Over the last few months I have had a great deal of fun and pain with electronics and gadgets. In the last few months I have:

Buidling a home theater
I had been planning on building a home theater in my new house since August and I finished the majority of it in December 2009. Here is what I went with:

For roughly $3500 I have a 110″ 1080p image projected on my wall and great surround sound. I am by no means an audio or a video expert so this upgrade in quality has blown me away and was well worth the investment considering that you can spend the same about on a 55″ TV which is 25% of the size and the sound would be lacking. Some days I still wonder if I should have gone with the TV as the projector requires a bit more maintenance and doesn’t look good during the day. When I put a movie on at night, those little niggling thoughts go away and I remember how awesome theater can be! If you can control the light in your room and don’t mind playing around a little to set it up then there isn’t a better value on the market.

Repairing/Upgrading a broken PC
Moving my PC ended up being a series of unfortunate events.

What did I learn?
Research the chips a bit better. “Supported” and “Supported at full speed” are different things.
Don’t power off a machine during a bios update (duh…this was an accident as I left the disc in the drive at boot up)
Check everywhere for a delivered package, even if it required a signature.
Run x86memtest or something like that when you get new RAM.
Keep in mind how easy pre-built laptops are! 🙂
Next time consider just buying everything new to start with as I have probably invested what a reasonable new machine would have cost if I was searching for deals.