Just saw a blurb on the Register and checked it out myself - Walmart is selling Duron 1ghz Microtel systems with 128mb of ram for $399, sans windows and monitor. The hard drive is only 5400RPM, the integrated video card is nothing to write home about - but the price is certainly right, and while there are no AGP slots, you can still get decent performance from a PCI card. This is far from a screaming LAN party rig, but for a poor high school student looking for a college machine, this does not look bad. And even with the limited RAM and video capabilities it ships with, a 1Ghz Duron goes a long, long way.

"Why do birds suddenly appear/ whenever/ you are near?" I'm in love, ladies, gentlemen, and slashdotters. In love with the nicest little keystroke loggers you ever did see, the keyghosts (www.keyghost.com). These little bundles of Big Brother joy look just like some sort of PS/2 adaptor or extension cable, and can store 500kb of EVERYTHING that is typed on the keyboard.

You could swap these babies onto a person's box in 10 seconds, tops, and a nontechnical user would never notice. I'll be getting one of these soon - I wonder if I can use it to get teacher passwords at my high school? Shouldn't be too hard - just wander into the room when a teacher isn't there, plug in a keyghost, and walk away. Pointless fun, that.

Advice for anyone using this, though: if possible, you should use the keyghost with some sort of logging software as well. That gives you redundancy, and if someone gets suspicious they will tend to look for a software-based logger, find it, and go away happy. Just a thought.

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I'm really, really glad I live in New Hampshire. Tonight there was a performance of Copenhagen in Concord. You may know the play - it's about the meeting in Sept. 1941 between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Copanhagen. Bohr ended up working for the Manhatten Project, Heisenberg ran the German A-bomb (and later, atomic reactor) program.

The play itself is...well...interesting. Three people are sitting in a room, talking about the responsibility of scientists in wartime. That's the play, and you love it or hate it. I left at intermission - not so much because I didn't like the play, but because the guy playing Heisenberg spoke way too fast.

The cooler part, though, was what happened before the play. Joachim Heisenberg is the son of Werner Heisenberg and a prof at UNH Durham, and he had a 40-min question and answer session before the play. Highlights:
-NHPR's Laura Connoi was running the session, and referred to Werner Heisenberg as the man in charge of the German fusion program during WWII. -Something that really struck em that prof. Heisenberg said: "We don't know what was really said at that time...truth is something that cannot be reconstructed without specific evidence."

Maybe I'll add more stuff later, but it's late and I want to go to bed. Suffice to say, this guy is cool. That in and of itself is enough to make me doubt his father was really working as hard as he could to give the Nazis an A-Bomb - I don't believe a total bastard is capable of raising a cool kid. On that note, goodnight my fellow Slashdotters, and peace until the morrow.

So, I finally decided to bite the bullet and start a journal today. I don't really know why, but I am. I blame peer pressure - a lot of my friends have Blogs, and I figured "why not?"

Other entries will be better, I promise. I really can write. Really.