"I'm still here!"

I'm still here!

Met a young American lady in my youth, and we found we'd had endlessly more to tell each other and the need to bounce off our thoughts off each other, than with any of the other people we'd met.

Finding the big pond most of the time being between us, with postal services reliably taking many weeks and a phone call reliably taking a week's wages, we discovered early computer networks. I had to learn to type fast, and find ways to get on those computer networks.

Being barred from the networked computer pools of power I started chatting up people who weren't, and discussing this and that, tailgated them in. Had them show me their motions, the fun gimmicks, and the bureaucracy. Weeks later, I had my own ID and logins to get me through, all on my own. In the meantime, with the help of a hacker friend, I fought 99b, SLS and later slackware to get a newly bought 386 box to dial-up the net. Months later I got my very own ID and logins with my real name on, as well.

Disk quotas, dead mailboxes, inactive user accounts, user profiles. Necessity made me what used to be called a hacker even before I found out there were other uses for grep, awk and diverse shells and shell tools than simply getting things to work, make them repeatable and reliable and ok-ish.

And then I got offered jobs, learned about databases and all the icky stuff other people did not want to meddle with. Again I got offered a job, and another job now teaching computer networks, and another teaching computer/network/communications security, and another, and another..., and finally, was asked to do things all over again. This time using Perl. That got me another job, and another job, and I discovered this site: I have been lingering on.

(eta: ...and then Perl Conferences came my way, and then I co-founded a Perl Mongers group ...or two, still going strong.)

Updated to shorten some of the run-off longish sentences.

Cheers, Sören