Something Swift this way comes…

So today was a rather slowish day at work. Okay, it was /really/ slow. I wandered around the office today looking for little projects to work on. Finally I started tinkering with an old refurb machine, adding a couple of hard drives in and dumping some memory into it. After fiddling about with the hardware for a bit, I called my manager into the tech room and sat her down in front of the computer. Now, she’s more ‘tech’ than most common users, but she’s by no means a technician so when I told her she was going to be installing linux on the system, she started squirming and coming up with excuses that sounded a lot like ‘gee no thanks, I already gave at the office’. I shook my head and told her that she’d be alright, I’d be there to help answer any questions or address any problems that cropped up. So she reluctantly gave in.

First step was to get the system to boot into the ‘Install Kubuntu Linux’ option. It took it a little while because, frankly, the machine is an old one and not very powerful. But after it came up and put up the little gui screen asking what language you want the installer to run in (and install the system in), she picked up on the instructions on-screen and started going through it, answering the few questions that it asked such as username, password, host name, etc. She stumbled a bit when it came time to partition the drive, but I pointed out to her that we were doing a clean install, that she could just use the ‘Guided – use entire disk’ option. She got through that and then continued on to the end of the round of questions, in all it took her about ten minutes to get through the questions and click ‘install’. When she did that I told her ‘That’s it, congratulations, you’re installing linux for the first time.’

When I said that, you could’ve literally pushed her over with a breath of air. Her jaw fell open and she exclaimed ‘No way! That was so easy…easier than installing Windows!’ I simply nodded and smiled. Once it got to the point where it finished installing everything and rebooted, we took the cd out of the drive and let the machine reboot to a fully installed and running system. She asked me about how to find drivers and I explained to her that there is generally no need to look for hardware drivers in linux – another thing she couldn’t believe. The capper though was when she opened the programs menu (Big Blue K) and realized that Open Office and other useful applications were already installed on the machine.

She looked around in the menu for a bit, and then asked ‘So how do I get on the internet?’. I explained that she could use Konqueror as it will browse the web, but I wanted to demo the package manager for her, so I got her to open up Adept from the system menu and then told her to type ‘firefox’ in the search bar. She did so, and easily requested an install of firefox3. After clicking ‘Apply’ I explained to her that linux (in this case Kubuntu 8.04.1) goes out and gets the software from the internet for the user automatically, that it downloads and installs it for them, and even goes so far as keeping the software up to date for the user. She absolutely couldn’t believe it.

About that time, the phone rang and she had to take it, but overall her reaction was really positive – I’ve been talking about linux around her for almost a year now, and this is the first time that she really sat down and looked at it, giving it an honest shot. That said, I didn’t harass her into it, though I did explain to her that I wanted her to try it out and give me her honest opinion of it – letting her come to the realizations that it was more ‘user friendly’ in functionality than windows is because of the capability to have a working system up and running in under an hour instead of spending hours working on installing OS, finding and installing drivers, running updates, restarting the machine time and time again to get the simplest of things to work – I let her see that the user can /use/ the machine after it’s installed instead of having to spend hours trying to get the machine to a safe place to work. All in all, I think she left the demo in a favourable mindset towards the scrappy little OS called linux, and I think she’ll be more receptive about it in the future when I mention it around her.

More later,
S

Sometimes I’m silent here, not posting for a little while. It’s not because there’s nothing going on, just sometimes there’s too much going on, too much happening. Sometimes I withdraw into myself, don’t want to talk about it just internalize it, use the logical processes that have always worked best for me. A lot of people see this as me turning away, or pushing people away. Perhaps it is, but I can no more change this bit of my mentality and personality than a leopard can change his spots. I think it’s part of my familial legacy, as far as I know my sister and my father are the same way. When something hits us where we live, we pretty much just pull into our shells and deal with it internally.

I suppose that psychologists would warn us that this is destructive behaviour, unhealthy for us. Try to get us to talk about the things that bother us and how we feel, what our thoughts are and why we think what we think. Sometimes I feel like telling psychology to blow me. When we’re busy running our mouths we can’t shut up and listen inside for what’s going on in our heads. We can’t use logic and analysis to determine what is going on with us internally and deal with it within ourselves. When we’re busy trying to make someone else understand what we’re thinking we’re not focussed on what we’re thinking, just on trying to explain the little bit we understand at the moment. I don’t need to talk to someone to understand that I’m angry, upset, feeling discomfitted, or discouraged about things. I also don’t need someone else prying within to try and get me to face up to what I feel inside. I’ve been doing that for years on my own, thanks. I’ve never been one that could drop a locked box of emotion down an internal well and try to pretend like nothing ever happened. Just because I’m not talking to you about it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it, working at it, worrying the problem over and over with the tools of logic and analysis that have served me well for almost 32 years.

When I’m silent it doesn’t mean I don’t feel, it doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. It just means that I’m working at a problem and I’m working it my way. Does that mean I’ll ever come right out and shout Eureka! Problem Solved! No – that rarely, if ever, happens. It simply means that whatever I’m having to deal with that I’ll deal with it, come to a solution of sorts and then put it up on its little mental shelf to use later against other issues or problems that I may have to deal with. All of this said and I’m betting someone somewhere will read this and still try to think ‘You shouldn’t stuff it all down inside.’ Yeah, whatever, you go on thinking that way. Thinking like that has gotten us to the nannystate we live in today, and keeps people from taking the time to learn who they are and what they’re doing with their life, precluding us from learning how to be self-sufficient and deal with obstacles both physical and emotional instead relying always on an outside third party source to solve our problems for us and give us a ready-made solution that tries to generically cover all the issues of any given problem without really solving anything truly and finally. Welfare anyone?

I’d rather hand-craft my own solution to my problems than buy their mass-produced wal-mart solution that is a poor substitute for problem-solving, thanks.

More Later,
S