Geekness of it

I spent a lot of money today. Believe it or not, for the first time in my life I bought a computer entirely with my own money.

Of my first computer, a 60 MHz 486 with 400 MB hard drive and a whopping 16 MB of memory, my dad paid half and I paid the other half. I put my hard earned money from my summer job to it and later on I installed a CD-ROM drive to it (since of course it didn't come with one). The year was 1995 I think, and the computer was called Holly after Red Dwarf's computer.

Holly kicked the bucket when I was doing my final year project at the Uni: I got a BSD in middle of compiling a file. Rebooted, and she never came back. Holly was laid to rest and since I was just a poor student, parents were called in to help with finances. The new beauty was a 600 MHz Pentium III with a 10 GB hard drive and respectable 128 MB of memory. This was in 2000 and she was called Aeryn, after Farscape's lovely Aeryn Sun.

Aeryn has served us faithfully, and was upgraded with more memory, a bigger hard drive and a CD-ROM burner about two years ago. But now it's time for her to retire too. I think she'll be staying around for a while still, but a new sexy beast has been ordered and paid for. I'm hoping she will be delivered early next week.

(And for those geeks in the audience who think I should have built my own computer, I can only say that my beard isn't quite long enough for that. I'm quite happy and lazy enough to select the components and then give £50 to someone to build it for me.)

Later: And Sami, I swear I wrote this before I saw your entry!