You must forgive me for taking the back seat in my blog as of late. If I'm not busy tweaking a forthcoming GnomeDOWNLOADS portal, writing articles for CPU magazine, working at TechTV, working on GnomeTOMES, repurposing content I plan on publishing elsewhere, then I'm building a new system from scratch. Wanna see what components I've collected so far? Check 'em out. I plan on assembling this system over the weekend; I didn't even bother to get a floppy drive for it. The board and memory sticks came to us courtesy of Intel. Gotta love testing new hardware, eh?! Robert Heron, Gretchen, and I took a trip to the Fry's in Sunnyvale this evening to pick up the parts shown in the aforelinked video. Could I have gotten 'em cheaper elsewhere? Most likely, but I'm not up for buying system components online anymore. Not that I couldn't, just that I really don't appreciate the (near 9%) local sales tax that gets slapped onto every order! Yeah, I know you Canadians are laughing at me right now – but it wasn't half this bad back in Iowa. The money certainly isn't going to our highways, that's for sure.

I'm transferring the Plextor CD-RW, generic DVD, and nVidia-based video card from my current system; everything else will remain. So, what do you think I'm missing? I considered getting other devices for my empty drive bays, but don't really know of anything that I'd need. Almost picked up a FireWire CF reader down there; it was a little on the pricey side, but that's what you get for speed. I'd use it to dump my digital images as well as transfer music to and from my Pocket PC. Maybe at some point in the future? Mr. Advocacy can kiss my ass. My eye is still on that Samsung LCD I made note of yesterday, but that might have to wait until my bank account recovers. Hey, I only do this once every two years, so it's not like I'm addicted to upgrading my hardware. Not that I would mind an addiction like that, but… still. I'll go from a 1.0Ghz PIII to a 2.5GHz P4 overnight. The difference, according to my calculations, will be like night and day. And I'm the kinda guy who notices when one pixel is out of place.