[ale] Introduction

[Jason Fritcher]

Geoffrey wrote:
> Welcome.  What part of town do you live in?  You do know that we have 
> three meetings a month, but the best one is the NW meeting...

I live in Sandy Springs, a bit north of Roswell Rd & Abernathy. I saw 
the 3 meetings a month. Initially I had planned on attending the just 
the Central meeting, but based on your comment, I think I'll make the NW 
meeting as well. :)

>> Then I got a job that required me to learn unix programming and my
>> interest in Linux took off. In the last 5 years, I've used all the
>> mainstream distros and have settled on liking Gentoo the best with
>> Debian being a close second. :)
> 
> Well, there's still room to educate you then. :)  SuSE and Mandrake 
> here.  I use Red Hat on one box because my client says so.  I've just 
> finished installing Release 2 of the Sun Java Desktop and must say, I'm 
> not impressed.

Heh, room to educate. I'm all about learning, so bring it on. :) I have 
a serious dislike for any of the rpm based distros that comes from a 
dislike for the whole rpm system. Alot of my unix experience actually 
comes from FreeBSD, and during my time having to admin bsd boxes, I fell 
in love with the ports tree. That's probably one reason I enjoy Gentoo 
so much. :) On the Linux front though, I've been really impressed with 
Debian and the dpkg system.



>> I'm currently a software engineer for Earthlink, doing mainly C and
>> Java development with a little Perl thrown in to annoy me. :)
> 
> The dream job!  You're confused though, it's the Java that is annoying 
> you.  I mean come on, try subtracting a character from a character in 
> order to get the numeric difference.  C ? yes, Java, I don't think so..

Heh. I've done so much Perl for Earthlink, and seen/dealt with sooooo 
many of it's quirks that I wish I could torch the whole thing. :) While 
there are quite a few quirks with Java, I haven't run into any that've 
required as many hours of bashing my head into my monitor to work around.

>> In my
>> spare time, I'm learning C++ and Python, and tinkering with writing a
>> toy OS.
> 
> 
> C++ and Python?  Son, we need to talk...

lol. I really like the parts of C++ I've seen so far, and as for Python, 
  its a scripting language that actually forces the program to code in a 
semi-clean/sane way, unlike another scripting language I dispise. :)

> Welcome again.  Have you ever seen snow?  How about the Rose Bowl?  The 
> game, not the building.

I ran into plenty of snow on the drive out here a couple weeks ago. :) 
As for the Rose Bowl, I've been to one, and in Pasadena, I lived a 1/2 
mile from the Rose Parade route. Saw that a couple years as well.

-- 
Jason Fritcher
jkf at wolfnet.org