By Paul Ferris
Editor, Linux Today
The Caffeinated Morning…
I wake up at 7:00 and snooze till 7:30. I can feel it, the
excitement of being here. I know a lot of people are commuting to
New York at this time of year to do Christmas shopping. I’m here
for something that most of them will never appreciate. But I’m not
awake yet, having coded some last-minute web site changes the night
before. I can’t wait to get to class, but end up scarfing a bagel
and a cup of coffee before waiting in a cab line.
Traffic in New York City.
If this thing were a 10BaseT Network, the little collision
lights on the hub would be lit up like a Christmas tree. I will
never complain about traffic in Cleveland Ohio
again. The traffic jams and wild traffic register as rank amateurs
compared to this.
Simple things like getting here from there are not simple. You
can’t get here from there. The routes are all screwed up. So, I’m
waiting in a cab line in front of the hotel, and I run into these
three guys, and one of them turns out to be Miguel de Icaza. We
talk a bit about Gnome, and I sit in the cab and think about the
accessibility to the people here who care.
The people who make all the difference in the world. The people
that make Linux special. The people who make Linux
Linux.
It’s a rush. My day is just starting. In the registration line,
I run into a couple of guys from Santa Cruz and we spend a couple
of minutes talking about Mozilla and VPN’s.
I’m a social creature by default. I’m getting to converse with a
diverse group of geeks whose products I depend upon for my everyday
computing enjoyment. It keeps occuring to me over and over; this
would never happen with any other aspect of my life so easily.
Since Linux is a community I can actually meet the
people who’ve made it what it is.
Linux is like an amazing art form to me, and these are the
Rembrandts, the Bachs, the new sculpters of an obscure art form,
the likes of which most people will only see the veneer. They miss
the depth that a few of us appreciate.
I can’t wait for what’s ahead today…