Feeling altruistic? How about getting your pc to do some useful work for a (reputable) "someone else" whilst you're not using it? All you have to do is download and install a piece of software from one of the links below and your machine can sit there happily doing scientific research, and returning the results to... well, scientists... without any further intervention on your part. This is "Grid Computing", a great concept! Essentially, someone with a huge quantity of data to analyse, for which they'd need a very powerful machine or a great deal of patience, splits it up into small chunks and distributes it to very large numbers of small machines to analyse. All you have to do is install the software and let it run as a screensaver when you're not using the machine. It downloads chunks of data, analyses them, returns the results, and asks the remote machine for more - as simple as that! Of course, if you normally switch your machine off when you're not using it, there's a debate about consuming electricity and generally eating into the world's resources... I'm not going to get into that particular argument here, but see 'the skeptical environmentalist' by Bjørn Lomborg for some excellent thoughts on the topic.
I live on the edge of what I consider the most attractive area in Britain, the Yorkshire Dales National Park. This site is the "things to do and see" part of the official park authority web presence and includes links to places to stay as well as walks, scenery and general "national park" things! Worth a visit if only to see the beautiful pictures.
Suzy is a young opera singer with a beautiful voice. Audio samples and photos on her web site.
