Internet Award to - - - ME!!!

Greetings and Salutations to All my Kith and Kin and All the Ships in Outer Space:

I just now received an e-mail from the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (i.e., "B.O.I.N.C.") notifying me that I have been selected as the "USER OF THE DAY" at the web site of SHA-1 Collision Search Graz, a cryptographic analysis program operated by the Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications, a department of Graz University of Technology in Graz, Austria.

Nifty, ain't it?

I also use the B.O.I.N.C. program as a volunteer to automatically process data for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (i.e., "S.E.T.I."), the Climate Prediction program, and the World Community Grid, where I've selected Nutricious Rice For The World and Help Conquer Cancer as the projects to be researched on my computer.

Doing this doesn't require any effort, intelligence, or unusual ability on my part, for my computer does all of the data analysis.

It's all done in the background, using very little disk space, while still permitting me to go ahead and do other things on the computer, such as compose this e-mail, do a crossword puzzle, participate in a discussion forum, or watch the astronauts floating around in Outer Space.

How much of my computer is required?

Well, folks, I'm doing ALL of this stuff on a Toshiba Satellite notebook computer, using a Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system, with less than one hundred gigabytes on the hard drive.

Every bit of my B.O.I.N.C. volunteer research takes up a grand total of only four hundred thirty-two and seventeen hundredths megabytes on my computer's hard drive!

The notebook sits on a cooling mat, so I can run it all the time, if I want to, and, using a VGA cable, I observe the computer screen on my ProView RX-276 twenty-seven inch LCD wide screen high definition television.

I also have my web camera and microphone connected, so I can chat with folks, face to face.

Ooooh - - - ain't this neat stuff?

I'm having so much fun!

I just wish these folks who run the Ol' Soldiers' Home would install Wi-Fi routers, so we could have FREE high speed access to the Internet.

They've been promising it for months, but we still don't have it, and I'm beginning to doubt we ever will get it.

Thank you.

John Robert "SAIGON" Mallernee, KB3KWS
Official Bard of Clan Henderson
Armed Forces Retirement Home
Washington, D.C. 20011-8400

NOTE: "My unpopular and controversial personal opinions are independent of my Scottish clan."