Everything You May Have Wanted To Know About Me But Didn’t

I’m Wayne Richardson, the owner, admin, and lone writer at fsckin w/ linux – a swift kick in the *nix.

This website is the culmination of nearly 10 years of experimenting with Linux, and three squirrels that spoke to me in a dream.  We held a televised debate on the topic of macadamias verses pecans.  It was weird.

My first introduction to Linux was by a good friend of mine near the end of 1998.  I eagerly put the borrowed Redhat 5.2 CD into the caddy of the 1x CD-ROM drive in my 486DX.   At the time, Linux was not very friendly to new users back then.  If you could get anything working at all, it felt like a miracle.

Since then, trying out new Linux distributions became a hobby of sorts, I kept a keen eye on Slashdot (UID 69114) and DistroWatch, downloading and installing new distributions, and getting really frustrated when something didn’t work.   Two years passed before I got my ISA SoundBlaster 16 card working to hear Linus Torvalds “pronounce Linux like Linux.”  He’s from Cannuckistan, isn’t he?

Fast forward to not so long ago, my computer had rebooted for the nth time that night unexpectedly, and I was at my wits end with Vista.  I contemplated two options:  Reinstalling to XP, or jumping off the top floor of the tallest building in Salt Lake City.  Lucky for you, I decided to try neither of those options.  Also, there’s a chance that the tallest building in Utah may not be a lethal jump.

After taking a short break from the computer to collect my thoughts, I came back to my desk and while rifling through a spindle of CDs, the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn disc that I had burned a few months prior stuck out of the pile.

“This is it,” I thought to myself.  “If my hardware works on this distro, I’ll try it for a month.”

On that fateful night, August 22nd 2007, I installed Linux on my desktop and everything was automatically detected and worked right out of the box.  I sat back, grabbed a keyboard and started writing about the ride of my life.

Here I am, a couple months later, still writing about things I find interesting, and recieving more than 5,000 visitors daily. 

The revenue from advertising pays the tiny hosting bill, keeps me interested in doing something other than playing Team Fortress 2, and eventually will pay for some geeky things I’ll write about here.

If you have any private comments, suggestions, or are really annoyed by something on the website (i.e. the scrolling RSS icon that I loved) just shoot me an email… wayne(@)fsckin(.)com.   I’ll beat you around a bit with a large trout and consider your inquiry.

I can’t store my sig in /dev/null?
Wayne