Greetings,

I'm Brian. I am an older fellow, living in Syracuse,NY, and it has been suggested that I spend too much time on the computers and..."need to go out and meet real people". My my, where do people get these ideas, anyway? I'd like to know, sort of.

background:
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moved around a bit, settling, in a way, on the Peninsula. Attended a number of high schools in the Mountain view, los Altos area, and daydreamed through classes at Foothill College, worked at Tab Products on California Ave in Palo Alto in the mid-Seventies, troubleshooting what we called called 'smart' terminals. These behemoths were designed so that folks could have more than 25 terminals on an IBM mainframe without being forced to lease another entire system from Big Blue. Ah yes, those days.

I use a Powerbook, with a mid-level [1.25Ghz, 1GB RAM] hardware setup, running OS X, Win2kpro (in VPC), and lately, and almost exclusively, Ubuntu 5.1.0, which is terribly fun, and runs much faster on the PowerPC CPU, than the Apple 'hybrid' OS. [Apple should have ported NeXTSTEP to the Mac, and given the Legacy OS the heave-ho, but, oh well].

The install of Ubuntu was a breeze, a child could have managed it, easily. I'm a bit flummoxed by the inability to run my external monitor, and Java5, etc, but I'll live, for now.

My most recent work centered around data migration, specifically, turning printed matter into interactive electronic docs, courtesy of SGML/XML and the Department of Defense's DTD associated with their Comm Electronics Command outfit(CECOM). It made my head hurt, the pay was atrocious (private company, not the Mil guys), and I walked.

I am now living on peanut butter, new software, and sheer will power.