1. If you care at all about keeping the fruits of your photography labours safe, I cannot recommend highly enough Peter Krogh's "Digital Asset Management for Photographers, 2e". The bucket concept is from there. See http://www.thedambook.com/
I've been spending a bit of time writing the memory tester for my Sinclair Spectrum Diagnostics board. The board itself, to recap, contains a flash ROM, a little bit of glue logic, a couple of flip flops and eight LEDs - the idea being that the code running in ROM can display the results on the LEDs, so as to use as little of the (possibly suspect) Spectrum's hardware.
Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so. -- Josh Billings