[ale] Introduction

[Dow Hurst]

Jason,
Welcome to the ALE group!

Geoffrey is only saying come to the NW meeting because he is running 
it!!!! :-)

It is usually a good meeting and you can meet people there that can't go 
to the Central or NE meeting.  You'll probably have to figure out which 
meeting is closer and geared more toward your interests.  I've left the 
Atlanta area and moved to Greensboro, NC.  I've ended up really enjoying 
the move away from traffic.  There isn't any traffic up to the speak of 
compared to Atlanta.

Since your working for Earthlink you may find some strong opinions for 
and against on the list. ;-)        
I kept my Earthlink account in the move because of the webmail and spam 
control options.  I opted for a cable and have a very solid connection 
now.  Well, I hope you enjoy the Atlanta area and I am glad you found 
ALE, as this is a great group of people.  There are some real solid 
gurus on the list so just about any Linux topic is worth posting about 
and any question is worth asking.  Make yourself welcome,
Dow


Jason Fritcher wrote:

> Geoffrey wrote:
>
>> Welcome.  What part of town do you live in?  You do know that we have 
>> three meetings a month, but the best one is the NW meeting...
>
>
> I live in Sandy Springs, a bit north of Roswell Rd & Abernathy. I saw 
> the 3 meetings a month. Initially I had planned on attending the just 
> the Central meeting, but based on your comment, I think I'll make the 
> NW meeting as well. :)
>
>>> Then I got a job that required me to learn unix programming and my
>>> interest in Linux took off. In the last 5 years, I've used all the
>>> mainstream distros and have settled on liking Gentoo the best with
>>> Debian being a close second. :)
>>
>>
>> Well, there's still room to educate you then. :)  SuSE and Mandrake 
>> here.  I use Red Hat on one box because my client says so.  I've just 
>> finished installing Release 2 of the Sun Java Desktop and must say, 
>> I'm not impressed.
>
>
> Heh, room to educate. I'm all about learning, so bring it on. :) I 
> have a serious dislike for any of the rpm based distros that comes 
> from a dislike for the whole rpm system. Alot of my unix experience 
> actually comes from FreeBSD, and during my time having to admin bsd 
> boxes, I fell in love with the ports tree. That's probably one reason 
> I enjoy Gentoo so much. :) On the Linux front though, I've been really 
> impressed with Debian and the dpkg system.
>
>
>
>>> I'm currently a software engineer for Earthlink, doing mainly C and
>>> Java development with a little Perl thrown in to annoy me. :)
>>
>>
>> The dream job!  You're confused though, it's the Java that is 
>> annoying you.  I mean come on, try subtracting a character from a 
>> character in order to get the numeric difference.  C ? yes, Java, I 
>> don't think so..
>
>
> Heh. I've done so much Perl for Earthlink, and seen/dealt with sooooo 
> many of it's quirks that I wish I could torch the whole thing. :) 
> While there are quite a few quirks with Java, I haven't run into any 
> that've required as many hours of bashing my head into my monitor to 
> work around.
>
>>> In my
>>> spare time, I'm learning C++ and Python, and tinkering with writing a
>>> toy OS.
>>
>>
>>
>> C++ and Python?  Son, we need to talk...
>
>
> lol. I really like the parts of C++ I've seen so far, and as for 
> Python,  its a scripting language that actually forces the program to 
> code in a semi-clean/sane way, unlike another scripting language I 
> dispise. :)
>
>> Welcome again.  Have you ever seen snow?  How about the Rose Bowl?  
>> The game, not the building.
>
>
> I ran into plenty of snow on the drive out here a couple weeks ago. :) 
> As for the Rose Bowl, I've been to one, and in Pasadena, I lived a 1/2 
> mile from the Rose Parade route. Saw that a couple years as well.
>