Among The Jumbled Heap

This is my year of OpenSource.

Since last December, I have:

• installed Ubuntu on my Desktop,
• reconfigured my wife’s laptop to dual-boot MS-Windows XP and Open Suse,
• reconfigured my mp3 player (a Sansa Sandisk 250) to run RockBox,
• initiated a web project at work that uses the Joomla CMS
• played around with Django, a web-development platform that uses Python
• set all the library computers up with Firefox, and
• recently created what my coworkers are calling the “Ubuntu Lounge”, a computer room on the third floor of our library where I’ve set up four legacy machines to run Xubuntu and Fluxbuntu.

And, of course, I am running this blog on WordPress.

What have I learned from all this opensourcing???

I am proficient at none of these things. My geek-powers are limited. I am not strong in the Force. And that, I think, is the beauty of open source. There is always more to learn. Open source takes the power of computing and places it back into the hands of the user.

I remember growing up with computers. My dad bought our first computer, a Texas Instruments machine that plugged into our television, when I was eight or nine. The TI was a glorified calculator with a diminutive keyboard with bubble keys, and I loved it. I could make it print my name to the screen to infinity. This was my favorite trick. As computers developed, my skills developed. Yet, somewhere about 1990 things began to change. Microsoft began its dominance of the PC operating system market. My dad finally gave in and bought Windows (prior to that he stubbornly held on to the propriatary TI Dos-based system), and life conspired to take me away from computing.

My skills are still small, but I feel like I am picking up where my nine-year-old self left off. If we don’t want to cede all the power of the information age to a few large companies, then we would all do well to start using and abusing Open Source.

So…I am doing my part. This blog will consist of one part OpenSource. I intend to talk about my Open Source disasters and successes. Step one is learning to create a decent WordPress Theme/Template.

I also write. I’ll be putting some of my writing up here. Short Stories, mostly, but also Creative Non-Fiction, Essays, and perhaps even bits o’ novel that I’m working on.

I am a librarian. I like musing about our information age. I’ll do some of that here.

I am an arm chair political pundit.

All of these things bleed into my blogging.

I am also a perfectionist. This trait hinders my blogging. I want each word, each phrase, each posting to be perfect. Right now I am looking at what I have written and thinking, “this pointless entry does not deserve to be posted. Chadly is not cut out for this bloggin’ stuff.” I plow on. I post on. I hope you, whoever you are, read on.