[tlug] "Like Cars..."

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

The distro thing.  It reminds me of when I was in high school - some 
people would get downright emotional over discussions about Ford, GM, 
and Chrysler.  As I type this, I look over at the stickers on my 
computer...  It began life with two - an "Intel Inside - Pentium-II" 
sticker on the far left, and immediately to the right of that a 
"Designed for Microsoft Windows NT / Windows 98" sticker.  When I put in 
Red Hat, I put one of those cool thick clear plastic "Red Hat" stickers 
to the right of the Windows sticker.  Later, when I put in SuSE, I put a 
large(ish) two-tone green "SuSe" sticker above the other three.  It's a 
silly thing, but I've grown sort of fond of the green SuSE logo - so 
much so that I swapped covers when I moved the hard drive over to a 
newer OptiPlex with a P-III, so I'm still looking at the same cover 
(with a different computer within).  On an NEC laptop, I was steamed 
about "W", so I ripped the "W" sticker off and put a SuSE one in its 
place, but with my old OptiPlex, I like the set of four - it shows the 
history of that hardware.

Anyway, not an important thing really, but like with cars where someone 
who "just wants to drive it" is far more cognizant of the shape and 
color of the car than the details of the engine lurking beneath the 
sheet metal, there's a culture clash when discussing the same machine 
with a good mechanic who knows only too well what's under the sheet metal.

For me, it's always been a financial issue.  When I rebuilt the brakes 
on a 1962 Ford Galaxie and then on a 1963 Ford Thunderbird, it wasn't 
because I wanted to - it was either I did it, or I walked.  I couldn't 
afford to pay someone else to.  Nevertheless, I can't look at 61-63 
Galaxies and Thunderbirds (pictures of actually, the cars themselves are 
very few and far between now) without visualizing the non-cooled and too 
small brake drums of the Galaxie (a 6,000 pound car BTW) and the vastly 
superior (wider and with cooling fins) brake drums of the Thunderbird 
(before disk brakes DYK).

This would have (maybe) been a good topic for verbal discussion over a 
few beers, but hasn't gone into screen electrons overly well.

Oh well... reluctant mechanic / reluctant computer... um... engineer(?) 
Lyle signing off.

While I'm at it - I hereby do wish a Healthy, Thinking, Happy and 
Profitable 2005 for all of us.

Lyle