One of my very favorite ink slingers is Ken Starks, immortalized as Helios, slayer of dragons large and small, and tilter-at-windmills extraordinaire. Ken wrote recently, in his usual entertaining style, of his misadventures with a shiny new Linux user, You only know good when you've seen bad.... This shiny new user, Paula, was driving Ken to contemplate some heavy-duty substance abuse (sure, Ken, like we haven't heard that excuse before), but actually the whole scenario sounded more encouraging than dire to me. This brand-new Linux user, this refugee from the Redmond wasteland, was stretching her wings and trying to fly. She edited xorg.conf all by herself, though not quite the right way. She exposed a bug in Ken's customer support (don't use writable CDs for recovery disks). Now how many new Linux users can even find xorg.conf, let alone have the boldness to muck with it? Or even experienced users? The Ubuntu forums are cram-full of command-line fear and loathing; the very sight of a text file drives them into seizures. I think Paula's eagerness to explore and try new things should be rewarded.

Of course that's easy for me to say, because I don't have to support this customer. I phased out most of my onsite jobs because I don't have the patience for customer support anymore. I used to love it. I taught classes, I did one-on-one coaching, and I enjoyed it. But that was then. Now I'm old and grumpy and don't want to be bothered. But still I know the right thing to do, and the right thing is cherish and nurture customers who are eager to learn and unafraid to explore. They're a whole lot more rewarding and fun than the ones who freak at the notion of anything that is even a tiny bit different, and who would rather fall down a flight of stairs than allow a new thought into their brains.

Refugees From the Windows Wasteland

Maybe some of us wizened old Linux geeks have forgotten what it's like in Windowsland. It's ugly. It's smelly. Exploring your system does not reward you with a deeper understanding of how it works, first of all because "works" is only superficially accurate- it limps along, barely. Exploring your system only reveals more and weirder hazards the deeper you go.

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