
This morning at 10:30, I had a nice meeting with Paul Lowe, our Assistant Vice Provost for Research, on

At 11:15, I headed over to Throckmorton to check on the Theoretical Plant Modeling lab of Steve Welch, who is the lead PI of our NSF FIBR Project on Ecological Genomics of Arabidopsis Development (EGAD)1. I am ordering four Dell Dimension 3000 systems (Pentium 4, 3GHz, 1Gb RAM, 160Gb HD, for $950 plus S&H) for his lab, a 4-port KVM, a couple of 10/100 NICs, and a 24-port 10/100 switch. Well, it turns out that four of the systems he has decommissioned and were about to be junked were Gateway E-4200s (Pentium 3 450MHz), and two were HP Vectras (P6-180s). I called

1 When we scientists get to select our own acronyms, the result in inevitably geeky. I had to explain to Erika Charbit, the Ecological Genomics/FIBR postdoc, that "Egad" is an English exclamation roughly equivalent to "Zut alors!" (BTW, that is
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