I made a cardboard castle for the kittens

Had some time on my hands this morning waiting for rows to import into a database.
So I grabbed three cardboard boxes, a cutter and sticky tape.
And made this:

It's crappy, but the kittens love it.
They were flaked out after a meal from mom, but I'll take photos when they are playing in it.

If you do this yourself, make the holes HUGE.
Don't skimp.
I did and had to go back and carve chunks out of the cardboard so they could fight and tussle in the openings.

Ok. IT officially sucks.

I had a need for a bad ass server to help with some database work and also give me a staging platform for a project I'm working on.
So I dusted off a 3 yr old PC which I vaguely remembered being loaded for bear. Ransacked and re-organised my work room re-routing power, changing to an 8 port switch, dug up MS kbds and mice, power cables etc.
Put together an Ikea coffee table to hold it, powered it up.
3hrs work.

And my gasts were utterly flabbered.

Two things. a) 1Gb of RAM? and b) 1Gb of RAM?
I thought it appropriate to make that point twice because it was so... so... WTF?
1Gb?

When *EVER* did I think 1Gb was a lot?
When did that happen?
Frickin 'ell.
My Jurassic era Mac Mini has more grunt.
So...
Advice.
New MBoard, buckets of fast RAM.
Ubuntu 12 64bit server.
Suggestions?