5 Jul 2002 Barbicane   » (Journeyer)

Alright, I have had this account for a few months now I think and it is time to put something in.

I like the idea of advogato. Every now and then I get these ideas that I want to let out. I have journaled on paper (spiral bound notebooks) for over 20 years. It has always given me a sence of comfort to write down my thoughts. The problem with pen and paper journaling is that it is hard to share, and takes up space on my bookshelf. So I think I will give advogato a try, and see how I like it.

I doubt I will have anything useful to add to the community, but maybe, just maybe, I can be another monkey adding to the works. And who knows, maybe I can end up providing a small nugget that inspires someone to do something that will end up being important, you never know. :)

A slight introduction of me

I am Married, have two kids (boy 5, girl 3) and am actually a very happy person. As bizzare as it may seem, I am madly in love with my wife, and feel bad sometimes that others have trouble finding the right person.


My History with Free UN*X

I have been using Free UN*X for over 6 years. I was intruduced to FreeBSD by a friend, and dallied with it for a year or so. Then that same friend came along and introduced me to RedHat. I was impressed with the power, but still it wasn't the same as windows; no really cool games, no nifty little plugins, etc... So for 1 more year, I dual booted and stayed mostly in windows and treated linux mostly as a novelty. To get anything interesting to work, I had to call the friend who introduced me, and have him work on my system. Then slowly, it started to happen, windows wasn't as stable as the linux side, and I was spending more and more time using Linux.

All the games and whizbang neato things started to loose thier gold plating, and I realized one day that in all actuallity Windows and Linux served the same purpose:
They let me access the power of the computer
but there was a major difference, that I recognized as I learned how to use the GNU Utilities:
Windows allowed me to use the computer, but GNU/Linux made available to me control of the computer.
Once I realized this, I made a decision to learn all I could about GNU/Linux.

I started installing. I installed Slackware, TurboLinux, Redhat, you name it. For a period of 2 years, I installed various brands of linux again and again (about 1 every 3 weeks). With every install, I got a little better. I became comfortable using joe and pico, I liked pine, and occasionally got into mailx. I tried everything I could get my hands on, and tried things again after a few months of not using it. I eventually got to where GNU/Linux was more comfortable for me than Windows. :)

Now, I use FreeBSD for servers, and Debian GNU/Linux for workstations. This is not a slight to any of the other distributions out there, I am just comfortable doing it this way. I am a die hard ViM bigot, I prefer bash to other shells, I use BlackBox for my WM, and I use mutt to read my email. I like to argue the points of why I like these particular tools, but I recognize that the reason I use them is because of comfort.

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