[UbuntuWomen] A long postponed introduction

[Miia Ranta]

Hello!

I've been lurking on this mailing list for quite some time, having
postponed this introductory message for a loooong time. I apologize and
try to explain it with my general disliking of mailing lists - as the
postmaster and webmaster I get a lot of spam that Evolution doesn't
recognize as such. I dislike email only slightly less than telephones,
my phone bill is about 5 euros per month. Anyway.

I'm Myrtti, from Tampere, Finland. I'm 27 years old on August and I'm
studying at the local University of Applied Sciences to become a
Bachelor of Computer Sciences - studies I should be continuing even as I
work (officially part time) at the Finnish Centre for Open Source
Solutions (=~ LUG for FLOSS companies).

I've been intrested in webdesign since 1995 and considered myself a geek
and a nerd since I was 13. I've studied media technology and was
introduced to first by getting a shell account with pine to read mail
with and putting homepages on. The first "true" venture to Linux for the
first time on my previous studies circa fall 2000 with Red Hat. Nobody
told me that logging as root to a graphical session was a bad idea and I
got bored by the whole thing quite quick. The next time I ventured into
Linux was on 2002 when I got my first Linux shell account from my now
common-law husband. He introduced me with first an IRC bouncer, then
later irssi and screen. It took me quite a while before I installed any
Linux as my desktop OS, that was spring 2004. I tried Debian, Fedora,
Knoppix and Mandrake, and suddenly acknowledged that men seemed to have
a strange attitude towards newbies in computing that I dislike. A
hardware crash distroyed my computer and I started new studies and had
courses that required Word and SPSS. I needed to do some vector
graphics, did them on sodipodi and got frustrated over how it worked on
Windows 2000. After the courses requiring the usage of Windows-only
software ended, I quickly decided to move to Linux to get the advantage
of using my favorite apps in native environment and bumped into Ubuntu
in February 2005. The attitude I'd seen on other communities about
newbies and especially newbie women was nowhere in sight with Ubuntu, so
I instantly fell in love with Ubuntu, the community and especially the
CoC.

My experience in online discussion forum based communities made the
founder of the Finnish Ubuntu community Timo Jyrinki intrested, and
since I was fluent with Sodipodi and Inkscape, he asked me to do the
community a logo and to help him with the newly found forums. I actually
got my current job because of the forums; my current boss started a
thread about a local FLOSS conference and asked if anyone was intrested.
I replied and said it would be a great way to make contacts to get a job
trainership position - he emailed me back and promised me entry to the
conference and asked if I were intrested to be working for COSS :-)

My job consists of installing Ubuntu's to our laptops (before everybody
used Windows which obviously wasn't really good imagewise), overseeing
and supervising our Summercode Finland project (kinda like SoC but with
a local twist), communicating with different communities (Ubuntu, FLUG,
localisation, demoscene, women, students) and this is what is mentioned
in my business card; the first two lines are 'Miia "Myrtti" Ranta,
Communities', fixing our website now and then and doing this and that
about open source, open content, open solutions and open standards. I'm
supposed to be writing my final papers on the subject of "Migration from
Windows XP to Linux in a SME - case Technology Centre Hermia" (COSS is a
project of TC Hermia), but currently I'm exhausted with work and my
studies are suffering a bit from that.

I regret that I'm not able to give either Ubuntu, Ubuntu-fi or
Ubuntu-women my best efforts, but I try to keep myself up to date with
IRC and some blogs. The little I do in the Finnish community has been
restricted to trying to keep freenode's #ubuntu-fi as CoC as possible
especially towards newbies, since I really think it's the first and
foremost reason why the community is so magnificent, why it accomplishes
so much and ultimately why Ubuntu is so popular and newbie friendly.

I've played around with the idea of forming a Linuxchix sort of
community in Finland, but the idea has been lying around for a long time
since I currently don't have time or resources needed. I even dislike
the idea of it being Linux only - women in ICT should be encouraged no
matter their OS of choice happens to be.

More personal side of me can be seen at my webpages -
http://velhottaret.net/~myrtti (velhottaret is Finnish for female
wizards - the server is run and used by women only). My personal email
address is myrtti at gmail.com should you wish to email me personally.

Miia "Myrtti" Ranta
-- 
COSS - Centre for Open Source Solutions - http://www.coss.fi
IRCnet, freenode, mozillanet, GIMPnet