Top of the line 14 year old PC would be a P2 w/ 100mhz fsb at 350, 400, or 450mhz. Up to a gig of ram, CD R/RW drive, IDE or SCSI hard drive of 10-30gb.

Still very usable as a basic desktop system (surf web, email, light wordprocessing) or a server for a low-traffic domain (ie, wouldn't withstand the /. effect but for everything else.....)

typically collections of cultural resources

I'd change this to "cultural and educational resources", and add in places for social gathering - how many childhood friendships started out as 2 mommies taking their kids to reading circle time at the local library? Quite a few, and I know that I still had social contact with some of my reading@thelib times through highschool even though we never attended the same schools.

The plane'arium at the college I work for has both a star machine and a projector. Projector takes in mpeg-1 at 30fps and 1024x1024 ... Several good shows (The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zepplin, etc) have been purchased, and I'm working on the graphic design program to get students to do stuff using the music freely available on archive.org (mostly the Dead concert recording stuff...)

Music? No problem... most of us here in our offices like music.

However, one lady has planned 3 weddings in the past 2 years, as well as various conferences and stuff that is barely job related.

And, I found out last week that her son is getting married, so we're going thru another wedding plan....

You are part of an HOA. I'm assuming that some/many/most others in the HOA also want better services. Raise HOA rates a bit, have the HOA run the wires and provide the service.

And yet, it is relatively easy - at least for highschools that have a University that offers a CS program within 45 minutes to an hour drive - to hire a grad student to teach one period a day. Just an adjunct at high school level instead of a community college....

That is how I took Latin in high school (guy would come over from the uni for 2 periods a day), and it is how the senior level programming class was taught (we learned Fortran and Cobol on green screen terminals hooked up to a machine at UF).

I telnet to port 80, issue GET requests, and parse the HTML/CSS myself.

European or African?

Better example - skip ahead to 0:45s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAYt6dpCgOI

Which is funny, 'cause when you are reloading w/ lead bullets (non-jacketed, maybe even made yourself in a mold) you size a bullet for 9mm to .355 and for 357 you size it to .358. And .380 is the same diameter as 9mm (its "european" name is 9x17 vs 9x19 for 9mm Parabellum) and 38 special is the same diameter as .357 magnum (only difference is .1" of case length which is why you can shoot 38 special in a 357 revolver)

Well, the blink tag has be deprecated for a while...

Nothing - they called us (Visa branded gas card). Sent a new card automatically, called ot let us know why our current card wasn't good any more, the fact that someone tried to run a $1500 purchase on it an hour ago, and that a new card was in the mail.

Kinda impressive as far as customer service goes in my opinion.

I'm sure it all looked great, until this happened, then they get 200% more wise.

Experience is learning from mistakes you make

Wisdom is learning from the mistakes other people make

For me at home and many of us at work , dual monitors made sense over one big monitor. 2 17, 19, 21, or 24 inch monitors are much cheaper than a single 32"+ monster, especially considering that 2 monitors on 2 cards have been supported by both Windows and Linux for 12+ years now. And even now, if costs are comparable, being able to have one in landscape mode and a second in "letter" mode works better for some peoples work flow/habits/desires.

Easier/quicker to see something than it is to see soemthing, get a camera up, focused, and running.

That said, I've seen largemouth bass jumping up to grab dragonflies mid-air quite a few times. Doesn't suprise me at all that this happens, just cool they were finally able to document it on film.