Or, more to the point, new blue computer. As in, IBM. But first, a quick rundown of the other events of the weekend.

Friday night (Halloween) I went to the Winter Hawks game and watched what essentially amounted to a colossal game of Pong. I wasn’t into it, the nonexistant crowd wasn’t into it, and the team wasn’t into it. They really kicked it in gear for around five minutes there, but that just wasn’t enough to hold my attention too well. I flipped through a magazine for some of it because I was irritated and bored with the poor hockey. The goalie now makes stupendous difficult saves but will watch the puck travel slowly through the five-hole like there’s nothing he can do about it. Maybe time for a trade?

Saturday morning I took my car for an oil change (Acura “free lube for life,” baby!) and helped out my parents at their garage sale. It was maybe 40 degrees Fahrenheit out all day long but buttloads of people showed up. I was taking the money and I couldn’t keep up with it! It didn’t help that my parents didn’t have half of the stuff marked.

When all was said and done there, I got rid of a bunch of crap and raked in around $20. Not the most colossal haul ever, but it’s more room in my apartment and $20 I didn’t have before. Maybe I can buy, like, a Coke at the hockey game.

Saturday night I went to a Halloween party over at my friends Jason and Tracy’s house. Their parties always rock. I was much more happy with my costume this year than with my costume from last year, and folks were suitably impressed. Played a little air hockey, played a little pool, and generally hung out. I look forward to the next one. I’d have parties at my place but I don’t know enough people who’d show up (I’ve tried that before).

Sunday I spent most of the day hooking up the new computer. I got an IBM ThinkCentre M50 with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 video card… it rules. I hooked that up and was finally able to plug in all of the devices I’ve got because of the miracle of USB. Plus it recognized them all automatically, which is exactly what it should do. It just doesn’t get better than that. It’s so much faster, so much better, I don’t know why I didn’t upgrade before.

Oh, yeah I do. Cost.

I got a good deal on this, though, and it works like a charm. Love it. I only ran into two problems, both related.

First, I wanted to put my modem from my old computer into this new one. So I took the modem out of the old one, popped open the case on the new one and… saw that all of the cards in the new computer are low-profile. Which means they’re half the size of the full-height cards. Which means my old modem is two times too high to fit in the new computer. Dammit. So I’m searching for a new modem.

Second, I wanted to hook my scanner up to the new computer. The scanner is a SCSI device, which means I need to move the SCSI controller from my old machine to my new one. Which means I need to pull that card out of the old machine and… yeah, that’s right. It’s two times too big, too. So I’m searching for a new SCSI controller.

I went to Fry’s and picked up a USB 2.0 160GB external hard drive so I have loads of space to store all of my media files and documents. Why didn’t I get another internal drive? Only enough room for one drive in the low profile box. I got it for $200 after rebate, though, and that’s not too bad considering the price of 160GB drives and the price of external drive enclosures. It even comes with different faceplates so you can customize the colors and stuff on it.

Today I ordered an external USB 2.0 DVD+/-RW/CD-RW drive from Best Buy. $200 after mail-in rebate and I’m good to go. That should be here in the next couple of weeks.

I’m kinda digging this whole low-profile-and-external-drive-combo thing. Makes it easier to use the hardware elsewhere, take it to a friend’s house, etc. Or if you don’t need it, but you’re taking your computer, you don’t have this full size tower case to lug around. Pretty cool.

Oh, I also finally bought a car power charger for my iPod. I’ve been caught too many times without battery power in there. No more!