Sweet. My course schedule for Spring '09 has at long last been finalized. Here's what I'm looking at:

• BUS 840 - Managing in the Global Business Environment
• ECO 710 - Economics for Managers
• FIN 720 - Foundations in Finance
• MGT 780 - Management Theory and Applications
• MGT 800 - Managing Human Performance

Looks like there's a lot of management ... involved. So to help me manage my time keep my sanity, I'm treating myself to one of these :

Ah yes, the mighty Xbox 360! Oh how I enjoy being a consumer in the late majority.

Actually, I don't always adopt products when they are nearing the latter stages of their life cycle.

I have one of these: and these:

The Apple iPod Touch first generation, introduced August 2007. 10 Months later, I owned it. Thanks all go to my generous and patient girlfriend Katie, who doesn't understand my obsession with everything Apple, but feeds it anyway :-)

The 20" Aluminum Apple Intel iMac, also introducted August 2007. Less than one month after its introduction, I owned it.

So could you say that I am an Apple early adopter? No! The first iPod ever introduced was back in 2001. They took off and became insanely popular over the course of its evolution, and entrance into mainstream media and culture, saturating to the point where they became not just another must-have accessory. I didn't own one until December of 2006 (thanks again go to Katie, who started the whole sprial of Apple fanboyishness. I was largely against anything Apple because of the price tag. Little did I know just how sweet the design and function of their products really were.) Who knows when I would have actually broke down and bought one had I not been gifted one?

But that's just Apple, and computers. Lets talk gaming consoles.  A wee bit ironic, I know, that my console of choice will be a Microsoft product.  I will not repent.

NES! Nintendo Entertainment System. Quite possibly the best console ever. Now: retro classic. Then: cutting edge. My memory is hazy on this, but I believe I had an NES about four or five years after they were first introduced in 1985.

After the popularity of NES fizzled out, then came Super Nintendo (SNES). I never owned one.

Sega  Sega Saturn  Sony Playstation

Nintendo 64. Yes! It was introduced in 1996. I bought my first N64 from Ebay in 2003.

Sega Dreamcast  Nintendo Gamecube  Playstation 2  Xbox

And so here we are, at the current generation of consoles: PS3, Xbox360, and Wii.

Xbox 360 was released in 2005. I'm just now picking one up, in late 2008, on the cusp of 2009. Why?

Well for a long time I considered the PC my primary "console" or form of entertainment. I played a lot of PC games and waited months and months for console games to be released for the PC. I wasn't a huge gamer, but that, combined with the internet provided ample means of entertainment value.

However, I'm tired of waiting years for games to come out for a pseudo-console I own that may not even run them properly. What really pissed me off, recently, was that GTA IV was released for Mac/PC. This normally would have been a moment of intense celebration, but alas, I was let down by the games Mac specifications. See when I bought my Apple iMac back in September of 2007, a month before Apple's newest Leopard Operating System was released, I didn't mind too much because I knew that the old, stable version of Apple's Mac OS X would be light years ahead of any Windows based OS, regardless of what was or was not about to be released. And I was correct! However, after waiting months for GTA IV to come out for PC and maybe Mac, the game requires the Leopard OS, the one I do not have, to run properly. Rats.

A Leopard Upgrade would be nice, but costly--at approximately $110. Meanwhile, Apple has an even newer OS right around the corner: Snow Leopard.

Enter Xbox 360, to save the day. All I really want to do is play some GTA IV, Call of Duty, Need for Speed, and Guitar Hero! If I'm going to pay $100 something to upgrade my Apple OS, why not throw in an extra $200 or so to be guaranteed the ability to play every cool game, evar?

So maybe I'm not really in the late majority on this one! The console I'm buying is old, in a technological sense, but it is still a current generation console. The benefits of owning a current gen console finally outweigh the cost for me. Of course, that is largely due to the fact that I'll be getting it at a pretty decent discount because I've been racking up bonus cash by slapping tuition on my credit card.

And with that, we have come full circle; a full 360°.