[geeks] Introductions (was Re: Etiquette)

[Dan Debertin]

Okay, we appear to be doing intros. So be it.

Dan Debertin, 26. I'm from Tacoma, WA, originally, and am endlessly pining
to get back to that area. Presently, I live in Minneapolis with my wife of
11 months (1 more month of newlywed-hood. sigh.). I have a Bachelor of
Music degree. I can't have pets in my current living arrangement, but if I
were to have a dog, it would be a corgi. Great dogs.

I'm the Senior Janitor^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSystems Administrator for Bitstream
Underground (www.bitstream.net), a Twin Cities-area ISP and web
development shop. We have about 10 racks of gear, all running some form of
UNIX, mostly Solaris and *BSD. It's an okay place -- I don't have to take
care of a single Windows box, and if you put me in front of one, I'm
pretty much lost ;). Most of the people are clueful, although I work under
an at times annoyingly tight budget. I've been there for almost 2 years
now.

I've been using UNIX since 1993, when I got my first UNIX account at
college. This was IIRC a BSD/OS machine. I feel lucky to have experienced
USENET when it didn't suck horribly, having an email account and not
receiving spam, and large user-base, multipurpose UNIX systems. But I
still wish I had been born earlier, like most of you. Oh well. Would have
been fun to have been a sysadmin in the 80s.

I'm pretty much brand-agnostic -- I enjoy and can administer capably on
Solaris, SunOS, any BSD, IRIX, SCO, Linux, etc. Like any sane sysadmin, I
have a healthy hatred of SCO, but it's still just UNIX, so it's not a
total waste of time.

NetBSD fills me with warm fuzzies. Linux gives me an icky feeling. I could
quantify these feelings with technical differences, but really, that's all
anybody in such an argument is trying to say, in not so many words.

In my spare time, I try to become a better programmer, listen to music (my
favorite composers are Bach and Schoenberg), and travel whenever I can get
a break. I have a respectable but not excessive pile of machines. My pride
and joy is senator, a 670MP that Bitstream no longer wanted. I have a few
other Sun boxes, an SGI machine, some macs, and a stack of POJ 486's.

I have never paid money for software, and I have never paid more than $20
for a computer, and I have everything I need. This would not be possible
without the free software community, to which I am enormously grateful. I
hope to contribute back someday.

Anyway, that's it.

Dan D.
--
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.

Dan Debertin
airboss at nodewarrior.org
www.nodewarrior.org