Treasure hunting

So today I found a major score. On my daily travels in Arlington, I found someone that was giving away a free computer. That's right a 6-7year old pentium III with 128 MB of Ram and a 30 MB hard drive. Who the hell wants that? I do. Believe it or not, that's actually newer than the linux box at work. So how well does linux run on a machine that old? Let's be honest and say the bigger desktop environments for linux (e.g., KDE and Gnome) run pretty slow on these machines. So I installed a linux distro built almost specifically for older systems, VectorLinux. I've never used VectorLinux before but I am pretty thoroughly impressed. It is a very well documented distro; I was able to answer every question I had with their built-in help. Anyway, I now have a total champ of a computer that I can take to work and replace the one rotting on my desk. FYI, I also have a $1500 Windows XP box on my desk. Guess which one I use to write papers and which one I use to check my e-mail with? You might be surprised.

Speaking of work, for those of you perhaps working on your research I'd pass this along. Two USGS WRD folks wrote this on-line statistics book which is available for free. Hands down, it the best applied statistics book for the natural sciences i have ever seen. Be careful about printing it out though; it's about 300 pages.

Lastly and probably most interestingly, here is a funny movie I found on ye olde internet about the purpose of the internet. Probably not safe for work but not really vulgar or anything either.