Something about weekends. I’m not online as much (I’m sure Lisa would disagree with that), and it tends not to bother me. Basically it means that each week I tend not to take a break from posting over the weekend. Of course, that means that I’m backed up come Monday and I can’t think of what topics to write first. That easily leads to procrastination, and now it is Wednesday and I have been silent since Friday. These three day weekends don’t help, either (not that I would get rid of them or anything).
This weekend was quite a refresher, because so many things worked their way towards completion. The apartment being on of them. The couch was delivered on Saturday, so we now have a working living room. Not that it was broken before, but we can both sit and watch TV there now. It certainly opens up the apartment more when you can start using all of the rooms. Inspired by such additions, I’ve packed away a lot of my crap that was still sitting around in milk crates. Unfortunately we now have a bunch of empty milk crates, but one step at a time, please. At the very least, I can see inviting people over in the near future.
The end of last week also brought several deliveries. I now have a 1 GB card for my Digital Rebel. That means that I can take close to 300 pictures without worries (or 130 in RAW format). Now I just have to go out and find photo-worthy subjects (my sister’s wedding this upcoming weekend may just be the first opportunity). On top of that, my new computer was delivered. Yeah, I was sick of how poorly my old one was handling USB 2.0, so I bought one of those barebone kits from Tiger Direct that included a nice new case, motherboard, Athlon XP 3000+ CPU, and added on 512MB of 400MHz RAM. Oooohh, you may all bask in my geeky glow! It has been reconstructed (aside from one or two minor components) and is running smoothly. I will be taking the leftovers from my old desktop and my current server to form a new server. By their powers combined, mighty they shall be!
I also went down to Philly Friday night for dinner with my family. We ate at a wonderful restaurant (The Continental), and enjoyed our usual witty repartee. The more time I spend in areas like Old City, the more I realize that I would rather live in Philly than New York. As much as you have at your fingertips in NYC, you don’t have neighborhoods that nice. Chances are I will never live in a city again, but I do imagine myself talking Lisa into moving closer to PA as time progresses. In the meantime, we will enjoy our life together in Montclair.
I’m just curious, how much did the new system cost? I’ve been looking at either building one for Eva, or getting a new one for myself and giving her my current one. Her dad builds pcs from spare parts, and I think he used some battlebots leftovers to make her current one, because either the hard drive or power supply craps out every few weeks.
I picked up this base system, but it also came with a $40 rebate to drop it below $300. The memory still has a $30 rebate, which is why I upgraded to the faster RAM, too. If you poke around their barebones section, you can often find setups with rebates, etc. that bring the price down low. I still had my old hard drives, video card, a new TV card, a DVD burner, flat panel monitor, speakers, and wireless keyboard/mouse combo that helped me keep the whole purchase to under $350. But that was for an XP 3000+. You could easily pickup a 2400 or so for close to $200, which would leave you more room to pickup the other stuff.
Joseph also got his latest setup from there – he picked up one of the Biostar systems, which came with a hard drive, cd writer, etc. I think it cost him about the same as me, but he got a slower CPU.
Tiger was easy to buy from, and I do recommend them.
I’ve been poking around on newegg.com, mostly for pricing. Any opinion on them?
Thanks for the link to tiger, I’ll have to check them out this weekend with Eva. She doesn’t need anything too fancy; hell, if it runs, it’s basically a step up for her right now. 😛
Coincidentally enough, I got the CF card from newegg. They were good, but I have two caveats:
1. The prices fluctuate like crazy on their site. I went to buy the card one day after seeing a link that said it was $116. By the time I got there it was already $119. I was going to order it that night, but forgot. The next day it was up to $130. I had to wait a few more days for it to drop down to $123 and then under $120.
2. They’re in Jersey. Yup, you actually have to pay sales tax to order online from them. That negates a lot of the savings they have over other sites. And it doesn’t get you the merchandise any faster. It took 3 days for my card to go from Edison to Montclair. I could have walked there faster!