<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.18.3"> </HEAD> <BODY> Greetings, Fedora Documentation list! My name is Basil Mohamed Gohar, and I'm keen to join the Fedora Documentation project per encouragement from Karsten Wade. What follows, hopefully, fulfills the requirements of the Self-Introduction for joining the group, but should also give you a bit of an idea of me. I am a graduate of The Ohio State University with a bachelors degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering (it's only one major despite covering two subjects), class of the Summer of 2004. I currently work as a web developer for a small consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio whose primary business relates to virtual schooling, including homeschooling & charter school programs. My personal experience with Fedora started with Fedora Core 5, when I installed it on my computer just to play & explore a GNU/Linux operating system. Though I'd been a support of free software since I understood what it was, I had not yet been ready to take the plunge & commit myself to it. That experience changed it for me, and by the time Fedora Core 6 was released, I had switched to using it as my main system. Prior to using Fedora, though, I had been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 & 4 on two servers that I leased for hosting my own web sites since 2004 & 2005, respectively, so I grew familiar with a command-line *nix environment through managing those servers. I am what some would call a free software fundamentalist, because I believe free software is fundamentally better due to the principle that is free as in freedom. I have had some experience writing documentation for projects & programs before, but nothing as large-scale as Fedora. I am a native speaker of the English language, having been born & raised in the US my whole life. I tend to be picky about grammar where I notice a mistake, and I am pedantic when it comes to ensuring what has been stated is factually correct. I consider myself to be verbose, but clear, when I write, but that is a judgment best left for others. ;) I have done a little documentation work for the Fedora Unity project, but that stalled when I had to move on to other projects at that time. I have been using computers since I was very young, as there has always been a computer of some kind available in our homes. Being a developer, I suppose that I am an "expert" computer using on most platforms, with the exception of Mac OS, as I do not own any Apple hardware. As I mentioned earlier, I am a web developer by trade & hobby. I work primarily with PHP & MySQL. I would describe myself as a PHP guru, but I wouldn't disagree if others claimed I was. ;) I have been programming for over 6 years, having taught myself PHP after learning basic Perl to parse HTML tables to convert them to Microsoft Excel documents (yuck!). I was also encouraged by my desire to write my own website code for listing files for people to download. I feel I am an excellent match for the Fedora Documentation project because I believe that free software is fundamentally superior, I communicate well, and I want to contribute to something that will benefit people & make free software easier for people to use by having quality resources available to them. My GPG fingerprint follows: <PRE> pub 1024D/25DB6E43 2008-12-11 Key fingerprint = 29B4 52ED 2335 1948 652A 22BB 873C DA6A 25DB 6E43 uid Basil Mohamed Gohar (Basil's GPG key) <<A HREF="mailto:abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org">abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org</A>> sub 2048g/7B467FE6 2008-12-11 </PRE> I look forward to contributing more in the future, and I will follow-up with an idea I had which is what encouraged Karsten to prompt me to officially join the project in the first place. <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD> <HR LENGTH="400"> Basil Mohamed Gohar <A HREF="mailto:abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org">abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org</A> <A HREF="http://www.basilgohar.com/">www.basilgohar.com</A> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML>