So on Labor Day, Amanda and I went over to Target and took the bar code scanner around and scanned stuff for our wedding. It was fun, but I actually enjoyed going around Linens N Things tonight registering there. I was surprised at both places how much of their stock is not available online.

In case you’re interested in seeing what we registered or even want to send us something :-P, here are the links:

Target Wedding Registry

Linens N Things Wedding Registry

Folding @ Home — It’s got nothing to do with laundry. I just wanted to post a quick message to let you all know about an easy way to help out a bit in medicine advancement. Stanford has a distributed computing initiative going called Folding @ Home. Distributed computing is basically where a bunch of computers divy up processing to work on large mathmatical programs.

There are other distributive computing programs out there that do things like help break large encryption codes, or even search for extraterrestrial life. But this one is down to Earth — computing how proteins fold, which can help in disease prevention, the creation of better medicines, and the eradicating of things like cancer and AIDS. The programs run in the background and use your idle computer processes. It’s never slowed me down a bit.

I used to do one that Intel help sponser, called United Devices, but it only works on Intel processors. They also do cancer research, but until the Intel-based Macs start hitting the market, there won’t be a OS X client.

That’s part of why I switched to Folding @ Home, but I’ll stick with it now that I’ve switched. I’ve got 6 Macs and PCs running it, between work and here and hope to get a few more doing research. Download whichever flavor you want. I recommend doing the straight ol’ console versions. There’s no pretty window dressing, but it crunches a bit faster because of that.