Hello. I'm John Boice, AKA SilverBear. Married over 30 years, father of 2 children: daughter married, son starting university September 2008.
I've been involved in Personal Computers since 1986. My first computer was a Kaypro XT "IBM compatible." In those days the distinction was between "IBM and Apple," not "Microsoft and Macintosh."
The first computer I built was in 1999, and it's still running fine [whenever I boot it up]: ASUS CUSL2 mobo, Pentium III 800Mz CPU, originally 256MB RAM, now 512MB. I have a very small business repairing and building PC's out of the front room of my 3-story farmhouse in rural Western New York State.
My wife, Jessie, keeps miniature goats: Pygmies and Nigerian Dwarves. We had two horses until 20 September, 2008, when we decided the work-to-pleasure ratio was too high for Jessie, and relinquished ownership to another family in the area. The old Family Dog died soon after my daughter moved out, but we still have 4 house cats, one of who is fairly telepathic, and slighly sociopathic. Not to humans: Niles is a complete "people person!" But every now and again he bites all the other cats on the back of the neck --male domination thing, if you don't have cats-- even though he's been neutered. We suspect a nut has grown back.
But enuff about animals. Let's talk about ME [as Toby Keith would say]:
Former psalti in a Russian Orthodox church, former President of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, former Republican Party vice-chairman for our town, former Senior Master of Ceremony in the local Masonic Blue Lodge. . . and a number of other interesting and seemingly incompatible roles over the last thirty or forty years. . . I guess I like to keep busy. . . you can buy the autobiography if I ever get time to write it. . .
More to the point:
My first Linux was Ubuntu "Warty Warthog," but I quickly became a distro-junkie and tried out several others. Fedora [don't remember the version] didn't install correctly, but SimplyMepis 3.3.1 did, and I had a triple-boot system between Windows 2000, Mepis 3.3.1 and Ubuntu Breezy Badger for quite a while. Finally when Mepis 6.0 was written to be compatible with Ubuntu distros, I dropped Windows altogther. Mepis has been my main distro, my "workhorse" since then. But I usually have several other distros installed at any given time.
Currently that would be:
Arch Linux
Kubuntu 8.04
Pardus 2008.1
Fedora 9
I've tried to "give back" some portion of the great help and support I've gotten learning Linux. I helped write the Mepis 7.0 User's Manual, and I put in time on several Linux forums. Currently my projects include:
rootsweb.com -- list admin/webmaster of the "Comfort" family [Father's mother's mother's family] -- yes! WE've been here more than 300 years! I sneer at you immigrants. . .
MepisLovers.org -- moderator
LinuxTracker.org -- moderator
Kubuntuway.net -- moderator
MEPIScommunity.org -- Project Director
Mepis Torrent Team -- Project Director
SBLinux.org -- webmaster
SBLinux.freeforums.org -- forum admin
This is not to magnify myself as a "Linux Guru": Lord knows I'm still learning as much as I teach in any given month! Maybe more. But I want to encourage everyone to get involved in spreading help and assistance as your time allows. And if this "tell all" post doesn't encourage you to post your own intro --in as many or as few words as you choose-- then I guess I've wasted my time. And shame on you.
Start a new thread for yourself. This one is all about ME [gotta love Toby Keith] all about I!
