For non-techies to assume that hackers are masters of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word is just as silly as assuming Java hackers know Visual Basic. Correlation? Sure, but no matter-of-fact.

Next time someone thinks you're great at formatting tables in MS Word because you could hack a spreadsheet program in a week, ask them how good their [WordPerfect, Abiword, and/or Open Office -- even Mozilla Composer or VIm] skills are.

In other news, I bagged a 266 MHz Beige G3 desktop with 160 megs of RAM from eBay for $59 shipped. So far, so very nice. I'd hate to think of using it as my daily driver (though short of Eclipse, I imagine it'd make do), but after pulling the PCI USB card from my old StarMax I've got a great print server for next to nothing. I'll pull a Firewire card from my Celeron next and have a cheap but [hopefully] reliable file and Furthurnet server soon too. OS X has really changed things, and now OS X hardware is finally cheap enough to have some good, clean, geeky fun. Upgrading to Tiger has opened a license of Jaguar up in the office, and that's what's running the Beige.

Never thought I'd pull out the monitor to the LC for anything but nostalgia time, but there it sits, displaying Aqua whenever the printer needs a little coaxing. Nice.