Introduction

[Dan Smith]

Greetings folks.

Wasn't born wth Draciron as a name. Made it up to use as a pen name and a
stage name (Play guitar & bass).  I'm a 40 year old long haired Linux
enthusiast.

My qualifications besides willingness.

Made my living for last 17 years or so by cussing at computers. Believe it
or not people pay pretty good for that. Sometimes I even made them work :)
Started as a programmer. Then being one of the few folks willing to learn
SQL in the early days I got trapped into being the DBA of test systems, then
small production systems, then full scale millions of records type systems.
Just when I got good at it they made me a project manager. I had a nasty
habit of caring a bit too much about the customer. So I went back to being a
programmer/DBA/Project lead AKA cussing at computers. Unlike sys admins who
get to cuss at computers in public sometimes they'd stick me in a cube with
other cussers or way back in the artic circle otherwise known as offices
next to or in the server room. One day I show up for a new programming job
and they make me a System architect. Not quite sure how that happened but
turns out I was pretty good at it. So of course nobody wanted to let me do
that again. Once I was done archetecting (Is that a word?)  I showed up for
a programming job. Turns out the guy I was replacing wasn't actually a
programmer. They only called him one. He was a pretty good robot builder and
Sys Admin.  I made the mistake of admiting I'd built and run small test
networks. So I became the backup admin for a major lab and an entire
department. In the years I was there I actually forgot most of what I knew
about coding despite my job title for the first few years having developer
in it.  I never wrote code. I filled out more lines on forms than wrote
lines of code. Turned into a pretty good Sys admin. Also served as DBA for
the groups I was attached too, pushed paper and did lots of network
security. Enjoyed that and was pretty good at that as well. I guess this
means nobody will hire me to do that either now.

On the serious side. I've been doing IT for a long time proffesionally.
Before that as a hobby and semi-pro. I am also a writer. Novels tend to be
more of what I write. Not all of them are emails either. Contrary to this
email I do know where the spell and grammer checkers are and use them for
anything I turn in to be read by an audience. Most of my technical writing
has been documenting programs I wrote, System arch that I designed,  how
to's on various topics for companies I've worked for and articles on network
security. My favorite way to write a technical how to is to walk somebody
through the process I'm trying to describe in the doc. The hardest part I
have is that things which for me are instinctive and second nature are not
always universally understood by my intended audience. By walking somebody
thorugh it and taking copious notes during the torture session, I remember
those little steps that make a big difference if you don't do it and gain
the benifit of questions that I would not have thought to answer otherwise.
Sometimes questions I do not know off hand, even with software I wrote. I
can tell you how it worked but sometimes the why behind it wasn't always so
clear in the specs I worked from.

My experience with Linux started with a friend trying to convince me to
convert my 386-sx-40 to use Linux. I only had a meg of ram on it but this
didn't seem to phase my friend. I read up and it needed way more RAM than I
had. A few years later, around 96 I bought a Slackware CD. I was curious
about Linux. Even got it to install on a 486 DX2-66. Took me a week. The
biggest problem was that the CD controller wasn't IDE. It was on the Sound
card. A very common way of doing things back then. After I got it installed
I said cool and could not find any reference to the commands. X wasn't
installed. So my next foray was with either Caldara 2.0 or RedHat 5.0 I was
running both distros on different machines for a time. I actually got
usefull things done with these distros. Wasn't until RH 6 that I actually
really got into Linux. By RH 6.3 I was doing most things on Linux but still
relied on Windoze boxes for Internet and several other tasks which I
couldn't find Linux equivs or they didn't exist yet. In 2000 I started
working in a Linux shop. That was when I finally went all Linux. I still had
RH 6.3 on my main home machine as late as 2001. I have run several distros
but RH/Fedora has always been the best distro out there. Ever since
6.3there's been nothing close.  I am just now trying out FC6.  In fact
that is
why I don't have this email signed.  Yum has my machine a little handcuffed.
Soon as I'm down getting all of the hundreds of apps I want installed on the
machine then I can generate the critter. Yum's kinda busy until then :)
I've used every version RH has put out from 5.0 to FC5 extensively except
FC1 which I never even tried and FC4 which I used for a week and took the
machine back to FC3 until FC5 came out. Currently I run two FC5 boxes and
just moved this machine from FC3 to FC6. I've also used RHE but not
extensively.

I am a musician, and can also probably help with sound related stuff.
Security related stuff. Database related work. Server related configuration.


Well hopefully that gives y'all a pretty good idea about me and my technical
background.  I hope it'll be handy with one documentation project or
another. Will be happy to submit a sample of more formal type writing. I do
spell and grammar check when writing formally.  Also please don't ask me to
write docs on old school nix stuff like vi. I'd rather chew my leg off with
a dull vampire bat than use vi.


Good to meet y'all, at least the ones still awake after opening this email.
My ex-used to say that all she needed when she couldn't sleep was to ask me
about computers. She'd be sound asleep in minutes.

Drac
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/attachments/20061117/638c1144/attachment.htm>