I finally got all of the stuff I needed to build a new box and have been assembling it. I wanted to buy things locally and have someone locally put it together, but no one stocks anything that isn’t ‘vanilla’, and acceptable to the masses.

I’ll throw in links to the major pieces at Newegg.com, but I didn’t buy everything there, as they weren’t carrying some things when I decided to buy them, but are now.

I am using this power supply and case because they had a good price when purchased together.

Then I went with this ASRock motherboard because it had SATA III, USB 3.0, and support for an AMD APU processor. The APU has both a CPU and GPU on the chip which means I didn’t need to buy a graphics card. Then I added 8 Gigs of RAM to support the quad core processor.

I added two WD 1 Terabyte hard drives and a Blu-ray DVD drive/burner.

I broke down and bought a new Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse for this box because once you discover the joy of not having to deal with the tethers, especially on the mouse, you will never go back.

The most difficult thing to locate was the monitor. I went all over locally trying to find one, but no one had one with an HDMI interface and built in speakers. I don’t want to give up desk space to separate speakers. I even looked for a 22-inch HDTV, but at that size they are all 720P screens, and I wanted the 1080P, and they don’t have an HDMI interface.

I have everything in the case and just have to adjust some cable placements before ‘smoke testing’, i.e. add power and see if it burns up. This is the fun part where you find out if the cables were properly labeled and if the switches work.

The guys who designed the manual for the motherboard need a new printer because the font on the connections diagram is so large I can almost read it without a magnifying glass. I feel certain they can find a smaller font to really make it a challenge.

All of the advertising for these parts is targeted towards gamers and over-clocking. I’m just looking for the most current technology, so I don’t have to buy anything for years, and can still use common peripherals.

I’m planning on putting Win 7 Pro on one drive and Linux on the other, but that can change.

Position: 26.3N 87.5W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Nearly Stationary.
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph [ 85 kph].
Wind Gusts: 60 mph [ 95 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 175 miles [280 km].
Minimum central pressure: 998 mb ↓.

Currently about 215 miles [ 350 km] South-Southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the coast of Louisiana from the mouth of the Pearl River West to Morgan City.

I’ve been watching this for a while and it was officially declared after a Hurricane Hunter mission into the storm. Most of the wind is to the East of the storm.

The forecast has the storm turning West and heading for the Texas coast due to a high pressure ridge pushing down from the North.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]