PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: Smileeb

by smileeb

How old are you?

I will be 79 in july.

Married, single or what?

Married to a wonderful Polish woman, and in January it will be 54 years.

Children, grandchildren?

I have two daughters and one son. One step-grandson and two granddogs that we doggie day care when the kids are at work.

Retired or working and for how long and at what.

I worked at many things and learned a lot. From shoe repair shop, electric wiring, Bond Clothes, Taylor Instrument, to my final jobs at Kodak. The first 28 years, I worked in production. Movie film perforating (running different machines that punched hole for the sizes of the film and printed their codes on the edges). Later, a film slitter that slit 54' wide rolls into 83 film rolls maybe 3300 feet in length (the length could vary, depending on the order). My last 10 years were spent as an alarm mechanic working on and installing intrusion alarms, fire alarms, cameras, motion detectors, smoke detectors. Kodak, at one time, had more master boxes and pull box systems than many towns and cities in the country.

What is the area you live in like. Weather, Quietness, Scenery

The city is located along Lake Ontario, which at times is a great influence on our weather. We have the four seasons, some better than others.

Are you handy with your hands and have any hobbies.

I can do some carpentry work, electric, plumbing, but I'm in no way a professional.

What is your education level?

I'm one of those dull pencils in the box, only a year and half of high school.

Do you like to travel, go camping?

I used to love driving when we traveled (bad eyes now). Use to have a travel trailer or two, but I gave that up.

What caused you to try Linux and join this forum?

Not being a geek, but just a user of computers, and following instructions on how to do things, I ran Windows until the slowness and always needing to stay ahead with the constant updating of antivirus programs got to me. Being on the Soundbytes forum ever since, I started using computers and hearing about Linux. I decided to try it and messed with a few of the live CDs: Knoppix, Mepis, Puppy, Damn Small, then bought Mandrake. These encounters were not very successful. I next tried Ubuntu and that and their forum turned me off, but I did try Mint and got it to run. The fact is, it was running when I tried PCLinuxOS 0.98 and the hook got bitten.

If I'm not mistaken, O-P and Archie were two of the first to help me out when I had problems. Way back, O-P and I would have chats in Gmail, and discovered we had done some of the same things when we were growing up. Another reason why I like Linux. A few years ago, my kids bought me a laptop computer, and it had Windows Vista on it. The sixth time I started it up, it stated it could not find the operating system. That problem got solved real quick when PCLinuxOS was put on it and that error message has yet to appear again.

Here is the cottage the kids now own and I spend a lot of time there during the better weather.

Here is my cave.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight is an exclusive, monthly column by smileeb, featuring PCLinuxOS forum members. This column will allow "the rest of us" to get to know our forum family members better, and will give those featured an opportunity to share their PCLinuxOS story with the rest of the world.

If you would like to be featured in PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight, please send a private message to smileeb in the PCLinuxOS forum expressing your interest.