Because we do have to laugh at ourselves

[Snowhog]

(From http://www.alchemistmatt.com/twas/tw...puterLinux.txt)

Short Title: ComputerLinux

From: JM (eat.me@my.shorts.org)
Subject: merry x-mas
Newsgroups: alt.2600
Date: 2003-12-25 05:10:35 PST

Found while trolling /.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a computer was stirring, neither keyboard or mouse;
The packages were updated, each one with care,
In hopes that St. Linus soon would be there;

The daemons were idle using no CPU,
The firewall working left them nothing to do;
And mamma with her emerge, and I with apt-get,
Had just settled down for a long winter's fetch,

When out on the net there arose such a clatter,
I sprang to kernel.org to see what was the matter.
Away to my browser I flew like a flash,
Opened a new tab and clicked the link mighty fast.

The words on my screen with release notes just so
Gave the lustre of mid-day to source code below,
When, what would make my wondering eyes smile,
But a official release in a gzipped tar file,

"Now, Red Hat! now, S.u.S.E.! now, Mandrake and Knoppix!
On, Slackware! on Debian! on Gentoo and Gnoppix!
To the nearest mirror! to the next major release!
Now build away! build away! build away all!

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the mirrors the hackers they flew,
To see their new toys, and thank St. Linus too.

He sprang to his keyboard, to his team sent a note,
And away they all flew to 2.7, new features they wrote,
But I heard him exclaim, ere make config was gone,
"HAPPY HACKING TO ALL, AND YOUR uptime RESTARTS AT DAWN!"


************************************************** **********
************************************************** **********
Matthew Monroe in Richland, WALast Modified January 7, 2007

[vinnywright]

vinny

[Rod J]

very good!

[GreyGeek]

That poem and the compulsory article about how fast Santa's sled would have to be going to visit billions of houses in a single night are my two favorites.

Yesterday, Christmas day, was the first day I can remember since I have owned a PC (1978) that I did not turn it on.

As an old pilot who would rather fly than eat I got hooked on a book, "Fate is the Hunter" by E.K. Gann. He mirrored my expriences with icing up, a cockpit fire, an emergency landing, and hopping over a line of trees on take off. It kept me busy the whole day and well into the evening. Made me flight sick. (Sorta like home sick)

[DoYouKubuntu]

Gosh, 2003! That was quite a year for me. Has apt-get really been around that long? I started using Ubuntu with 5.04, so that was my introduction to the whole apt thing. Funny, but I can't recall right now which Linux I was using just before *buntu... Caldera, perhaps? *scratching my head*

[Qqmike]

DYK: Gosh, 2003! That was quite a year for me. Has apt-get really been around that long? I started using Ubuntu with 5.04, so that was my introduction to the whole apt thing.

I think I started around 2005 or 2006-ish. I didn't get the "get" part of apt-get!

[Qqmike]

Btw, DYK, are you feeling better (I hope)?

[DoYouKubuntu]

Btw, DYK, are you feeling better (I hope)?

Yes! Thank you for asking. I did have a bad cold that suddenly broke yesterday after five rough days; still congested but feeling a million times better. I kept reminding myself that it was JUST A COLD, not the end of the world like before!

How's everything going for you, Qq?

[GreyGeek]

Because we do have to laugh at ourselves

Gosh, 2003! That was quite a year for me. Has apt-get really been around that long? I started using Ubuntu with 5.04, so that was my introduction to the whole apt thing. Funny, but I can't recall right now which Linux I was using just before *buntu... Caldera, perhaps? *scratching my head*

I started with RH5.0 in May of 1998 and in September I switched to SuSE 5.3 because they were using KDE 1.0beta as their DE. I used SuSE till 2002, when Novell's CEO joined forces with MS to accuse Linux of IP theft.

I moved through a succession of RPM based distros and tried PCLinuxOS in 2007 (the year they hit #1 on distrowatch's PHR) but when TexStar took a sabbatical to rebuild his home in Huston, which the Hurricane destroyed, PCLinuxOS went down hill because of territorial fights. I moved to Mandriva but when their devs said that they weren't moving to KDE4 till the next year, and I read that KDE4 would be a part of Kubuntu 9.04, I jumped on the alpha release in January of 2009. The dpkg was new to me but it didn't take long to learn and turned out to be much more stable than RPM (at the time). 9.04 ran perfectly well and I stayed with Kubuntu for longer that any other distro I've ever used - 8 years (prev record was SuSE for 5 years). In 2015 I moved to KDE Neon and also adopted Btrfs. As a bonus I got my secondary GPU,NVidia GT650M (which can not be set as the primary in the BIOS), to behave as the primary by installing nvidia-378.22.

Now, I'm running the fastest, most powerful and flexible computer I've ever owned, with gaming abilities out the wazoo and a 100 Mbps symmetrical fiber optic Internet connection ... and all I'm doing is browsing YT, KFN, checking email and online banking. But, I use my iPhone6+ do do most online stuff. I haven't coded since I retired 9 years ago and probably don't have the mental capability to do that gig any more. My brain feels like my skin looks, prunish, and my memory works like my hands - shaky.

My three grandsons no longer play Minecraft, and playing alone is boring. All the fun was playing it with them. My oldest got married 3 months ago and doesn't have time any more. My middle recently got a car and found girls - he obviously doesn't have time any more either (except to play some battlefield game on his "box" of some sort) and the youngest just got a 3D headset and a battlefield game too for PlayStation4 and their 52" 4K TV. I never see or hear from any of them much any more.

So, I plan to continue to use this machine to putz around until one of three things happens: 1) the laptop dies, 2) it gets too old to remain compatible or 3) I die. All are equally likely. And, if #1 or 2 happens I probably wouldn't miss this laptop because I do just about all the important stuff on my iPhone.

Meanwhile, my wife and I enjoy eating out, which we do frequently, even if it is expanding our waistlines, and watching movies on Roku. The hard part is finding one we haven't seen before that isn't simply porn with window dressing.