bare-bones and not terribly practical. The one big thing it offers, however, is viewing photos on your TV. As a friend of mine pointed out, without the ability to go to links in tweets and status updates, this is all very limiting. And with PS3 announcing they will soon have Facebook intergration (and presumably the ability to handle links since PS3 has a web browser), Microsoft may have to finally get some sort of browser on the 360.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading, everybody!