I got a OS X Panther for Dummies, Fedora Core Linux for Dummies and an O'Reilly book on the Palm Pilot all for 5$ at a computer book store closing sale. I might go back there later today get some more books.

I did win an IBM 760ED Thinkpad laptop on ebay.ca this week. I also won some accessories like a floppy drive, a CD drive, another 1.2 GB hard drive and 32 MB RAM memory for this laptop. I also bought a zip drive for my T30 Thinkpad. All this spending amounted to about 150$ CND. The 760 was about 106 CND the accessories were fairly cheap.

After success with the IBM 360Cs I am now trying to buy an IBM 760ED thinkpad and will install Debian on this too. I may need to invest in some more RAM and also would get a zip drive for this model. Total cost maybe something like 180$.

I did some R coding using the xess editor. I did this on the winxp laptop. I have been surfing the web on my Fedora machine for a few days now. It seems very stable. I think my next machines will be an older IBM thinkpad and a Pentium III 900 dual processor 1 U server either compaq or HP.

I moved my laptop to my Mexican office desk in front of my TV. I will buy a new 25' ethernet cable today and have a 10' printer cable so so far the move of the laptop is ok.

I am expecting a memory stick pro duo 512MB card at the school bookstore soon. I am also expecting a new pair of glasses.

I did some updating of a contact list for the self help network. So I am just about completed the web mastering contract hours and need to invoice for another five hours.

I was finally successful at getting a popular Linux desktop(KDE 2.2.2) installed on my old IBM Thinkpad 486 laptop that cost me 55$ on ebay plus another 15$ for some more memory. It took me hours and hours to learn about Debian and many unsuccessful tries but I finally got it earlier this morning. Yahoo I am a Linux engineer.

I uninstalled the demo copies of Scientific Notebook and Scientific Word on my winXP Thinkpad T30. I may later buy these softwares but did not use them much. I also have not really used Laytex or Tex yet much at all. I do use Maple, Matlab, R and SAS most on Windows computers but also on Mac computers.

I tried installing the Debian desktop environment and x windows on the Thinkpad 360Cs. I needed to rm Gimp and then unselect mozilla in dselect and then unselect gimp. I don't have a good xf86configure file yet but everything is installed and configured. I need to change my video driver to vga16 and should have done more research before configuring x windows the first time. Maybe I will run tasksel again to see if it allows me to change the driver. I can't seem to install the driver I need with dselect or apt-get. I used yahoo's Linux room a bit for support. I also found a new battery for sale for this Thinkpad on ebay for about 70$ CND.

I ran my IBM PC server with Fedora as a workstation all day. I did email with it. I surfed ebay and other ecommerce web sites. I also updated my blogs at blogspot with it. I kept my laptop in use right beside it for school work mostly. I regularly switched back and forth between the two machines.

I did a lot of printing today. I printed a 124 page document mostly with 12 pages per sheet of paper by printing 6 pages side by side on one side of a sheet and then six pages side by side on the other side of the sheet. I also printed about 30 sheets containing a 61 page document actually a pdf of my lecture notes for tomorrow´s class. And now I am printing more wastefully my honours paper of 40 pages a page per sheet. So all in all I printed about 12+15+40 = 67 sheets of paper today. I read about 6 of these sheets. I also printed a few others sheets.

But this last 40 page document is mostly my own writing and in one week will be rewritten to be almost only my writing. It will be submitted next Monday as my honours final essay. It is just printing out right now and I will read it before going to sleep.

I ran some R code today and managed the 10 fold cross validation and a simple neural net. I also read histograms and did a brut force catagorization tree and plan to do some R code tomorrow that implements this tree on the ten fold cross validation. The comparisom was of histograms for two catagories and this allows one to see when one variable is higher than the same variable for another catagory. Yes trees are very initutitve.

I also read a little about cyborgs and feminism this weekend and all week on the buses I have been reading about women students in the computer sceince program at Carnegie Melon University.

I burned a back up CD of my two deep My Documents folder. This My Docments folder originally was on my Toshiba 420CD Win98 laptop. I don´t run any win98 computers anymore. Speaking of Windows I am going to replace the motherboard and memory and processor for my duron box. I will keep the power supply, case, and drives. I also back up my outlook express email store folder at the same time to the same CD. I also have started to use evolution for email on my Fedora box.

I also burned my first iTunes CD for my wife. I am going to back up my school work folder to CD next.

I stopped myself from buying a memory stick duo 256MB on credit. I have not been using my PSP much. I did download some open source Japanese software to make videos for the PSP and tested it out on windows and on mac. Each platform needed a different software. The PSP was released in Japan first. I checked out games at the department store downtown.

I am just printing out my blogs in hard copy now for the month of March. I have run out of blank CD´s and will got buy some this morning. I am doing this update with my Fedora/Linux computer.

I have a datamining assignment to do as I upgrade my statistics education. The assignment is to filter spam. I have been given some 4601 observations or emails. I have 57 variables based on word frequency, character frequency and capitals frequency and length. Then the 58th variable is 1 or 0 depending on whether the email is spam or not. So this is supervised learning. I was able to open this data set in both R and SAS. In SAS I did a proc means and also a proc chart. I have 58 histograms coming out of SAS. I am printing these histograms 4 per page on both sides of the page. I am also printing the results of the proc means.