Simon Butcher

I've been holding back from buying a new PC for quite some time now. Actually, it's been years. My main PC has been a Toshiba Satellite M70 (1.6GHz Pentium M, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD, surprisingly good speakers, and an annoying DVD drive which cannot be flashed with RPC-1 firmware). It's a great little laptop, even today, and aside from the low-end GPU and slow HDD, it runs really well.

This poor thing has travelled the world with me, but it's about time I upgraded. For several projects I've been needing a lot more processing grunt, RAM, local storage, and (eventually) desktop real estate. Today most of the stuff has arrived, and it's taken so long because I've been very picky about what I wanted in the build. It's been a long time since I've built a PC, and a few people have asked me to show them the build…

I'm in the states for work for two weeks and was encouraged strongly by our financial director to take a trip over the weekend. I decided to head to San Francisco, despite people thinking I'm mad (the office is in Greenville, South Carolina).

Maybe it is a bit mad to travel ≅4000km for a weekend city trip, but it's nothing compared to travelling between Brussels and Melbourne! I flew to San Francisco immediately after work on Friday, via the hilariously named George Bush Intercontinental Airport (presumably because “International” just isn't enough). Well, maybe a bit before “after work” since I… err… snuck out to catch my flight…