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 6.3 there'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
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