Today I was approached by someone in need of some help. They had purchased a VCR and DVD recorder combo and didn’t know how to use it. They asked if I knew how to use such a device. Having never had the desire to transfer video from tape to DVD (garbage in/garbage out anyone?) my was answer was no. They then asked if maybe I would read the book for them and then show them how to use the device to which my response was, sure, at my rate of $25 per hour.

To this the person, who works with kids, presumably a teacher at some level, responded with something along the lines of why do you get paid so much and the kicker, “my job is more important that yours.” This took be by surprise because for one it’s a little rude to throw around who’s job is more important and two because it makes me assume they think I should do the work for free. I mean seriously, here is a person asking me to do something they aren’t willing to do and balking at the idea that someone might actually want to get paid for it. Do they say the same thing any other trained service technicians working on their car, plumbing or what have you? Have they ever considered what they’re paying them in that case?

Besides that if they’re a teacher then why not…you know…teach yourself how to use an item you purchased?

I’ve been a Linux user for a long time, eight years in fact. Now I’m not trying to toot my horn, I merely am pointing out that I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of changes and a number of flash-in-the-pan distributions come and go. Most of the time the short lived distributions were simply repackaged and re-branded versions of an existing Linux project like Red Hat or whatever and they were pretty easy to pick up. Everything looked and felt like a Red Hat system but this “new” distribution focused on a certain aspect. Mandrake Linux or Linux Mandrake as it might been more commonly called back then, was in fact based on Red Hat but with an experience more focused on KDE and ease of use. Today of course Mandrake is known as Mandriva and you can no longer say that it is simply a repackaged Red Hat (or Fedora) distribution.

Now like I said, I’ve been using Linux as a desktop or server OS since about 1999, probably longer than a lot of people. During that time I pretty much have used Red Hat (or Fedora Core) exclusively and I’ve grown accustomed to it’s inner workings. I don’t have to reference anything to know how to install packages, what packages are called, manage services, edit config files or what have you, it’s all just familiar territory. Much like walking around my house in the dark, there are no surprises anymore.

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Continuing with today’s theme of software I like I wanted to post a bit about OpenVPN. OpenVPN is a cross platform (Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris and OSX) VPN available at http://openvpn.net/. Using OpenVPN you are able to connect a remote client or remote network to another network across the Internet with minimal firewall fuss. I use OpenVPN for various client to network and network to network style VPNs. I also use OpenVPN on my Linux server at home so my laptop can send and receive email from anywhere.

If you’re looking for a way to image the drive in your computer look no further than Snapshot. Snapshot is available at http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ and allows you to image your hard drive while the computer is running. Now I’ve used a number of backup solutions in my day and Snapshot ranks right up there as the best. Using Snapshot I have backed up and restored my laptop a number of times. Go ahead and click the link to read more about it. It costs about $49 USD.

If you’re like me then you probably have a number of email addresses that you’ve acquired over the years. Among all my accounts, I’ve had this one Hotmail address for the longest but I never log into it anymore because of the amount of spam I was getting. The problem with hotmail is the spam blocking tool is rather hit or miss.

For all of my POP or IMAP accounts I use Thunderbird and I’ve always been impressed with its spam blocking feature. Well not too long ago I found out about a great extension for Thunderbird that lets you add your existing free webmail accounts like Hotmail and use all of the features of Thunderbird you’re used to.

You can find the extension at http://webmail.mozdev.org/