I bought a new Thinkpad x31 last night from CDW. I briefly considered buying directly from IBM but after spending twenty minutes configuring a model to match what CDW had available to ship, my system crashed with a blue screen of death. ibm.com must have a shopper is defecting to another site test.

After rebooting, I skipped the ibm.com mess and just bought online from CDW in about five minutes. The new system will have 512Mb RAM, 40Gb DASD, firewire, USB2, built-in wifi/bluetooth and 10/100/1000 ethernet. I will likely kick the memory up another Gb but 512 should be ok for starters (the current system, gettysburg, has 384Mb and a 20Gb drive).

Will need to pick a name for the system. Should I continue with the cities and towns of Pennsylvania theme I've been using since '94 or so?

For the few interested in useless minutiae, I've run through

• allegheny,(the name of my work thinkpads, and the 240 I bought for use in Sydney)
• edinboro,
• meadville(was the pizza box under my desk in Armonk, then the name of my now-dead iMac),
• gettysburg(my current stinkpad x21),
• bala-cynwyd (a 43P I tortured for many years),
• mars (a cappucino mini-PC which doesn't run too well)

Perhaps it's time for another naming scheme.

This was originally entitled Argh. because I hadn't received the system yet at 7:00 pm and I was rather frustrated at having paid next day air for something that obviously was going to arrive two days later. Of course, about ten minutes after I posted this the system arrived.