About me, my Linux story (short version), and a brief note on the IRC channel and our member list

[Scott Shields]

Sorry I didn't get to this sooner. The mailing list was hard to keep track
of (we should fix that reply-to issue).

Anyways, I'm Scott Shields, a student at Kirkwood Community College. I've
been there since 2004.  I have a degree in LAN Management and I'm pursuing a
degree in Computer Information Systems/Management Information Systems. I
could say I'm a member of the Computer Club on the Iowa City campus, but
it's more of an informal club right now. I've also been talking with Jim
Thompson (the advisor for LAN Management) about the idea of a Linux Club, or
better yet merge a few of the smaller clubs and form an Ubuntu LoCo team
there. Last year was a tough year for me (and probably a few of us as well),
so I didn't get much accomplished towards that goal. This year I hope to
attend our security competition and find more people interested in Linux.

I decided to keep my Linux story short. I've actually only been using Linux
as my main OS for a year now. It was last year that I decided to force
myself to use it and retook the Linux Server class. I chose Ubuntu, the then
and still now popular OS, over the other distributions because OpenSUSE
(SLES is taught in the class) completely failed at booting on my laptop. I
then discovered that Ubuntu "Just Works" and decided to go with that. Using
Ubuntu as my primary OS forced me to learn a lot about Linux over the next
few months. I consulted it's great community resources (mostly the wiki and
IRC) and learned as I went. I now use Ubuntu as my main OS of choice and
I've also converted our server and a few machines at work to Ubuntu. Overall
I think it was a great experience and I owe a lot to the Ubuntu community
for helping me out.

I wanted to add a quick note. Don't forget to join our IRC channel
#ubuntu-us-ia on irc.freenode.net. It's usually empty, but I lurk in there
whenever I am logged in. We should find out when everyone is free and
schedule a meeting of sorts. We could then chat and get to know each other,
come up with some ideas and go from there. Also, feel free to at yourself to
the member list at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IowaTeam/Members.
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