Hell pulse, cut an old dude some slack would ya

Started out at 42 with a WebTv set top box, which I hung onto for 4 or 5yrs, then traded for an old NIB Dell 166mhz machine w/ ME on it and a 15" monitor for some car work and in the same week went to a 1gig Athalon machine runnin XP, 512mb of RAM & a whopper of a 40gig HD w/a 19" NEC monitor for a turbo install and some port work I had done.

Had a good friend that got tired of fixin my messes in XP and turned me onto Linux Lindows, which by way of appeasement to Windows soon came to be called Linspire, hell, he even made me a Red Hat firewall machine w/his own customized coding for it outta the old Dell.

At my 50th Bday bash the same friend showed up from NJ w/a shiny new CD of Ubuntu 6.06, their very 1st stable LTS distro, a new 24X DVD drive & 250gig HD, loaded it all up on my trusty Athalon machine (which now had a full gig of RAM), took care of all the patches and fixes and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven!

Within another year I had updated to 7.06? and built my very 1st machine usin a build list my buddy had put together for me. He'd also spent several hours remotely workin through fixes and such w/ me while teachin me how to search for work arounds online.

From there I began buyin cheap machines to fiddle with and learn shit on without hurtin my main machine, swapped to various new distros, tried a few different Linux flavors, even played around with XP some more and then gave a Hacintosh box a whirl.

Flash forward to now and I have more 'puters than I need, all runnin some distro of Ubuntu, all home built and w/way more CPU speed and RAM than I need (notice I said need and not WANT), but I'm def a GUI guy. I'll bust off into a console panel so long as I can C&P commands from a how-to I've found, otherwise, I never even open it up.

I'm sure I could learn to code, but lookin back on all I've done so far, that learnin curve was steep enough, so the lazy man inside me just says "Fuckit, stay w/the GUI", so ...