[geeks] How old am I and where do I come from...

[Nathaniel Grady]

I was born in NYC, lived for a few years in Los Alamos and Chicago, but mostly
grew up (1st grade on) in a medium-sized town in western New York on the
Thruway between Buffalo and Erie PA. I had the luck of having a father who did
a lot with computers (as a theoretical physicist) so there has always been one
in the house. I have to admit that for a long while I actually bought into
M$'s propaganda - but that just makes me all the more bitter! In high school I
started seriously using Linux and toward the end, FreeBSD as much as I could
instead of Windows (no pagemaker replacement, and doing print work in the Gimp
is not at all fun!). I bought a SS20 in college and fell in love with real
machines (I bought a Multia in high school when they were $100). Unfortunately
I just moved to Houston to attend Rice University and gave the SS20 to my
father. I just bought a Pismo (aka firewire) series PowerBook on ebay to try
OS X. I have to say I'm not exactly impressed. It's sooooooooo slow (I only
have a 400mhz box, but it's got a gig of ram. I expected it to be faster than,
say, KDE-3 running on my 366mhz PIII laptop with 128mb that was usually 100mb
into swap) and I find the eyecandy *extremely* distracting. I'm another ADDer
on the list - I found it very comforting to hear other people had similar
problems to mine as I've not met any people in real life who seemed to have it
severely (my biggest remaining problem is not being able to sleep / relax
effectively because the more I try and stop thinking the more things I think
of! I have forced myself to focus and find physics coursework to mostly be a
sufficient challenge / interesting enough that I can focus on it). I was also
classified as learning disabled, and sent to the "resource center" several
times a week. Unfortunately the person who ran it at the time considered LD ==
dumb, and primarily they did send really poor students there. All it did for
me was make me even worse-off socially. Anyway, I just moved to Rice
university to study applied physics. I dream of someday fabricating a
processor for a simple computer myself, in my own home to start one a club
akin to the astronomy clubs where you can't join until you've ground your own
mirror. I also really want to acquire a microVAX to learn VMS on - I keep
hearing about how cool x feature is, where x is a feature of VMS that is said
to be cool. Um, right, abolish and stamp out redundancy! I just bought an HP
C110 with 768mb ram and 2x2gb  drives to much with and hopefully eventually
colo for my mail server (my main email addy, nate at nutopia.org currently is
served by a 56k on a dynamic IP... *sshhhh*, don't tell my ISP I run a
server!).

Hm, I think I over-did it :)

--Nathaniel Grady

ps: Mostly I just lurk :)