IT was a great article, eh? I'm glad to see that a national tech ed magazine is putting more focus on Linux and OSS. Thanks for the encouraging words Scott and Levi! Scott - I'm a hapa-Hawaiian (don't ask how I got to be in the Ozarks! - long story), and my mother lives in Ewa Beach! Small world, eh? My tutu is from Niihau and I have ohana on every island. Haven't been back since 1994 though - too busy raising a family out here in the mainland... Scott you have land in Rolla? Next time you visit, "holler" at me and I'll look you up - perhaps we can do lunch or dinner! Levi - you're almost a neighbor too! My organization visits the hospital in Bolivar regularly as a role model healthcare system. I used to live in Rogersville (they didn't use Linux then), and I started my college career in Rolla... best 3 freshman semesters of my life! I believe we were required to take FORTRAN. And thanks to everyone on this mail list who has helped me through the years to create those LTSP labs in my school district. I don't know if those labs are even still functioning now that I'm gone... it would be such a bummer if that was dropped. But the guy they brought in after me wasn't a Linux dude - he shut down my Apache webserver and Sendmail email server and setup a MS environment (probably spent money that I was going to spend on client PCs to build more labs for more students). Oh well... The local hospital was looking for IT people and specifically an Educator, and I fit the bill. So now I do that... but I'm still promoting OSS and Linux in particular. We could save hundreds of thousands of dollars if we could migrate our org to simply switching to using Open Office in a Windows environment! Funny that when I left the field of Education, I immediately setup a Joomla server for a departmental blog/wiki/CMS. Soon after the Sr. Net Admin setup the free Windows SharePoint Services as a portal for the entire org. So I shut down my Joomla server - no need to double up the work we're doing. Now we've grown to need services that SharePoint "free" can't provide, but if we want the full package it's too costly! So, I'm back to beta-testing Joomla and Drupal for my department to test, as well as Moodle and TWiki (I tried MoinMoin, but the folks just didn't like it). This time I think the Sr. Net Admin (who is actually younger than me) is supportive of the idea and willing to put a virtual server online for me to install all these OSS applications on for the entire organization. Ironically, it will be an MS server, virtualized to run Linux as the OS... not the other way around! Funny, eh? The Sr. Net Admin has experience with Joomla/Mambo/Drupal, so that's a plus! Wish me luck with these new endeavors folks... and if you're a praying person, say a prayer for success on these projects. Saving this money means we're able to spend the money elsewhere on better patient care, or hiring more nurses or support staff. I hope it's OK for me to continue posting to this mail list, though I'm not using K12LTSP anymore. I learned all that I know about Linux (mostly) and OSS from this list. So I feel like it's "home" for me to talk about OSS and Linux here. Thanks to all of you for all that you do across the globe to help people and organizations experience the benefits and power of OSS. You folks are great! -- "miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letter too large for some of us to see." -- c.s. lewis