[Tfug] Hello

[Jeffry Johnston]

Hi,

I suppose I should introduce myself :)  I found this list while searching
for Linux groups (for a friend that I got started on all this crazy stuff).
I always meant to search one out but never seemed to remember at the right
times.

I've lived in and around Tucson for 17 years, pretty soon our family is
moving to Rita Ranch, a community on the southeast side.  I'm a software
engineer with IBM, working on one of their zSeries mainframe z/OS storage
software products.

As far as computers, we got our first computer (an IBM PC-XT clone (with
Turbo!), 20MB hard disk, 360k floppy) around 1989.  At one point I traded my
4 wheeler for an additional 20mb hard drive and 2400bps modem.  With this I
was twice as fast on BBSes as most of those "slow" 1200bps guys ;).  I even
ran a BBS during the evening for a while.. I'm surprised my parents put up
with that.  My first introduction to UNIX was in high school when a friend
of the family offered to let me use a spare University of Arizona shell
account.  I did not understand much anything of UNIX at that time, but I
enjoyed going to FTP sites, reading newsgroups, and chatting on IRC.  Fast
forwarding, I've had shell accounts wherever I could get them since
(Starnet, Primenet,  and some I shopped around for online), and tried
various Linuxes but never really stuck with them because of various driver
issues (no sound, crashing at boot, etc).  So I was running Windows 98 SE
during this time.  I have a severe dislike of Windows XP.   They butchered
the command line!

While I was participating in a programming research project at the U of A
(that was being developed entirely on Redhat Linux) I decided to check out
the modern state of Linux to see if it had gotten any better; I knew I was
on a sinking ship with Windows 98.  So, I tried Ubuntu (Warty), and kept
expecting to have to switch back, but never did!  All my hardware worked, I
was able to be productive, and I even liked it better than Windows.  I was
hooked.  And I guess I would have converted sooner or later anyways, as I am
an avid Slashdot reader.  The only application I need to run in emulation is
Personal Ancestral File.  Wine can't quite handle it right yet.... but
Windows 95 on qemu is fast.

Throughout the releases of Ubuntu, I finally realized that Gnome was going
in the opposite direction that I wanted (they kept stripping out features),
so I tried KDE (hesitantly, because it used to be pretty bad), and I love
it.  I put Linux on my IPOD (and used a translation dictionary I wrote
during a recent vacation to Mexico).  Recently, I decided to drop my shell
account and run my website wikis ( kidsquid.com and qemu.kidsquid.com) from
a machine at home, running Debian stable.  I am not a beginner anymore, but
definitely am not any kind of Linux expert either.  I'd say I'm somewhere in
between novice and intermediate.

You can find me on IRC, freenode: #esoteric and #ipodlinux.  Or during the
day: jeffryjohnston on Yahoo Messenger.

When will the next meeting be?  I didn't see any scheduled on the website...
I don't really fit into the whole bar scene.

Thanks,
Jeff