Computer ordered

The order is away!

I ended up making a few minor changes to the wish list. For $22 more I upgraded to a 4600 Dual Core instead of a 4500; a little faster plus double the L1 cache size. Got a slightly different case, too, and ended up with a 400 watt power supply instead of a 350—not out of concern that it wouldn't be big enough, as after checking the numbers myself I was satisfied that my chosen card + the CPU would together pull only about half of that, but because the 350 didn't have a PCI Express connector and the 400 did.

The card I ended up going with was an ATi Radeon X600XT 128MB PCI Express, for $30 + $15 3-day shipping from Geeks.com. Given that the card is going for $80-90 on eBay, that's not such a bad deal at all.

I hope everything will arrive before Thanksgiving.

I Want Sandy!

I've just started playing with a rather neat toy: a "personal email assistant" called I Want Sandy. It's free, and how it works is that you drop an email to it telling it "Remind me at such and such a time about such and such a thing," and it does. It understands specific times, like 7:00 or 5 pm, or more general times like "morning" or "tomorrow." When the time comes, it'll drop you an email or, if you configure it to do so, text your cellphone about it. Pretty neat stuff.