So I, um, bought a computer last Friday.

People who followed the lead up to the purchase of my current computer--which took six months, or a year depending on who you ask--will be surprised that this happened so quickly.

For a while now I’ve wanted to have a computer that would be able to always be on so that I could download big files when I needed to without needing to fuss with making sure that my laptop could be on all night, or similar such concerns. I wanted to have a computer that I could add cheap drives to as needed. I want to be able to have a computer connected to a couple of IRC channels without needing to worry about my computer dropping on and off-line constantly (which is a politeness that I worry about.)

The thing is that it never seemed feasible. Macs are expensive computers, and this wasn’t a premium sort of use case. For many years of my life I was really mobile and having a desktop computer never made much sense. Now that this new job has started to settle down, and as I’ve gotten more into linux, it’s becoming more and more clear that having a desktop computer with lots of screen space is going to be really valuable to me in this next stage anyway, and the truth is that I spend a good deal of my computing time (with my laptop) at my desk, so a desktop made a lot of sense.

And with this growing interest in open source technology/community/history it makes a lot of sense to gather some greater familiarity with the environment. So between the new usage profile, the fact that the hardware isn’t nearly as expensive in practice, and the fact that having a linux box would be a good ethnographic experience, I just hunkered down and bought it, after only a few weeks of dithering on the subject. I even splurged and got a second monitor so that I could run dual monitors, even so it cost less than the souped up MiniMac (which is sans monitor). I’m psyched.

While I’ll spare you the unboxing photos, I think its highly likely that I’ll be writing about my experiences with this new computer as I settle in. Stay tuned…