I am hoping this will be the first of many, but time constraints or other circumstances may alter the hope.

A desk a mate of mine built, is the main workstation which is not far from the kitchen.   The 2-way satellite modems are connected to it and its a 2 point whatever Celeron with 512MB RAM.  I went on a bit of shopping spree and bought a laser printer, 512MB RAM, my first optical mouse and a DVD burner.  The DVD unit was because the MSDN Universal discs are in that format.

<WHINGE>Where's my MSDN? Where's my MSDN? Where's my MSDN?</WHINGE>

Side Note:  If you yell into the Internet does anyone listen or care?

The burner part of it was because they are so damn cheap and I'm a consumer.  All those goodies got stuffed into the machine and its main purpose is for running the Visual Studio IDE.

In the other block, the house is two separate concrete slabs connected by a small covered walkway, the other 2 "servers" live.  "Web" box is a 1.5G Athlon with 256MB RAM and it will host the Web Services and Web Site.  The "DB" box is a Pentium III 450Mhz with 128 MB RAM.  When the other block was being built, I installed the CAT5 to every room.

Better Half: "Why is there CAT5 running to the shower, toilet and vanity?"

Me: "Umm.. I've been thinking of running a side business?"

Better Half: "Where are the divorce papers?"

No wall jacks where put in but the cable is in place. <EVIL LAUGH/>

I deliberately chose the crappiest box to host the DB because if you know me, I will try and get the DB to the highest form possible and with as many business rules jammed into the DDL as possible.  If it performs badly I will work backwards to "fix" it, but my pick is that SQL Server and MSDE will handle it just fine..

The initial scope was a one page document that contained a mixture of process, functionality and infrastructure items.  It seems to indicate a DB schema of 150 - 250+ entities not including auditing or application specific needs.  That was about expected.  Personally I have found that any more than that requires another modeller.  Its not that you cannot do more, rather a different mind/perspective is invaluable. 

Some times a single phrase in a scope document can extrapolate to a lot of work and it is those, as well as major functionality areas, that I will be concentrating on with the client.

I've seen a few different methodologies  and I hope to use bits from all of them.  I like the XP philosophy of heavy client interaction and the rigid borg like "must have full detailed specs or kiss my ass" method.

In a nutshell I'd like it to be tight iterations of discovery, understanding and design based around functionality.