How I got here.

What do you want to do when you grow up? Big question with many possible answers.

I've always enjoyed math and science (as well as history, geography, political science, etc.), wanted to travel and live in different places, enjoyed boats and boating, and wanted to make a decent living. I had no great plan for achieving all these things. I was able to study navigation and cross the Pacific twice while serving in the US Navy. I achieved a BS in Engineering in college with my senior project focusing on sailing hull design. Later, I received my dental DDS degree. Then I joined the US Army as a dental officer. While raising our family, we lived in three foreign countries and eight different states. Over the years I have designed and built five boats, each suited for the boating conditions in the area we happened to be living. Now I am ready to begin boat number six. For me, this board is a great place to ask questions or read others' discussions to expand my knowledge.

Although I haven't devoted myself to boat design as a career, it has been a satisfying mix, and boat design remains an interesting and creative hobby.

 

how I got here....
Long story and I'm not really a boat builder (sort of) and I'm definitly not a boat designer so I won't bother with all the boring details.

Short version.
Drop out of school
go back to school and get diploma
go to community college to drink beer and meet girls and learn to paint cars.
Succeeded in drinking beer.
Bounced around to three fast food restaurants, two saw mills and two Truck Parts places (peterbilt, kenworth, etc)
Got married
Got tired of tossing around cummins cylinder head cores and went back to school for Mechanical Engineering.
Found my calling with computers after taking a cad class and a fortran programming class
transfered to Computer Science
Went broke paying for school (wife said school or her, I should have chose school)
dropped out of college
Got a job at an internet provider (1st employee, did a bit of everything)

Got a job at Microsoft as a software engineer (no it wasn't my fault, no I won't fix your computer, no I'm not rich, no I can't get you a job/software/sourcecode/interview/news and no I don't know whatshisname in whatever department, here are 50k people there afterall). Worked on NT4 Terminal server, Win2k, Exchange server, Windows CE(current). I do have an opinion on Linux that may surprise you.

Got a divorce

I stumbled on the glen-l website and ordered plans for the Zip and have started building it as a relief from computers and am loving it so far.

All this and I'm 34
Of course there is lots more to this story but only if you really want to hear it.

 

i want to hear your opinion about linux.

 

I like linux.
I used Linux exclusively starting in 1992 and had never even seen Windows NT until I started working at MS 1997. I still have a web server that is running Linux and has been since 1992. I installed Slackware from floppy in 1992 (lots of floppies), the went to redhat somewhere around RH4

Then again I am an operating system junky. I find myself playing around with newos (http://newos.sourceforge.net) because it's something new and isn't part of the "O.S. WARS". But there are a lot of others out there that are just as interesting. Check out http://osnews.com for links to others.

In general I've found that it's not the operating system that you use, but rather who is using the operating system. They all crash for the same reasons, have the same bugs, and if you take the time to really learn about them, you can make any OS reliable, and relatively secure, and perform very well for a single given task.

I've had redhat's "up2date" program crash my system just as I've had windows update do the same to a windows box. All of the kernel dumps or BSODs I've seen have been because of lame drivers which were written by the hardware manufacturer. Hell, I had the same scsi card crash both OS's for the same reason.

Windows Exporer is a memory pig, just as is XFree86. Both are security holes.

User Elevation bugs enter the picture on both all the time, but people have short memories. Remember Code red for windows? Just send an asp page a certian query string to execute what you want? Compare that to the phf script that came with linux/apache. Think the RPC bug that came out this week for Windows is enough to make you switch to Linux? Remember that both SSH and Sendmail had to be patched this week because root expoit bugs on Linux.


How's that for middle of the road
In all honesty I use Linux, like Linux, and will continue to do so. But like I said, how good an OS is depends on WHO is running it, not which one it is.