Daily Archives: October 2, 2006

Doing things I don’t like to fund things I love

By | Published: October 2, 2006
I have been working in the field of computing since the age of 18. Like other dedicated IT professionals over that time I've been exposed to many applications, platforms and systems. Some of them I've actually found enjoyable to use, not all, but some. Maybe it's just rose-tinted spectacles, but I'm sure I found Novell Netware 3.1x great fun to setup and administer. I also used to quite enjoy (in a perverse kind of way) fighting with DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat to maximise the memory available to applications whilst booting a usable system. More recently I've found Linux really good fun to use. I thoroughly enjoy using and administering it. Maybe my view is distorted because I'm still learning so much about it, and there's heaps left still to learn.
Posted in Advocacy, Linux, SAP, Ubuntu | 1 Comment

Opening conversations with stickers

By | Published: October 2, 2006
I was recently given an old HP Omnibook xe4100 laptop. It's got a 1.1GHz Celeron CPU, 512MiB RAM and a 6GB hard disk. So it's not blazingly fast, but it's good enough for the journey to and from work on the train. I have an Ubuntu sticker on the lid of it which anyone facing me can see when I am using the machine. Last friday I was sat on the train, headphnoes on whilst I typed on my laptop. I noted when another passenger got on the train that he glanced at the sticker a few times. It looked like he wanted to talk to me, but my headphones made that difficult for him. So I removed my headphones and packed away my MP3 player. Pretty much straight away he said "I appreciate the sticker".
Posted in Advocacy, Linux | 6 Comments