I have time, what needs to be done?

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

I am very much interested in making a substantial contribution
to the project timewise.  Through planning and good luck, I do
not need to work right now, and through some bad luck I am only
enrolled in one class this semester (linguistics of phonology). 
If there is any time consuming work that needs to be done I am
more than willing to pitch in here.  Below is my description of
what applicable skills I have.  At the very least, I could work
on transcription, if there is any more to be done.

-  Good natural ability with math, I was on speed math teams in
High School.  My math, though never went beyond Calculus 1 and
that was ten years ago, but I am willing and able to learn

-  Studied languages from an early age.  My formal training came
in High School and College with two years of German, one year of
French, and two years of Spanish in High School.  In college I
followed with another semester of German and two semesters of
Russian.  I confess these are almost completely forgotten, but I
have had a broad lingusitic  exposure.

-  Entered the military with the official job designation as a
cryptologist, though almost all of my work was in translation
instead of cryptology.  While in the Navy, I was trained to a
fluent level in Mandarin Chinese and still maintain a level
higher than when I graduated, which was estimated as good enough
to enroll in a Chinese University.

-  Started doing simple programming at the age of 8 on an old
TRS-80, I never got terribly good, but I have a good knack for
these things, enough that I was able to teach myself to write
little shell script programs on the Sun stations while I was in
the military.  Incidentally, these were almost all little grep
routines for sorting and analyzing data files (and I must add,
quite a bit better than the ones THEY supplied us with).

-  Currently studying Speech Language pathology at the
University of Hawaii, though I also have a decent background in
psychology before I changed area of interest.

-  Finally, through a longtime childhood interest, I am decently
versed in the occult.  I'm not talking about the Necronomicon or
some new age books, but the ceremonial magick like the Golden
Dawn (even though thats a recent invention) and the Kabballah
that might actually have bearing on some of these old
manuscripts. I claim to be no expert by any means, but I'm not
ignorant either.  (I did make a basilisk once but he died and
I'll probably never find an egg laid by a rooster again to prove
I can do it)

One big limitation I have right now, is that I no longer have
access to a Sun, and I haven't taken the time to get really
familiar with my PC clone, it's mainly a toy to write e-mail,
pirate music and play on Chinese web sites.  Is there anyway to
run all of those neat little grep and cat routines on this
machine without having to shell out some big bucks to buy a
language?

Regards,
Brian