So about 6 months ago Alex and his coworker Kameswar went to Fry's during their lunchbreak. During that time, they bought:

A power supply

2Gigs of RAM

A video card

A network card

A huge monstrosity of a case

This GIGANTIC fan/heatsink (I've never seen something this big).

And an extra four-pack of fans, just in case

We already had an optical drive from Austin and a laser printer.

Later on, he bought this motherboard (or something that looked pretty similar. it had the same box but looks slightly different)

We also snagged a 23" monitor at Costco during black friday deals

Why all the madness, you ask? And why didn't he buy a CPU?

Well, about 6 months before that, Intel was giving away some Core2 Extreme processers to its employees who were interested in building their own system. Don't ask me why-- they probably didn't fall within the customer specs but were perfectly good parts or something. But anyway, because they're free, Alex gets one and has this great idea of building our own system. Sounds like a great idea, right?

Turns out though, that neither of us have ever done anything like this before. We had this huge mound of hardware that was supposed to be a computer, but for about almost a year it was just sitting in a pile, mocking us. So a few weeks ago we decided we would try putting this guy together.

We had a couple of snafus going in (the heatsink/fan was the worst-- it took us more than an hour to get it screwed in!) but all in all it was pretty fool-proof. You can only really plug in certain things to certain parts of the motherboard. But we tried to discharge ourselves often, and we plugged everything together, took a breath, and turned on the switch.

Nothing happened.

So following Ricky's advice, we turned it off, fiddled around with it a little more, and discovered we'd forgotten to plug in a fan and that the power supply cord had come lose. So we put those things in, turned it on once more, and it began to beep. This wonderful blue LED came on and the whole thing started whirring, thinking, almost as if to say, "HELLO WORLD!"

Yesterday we discovered that you can buy an OEM version of Windows XP for $100 less than the normal version (Thanks, Andy!) and we bought that and now we have XP loaded. Kind of exciting, considering neither of us knew anything about doing this. But it was a kind of fun little project, and kind of cool for use to learn together. Now if we can just install the copy of Photoshop Elements we got at Costco during black friday and the printer we got from Austin we'll be done!

Last night after work, I went with Alex and Austin to watch the Mamma Mia! (singalong version) movie.

Christine Baranski, I thought, was the best performer in the movie, and would have made a better Donna than Meryl Streep, but Meryl was pretty entertaining. The show itself on stage is cute, but nothing to write home about; they should have taken a queue from the Chicago team and retooled a marginal show so that it actually makes sense on the big screen, instead of trying to smoosh some of the same bad corny numbers into a movie form of the stage show.

However, it probably ranks as one of the worst movies I've ever seen (competing with Man Of The House), for this one reason: Pierce Brosnan singing. Maybe if he could actually sing it would have been acceptable. But he can't, and he knows it :P. It's pretty bad. Kind of like James Bond singing Karaoke. 

Even Colin Firth singing "Our Last Summer" was mildly palatable, but the fact that Pierce had to tackle such numbers like SOS, applying a Christian Bale-Batman-like gruffness to his voice, made the whole thing very painful. Plus, he sings in maybe 5 of the songs, which is second only to maybe Sophie or Donna.  I leaned over to Alex on several occasions, whimpering, "Alex... make James Bond stop singing..."

Anyway, my two cents.

Go youtube Pierce yourself if you don't believe me.