I'm about an hour in to enjoying my nice new 500gb 2.5" hard drive in my mbp. D'oh!

Why not create an image with your render software and deploy as many as you need on EC2? No hardware cost, no setup time, you only pay for the CPU time you use.

As I understand the dune-grass in Northern Canada up through Oregon and Washington is invasive and a foreign species. It was originally planted as a way to stop erosion of some beaches and spread out of control almost overnight. What's to prevent something like this happening / getting out of control and wrecking the natural ecosystem of our planet's deserts?

Probably 1994, I was maybe 9 or 10, I don't have any idea where I got the Redhat install disks (CD?). Nope, had to be disks because all my friend and I had was an old computer which was surely a 286 or 386.

We had a book. Once we finally got it installed we had no idea what to do with it. Ended up messing around with some commands and that was it.

It probably wasn't until a year or two later that I had a distro that fit on a 3.5 floppy that I used as a router to share our 56k modem throughout our house that I actually USED linux. Still didn't know how it worked.

It was probably 3 more hobby installs over the years before I ever had a semi-permanent use for Linux.

Now I use it every day. I run a cluster of ubuntu servers on EC2 and a custom FC6 server running a tuned version of asterisk capable of a lot of simultaneous outgoing calls.

This is the back end of my company, Talk Life, which offers on-demand phone access to counselors and therapists for those times when you just need to talk.