greg said:

If you just want a good subset to work with and don't have a lotta bandwidth, I could ship you a drive.

i'm good on the bandwidth. (especially since i will be _receiving_, right? or is there something that i'm not grokking?) nevertheless, that's an intriguing offer, because then i could ship that drive on to someone else, who can do the same... so we'd eventually have a ton of mirrors. and if the drive was to be sent to an i.s.p. -- such as dreamhost or hostmonster -- i'm assuming the contents could be copied over to a good number of different accounts, for a small price, without any further shipping. many of these i.s.p. offer unlimited bandwidth and storage for less than $100/year these days. so i'll think about it. this is all in a planning stage right now, so i will post again later when things start to go in play, but i think i'm good for now. thank you, greg... -bowerbird p.s. but you can put me in at a $20-$40 pledge if someone executes this as a communal project.