I’m not a Linux guru. I’m familiar with some aspects of Linux, and I enjoy using it. I’ve installed various versions of various distros on some 30-40 different machines. On a somewhat smaller scale, I’ve experimented with FreeBSD. My only area of expertise might be explaining what little I know to people who understand it all far less than I.
There’s a lot I’ll never know about it, but I still like DOS, and still believe the very best office suite ever was Enable O/A. I run it under DOSemu on my Linux box, and print directly to my dot-matrix printer. If you happen to know what Enable is, and want a copy, it’s still available (just grab the big ISO image). I hardly recall all the keystrokes I once had memorized, but for stuff I want to print on paper, nothing today matches it for my purposes. I’m hoping to get a really fine old vintage Pentium to run FreeDOS so I can do it right, and run a bunch of other DOS stuff I still want to try.
In my youth, I worked on cars a great deal. I got familiar with the basic design and workings of them, up through about 1987. After that, I simply got tired of it, so I started saving up to buy something I didn’t need to work on so much. Now I don’t remember as much as I did once. Simple stuff, such as shocks and struts, tune ups, maybe the odd starter or alternator, is about all I can handle these days. They’ve gotten so complicated, and so hideously cheap, it’s just not worth it any more.
When the VA sent me back to college to get a teaching degree, I was one of the few who took enough hours in Economics, Geography and Political Science to certify in those subjects. Most of the folks passing through the Social Studies Department were lucky to finish the requirements for History. It didn’t help me get a full-time job, but I was told I knew my stuff by quite a few tenured teachers. What I knew was what colleges teach about such things, and as I continued reading in those fields, I realized they had tried to hide things from me. They even hid stuff about education itself, so I got tired of fighting the system and quit. I returned my teaching license to the State Board of Education for Oklahoma. I’ll never work in public education again. So I’m still doing lots of reading in the field of Social Sciences, only to realize I really don’t know much at all.
So far, I’m doing pretty good with cutting trails in the woods. It doesn’t take a lot of knowing, just doing. That’s why it appears to be so successful. Fixing bicycles isn’t really easy, but there’s just not that much to them. My hands are good at “cut-in” painting, but I don’t really know about painting. I can patch sheetrock well enough, but I’m not much good at putting up a new drywall cover. For some reason I never really took to carpentry, but I seem able to cut pieces very precisely for little projects and repairs. I can’t make steel armor like my son does, but I form little bits of sheet metal for this and that. I was never better than mediocre at drawing, but I always manage to sketch what I need for just about anything.
What’s crazy is my fundamental temperament thrives on competence.
