huh? An entry from enigma?

Well, it's about time! Thanks to uzi and yosh, I was able to get the account name I wanted, which had been abandoned by someone long ago. Granted, that was months ago. Thanks to them both ;)

So why now? I have done something :) I finally started my own LUG! I have been planning it since the beginning of the year and just got the website launched this month. It probably won't actually get going (with meetings and all) until the end of the month. You should be able to get to #pclug on irc.pclug.org by the time you read this, many thanks to hacker for that!

I decided to start the LUG when I was having trouble finding Linux users in the area. I finally stumbled upon Chico State's Linux User Group and started attending meetings down in Chico. The meetings have been becoming more active there (although it doesn't show on the website) and I have met a good group of people. I had almost given up on pclug. Eventually I met a couple of guys up here that inspired me to get it going. I am hoping it will be a good thing for the community up here, but only time will tell. I plan to contribute as much as I can in the way of educating new users about Linux and free software, maybe even start some regular training sessions... we'll see.

What else?

In other news, I have been doing odd consulting jobs here and there. The most interesting of them is a school that has decided to go without Windows. They are strictly Linux (Debian ;) and OS X, so I have been getting my hands dirty with OS X. I created my first bootable OS X CD today but have not had a chance to play with it much. I still prefer my Linux boxes to OS X, but getting root on a Mac is kind of cool ;) So, if you know of some cool educational projects to further entice schools into free software, please drop me a note.

Launching the website for pclug brought me more into the web space than I had been before. Finally, I have PHP and MySQL running on one of my servers. I have built a couple such websites recently, but my DocBook based website keeps calling my name. I have some ideas that I am hoping to explore more by the end of the year. Learning a little about PHP and MySQL has shown me some possibilities that I had only guessed about before. I am really interested in developing some database solutions, but have resisted the urge thus far. If time permits, it is inevitable...

Cheers!