Okay, I'm at the convention

Okay, I'm at the convention center, and I have the Wi-Fi up and running. It's even 802.11g, so I'm connected at 36 Mbps. If you're wondering which geek I am, I'm the one in the black t-shirt that says "It must be user error". :) Thanks to Eric Sink, one of our speakers today, for helping me get online. He' s also sharing his little table with me and my laptop.

For breakfast, I wound up at Burger King, a few blocks south of the Hotel, only $2.17 for a sausage biscuit and milk, much more reasonable than the $2 toast at the Savery.

I think I'm the first

I think I'm the first Gnomedex blogger awake today, no one else seems to have updated yet. That's probably because I didn't stay up until the wee hours like everyone else. I've got a little more bandwidth now, as I've bypassed the lamp/phonejack thing, and increased to 34K. Unfortunately, I somehow forgot or lost the cell phone cable for my computer, so that's not going to be an option, but I should have Wi-Fi once I get over to the convention center. Now comes the quest for food, I'm not getting room service, it's $1.95 for TOAST!

Today is a Pseudo-Friday for

Today is a Pseudo-Friday for me, since I'm heading out to Gnomedex late this afternoon. I'll be sure to do some serious blogging while I'm there, as everyone else will be too, and the availability of wireless access will definitely help. Time to make sure both of my laptop batteries are charged up! My wife, Holly, is going with me, though she's not attending the conference. I guess having to live with a computer nerd is enough for her, she doesn't want to attend a conference with a bunch of them too, so she's going to be visiting some friends and family in the Des Moines area while I'm geeking out.

We're in Des Moines at

We're in Des Moines at the Savery hotel. If you're a fellow attendee, stop by room 334 if you want to meet me. :) The Savery isn't the most geek-friendly of hotels, they charge $1.00 for each outgoing local call, and I'm only get 26,400 baud out of this crappy phone line, though I'm hoping that's the lamp thing that I'm plugged into, I'll have to try bypassing that later, or I'll just go to my cell phone for wireless data, as it's faster than this primitive stuff. It's called broadband, Savery, look into it!

Since I'm from Iowa, I feel that I can bash Des Moines. I've never stayed in this part of the city before, and tonight when we went looking for a place to eat in walking distance, we didn't find much. A Domino's Pizza, a Quizno's, and that's about it. We wound up at the Marriot, a few blocks down, eating at Allie's, a restauraunt in that hotel. They had good food though, and it wasn't totally absurdly priced like many hotel restaurants.

I do wish this area of Des Moines was more like the area of downtown Minneapolis, full of great bars and eateries. Here, most of the restaurants were already closed at 7:00 on a Thursday night. Not exactly a happening place...

Because UNI buys hundreds of

Because UNI buys hundreds of computers at once when we re-do our labs, we're able to negotiate great deals with Dell, and this year we negotiated some super savings, that extend to faculty, staff, students, as well as their friends and family. Until the 15th of this month, you can order a brand new computer through UNI and save about $400-$500 off what it would cost you normally from Dell. You don't need to be affiliated with UNI in any way, as I asked about that, and was told "If they can spell UNI, they can purchase a computer on this deal." So, here's the deal, it's a Dell Optiplex GX260 machine, you only get one choice of CPU speed, the 2.66Ghz chip, which is where the most bang for the buck is right now anyhow. There are several other options you can see on the link, especially in regards to monitors and optical drives. Here is the link:

Dell Deal

To see the pricing, click the link above, then click on "Click Here to enter the Dell store and view specially priced systems recommended by the University of Northern Iowa." Then, choose the offer on the left, it should be listed at $966 or so with the default options. If you're looking to spend less, don't freak, you can. Just remove the parts you don't want.

Unless you're a serious power user or play a lot of games, you only need 512MB of RAM, 1GB isn't really necessary for most home users (myself not included). :)

I, personally, like the 18" LCD display, though you may not even need a monitor, if you've got an old one you're happy with, though these new flat panel displays are great, they take up a lot less room, and cause less eyestrain because there is no flicker with LCD technology.

In regards to the CD/DVD drives, my suggestion is to go with either the DVD/CD-RW combo drive, or the DVD+R/RW drive for a few dollars more. Either drive will let you burn CDs and watch DVDs, but the latter drive will also let you burn DVDs, for only about $45 more than the first..

In regards to video cards, either the integrated card, or the 32MB Radeon card is fine for word processing, the WWW, e-mail, etc. Neither one is a great gaming card, so if you're going to plan on doing some 3D gaming on the machine, just go with the cheap integrated video, and pick yourself up a separate 3D card to install when the machine arrives, such as this one:

GeForce 4 Ti4200 Video Card

Other than that, the default options should be fine, though I do like the USB keyboard a little better, but it's your money. Same goes for the speakers, the ones with the subwoofer sound nicer, but if you don't play many games or much music from your computer, you won't need them.

This is really an outstanding deal, I've already helped at least a dozen faculty members order them for home, one professor even ordered 3, one for himself, and one for each of his two kids, the savings are that good.

This machine also comes with a 3-year Next-Business-Day On-Site Warranty, so if something breaks, they send a guy to your house the next day who will fix/replace it for free.