PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: wayne1932

As told to Smileeb

For this month we have wayne1932

Hey, when you really reach the bottom of the barrel, you might consider me for the magazine article. Short info: I've been hanging around PCLOS for quite a while, started with Mandrake, and found out that Tex made better packages than the Mandrake guys. When he started his own distro, I moved over. I notice that I've got three years on you. My forum name includes the year I was born. :)

I'm 82 years old, born late in 1932. (Genuine Okie from Muskogee, for the country western music fans here). I called Muskogee home for the first twenty-seven years of my life. After high school, I was unable to go to college (finances), so I took a job with the railroad and worked up to a telegraphers position (clickety-clack). Then I was drafted into the army for two years for the Korean war. I furthered my interest in electronics by being a radar operator. The Army provided me with the GI bill, so off I went to college for my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering.

After graduation, I worked 29 years in the telecommunication field as R&D engineer inventing equipment for the long distance network. Unfortunately, I specialized in analog equipment and was obsoleted too young in a digital world. I obtained my master's degree during that work career. I was involuntarily retired at 56 years old, so I kept working as a consultant in telecommunications. Finally decided in 2000 that 40 years was long enough for anyone in one field, so I hung up my hat and stayed home in retirement.

I have spent the years since 1960 living in the Dallas, Texas area, met my wife here and raised two great independent kids. Unfortunately, independent means I have no Grandkids. Dallas is a great place to live, getting too overcrowded now, but still has all the amenities for a good interesting life.

My wife of 52 years and I now live a quiet life being involved with our church. After our kids were old enough to fend for themselves, she went to work in a variety of places as office administrator. Her last position was with Nokia, so I got an education in cell phones. We loved traveling and spent many years using a camper/trailer/RV seeing the great sights in the US of A. I have been in every state except Delaware, and may have to make a special trip just to say I've been there. I have spent some time researching my genealogy as far back as I can.

My computer experience began the day in the early 80's they put an IBM machine on my desk with TWO floppy drives and 64K of memory, with a dot matrix printer. I got proficient in WordStar, and Visicalc. I worked my way up from DOS 1.1 thru Windows 98SE, and decided I didn't like Microsoft's business practices. I started Linux using Mandrake, and found that Tex made better and more interesting packages. When he started his own distro I went with him and have been here ever since. I keep my toe in the water and have a special part of my harddrive dedicated for my experiments with other distros, but nothing has tempted me to jump ship yet. I have always loved KDE for its ability to be configurable. My wife and I have both Laptop and Desktop machines networked thru Samba. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get her to switch to Linux. She claims that she doesn't want to learn something new. HaHaHa....... Win7 was a worse experience than the learning curve for PCLOS would have been, and to top that off, it meant I had to learn it, too.

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.