To kick off this blog, I would like to start with a general observation about online communities. After all, that’s what Linux and OSS help us build, right? Vibrant and active online communities are just one result of open-source thinking.
The backlog of my story reveals that I once dreamed of being a writer. So big was this dream, in fact, that I can pretty much say that for as long as I’ve had my hands near any variety of writing instrument, I’ve been “in the middle of” some big breakthrough as a writer: technical, scientific, literary, or otherwise. And for as long as I’ve been able to go “online,” I’ve sought communities where I can mold and shape the bits of these “breakthroughs” into tangible, manageable bytes.
Excluding the graphing calculators I had through middle and high school, the first real computer that I was able to call my own was an Acer Aspire. It was a gift from a relative. The monitor was thick and heavy and pixelated, and I obtained it during high school, somewhere in between my sophomore and senior years.
My AP English teacher once posed the question to our class: “Do you think that we’ve reached a sort of creative impasse in our thinking? Have we come to the end of new ideas? Has every great plot already been written? Has every imaginable human struggle already been imagined?”
“No,” I answered, firmly. “Definitely not. Technology will change humanity.”
And it did. Materializing with the theory of Moore’s Law and extending into the fuzzy tail of cloud computing today, there’s no doubt that societies have become more advanced and even more capable of advancement.
But back to high school.
Eventually I got a dot-matrix printer so that some assignments could be completed at home. Yet all the while, all I could think about was how much my computer and printer sucked and how the ones at school were so much better. And cooler.
(Granted. The computers were *not* as cool as the Apple Macintosh computers I’d left behind at my high school in Florida when I’d been working as a wee freshman on the yearbook staff.)
But keep in mind, at this point in the story, this is still is a 15 year-old’s thinking.
Today I’m 29, and it’s almost bizarre to think about how I’ve been on this planet for *almost* twice as long now. Indeed. When linux.com relaunched and I signed up, happy to have a new place to write and share ideas, I was also very happy to discover that the decidedly nifty prime number of 1979 would be mine here.
(To Be Continued == TBC)
