Unsent letter from 2006

Russ (one of the great figures in my life) made fun of me about ten years ago for not building my own computer. I think it was right about the time that I bought the Micron. Russ had already long been a hardcore geek--I recently wrote to you about his internet adventures before there was much of an internet out there.

So, anyway--I put a computer together today. It was pretty fun.

I know you already managed this yourself--at least, you figured out the hard part, which is getting a new hard drive in there. I found some slow old thing, jacked it up with all the spare parts I could find, and started installing some badassery on it. The plan is to make it somewhat useful for science in the near future--we'll see.