<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.26.0"> </HEAD> <BODY> Hello Rachel, I'm new to this list as well, so maybe I should introduce myself. I've been using Linux since 1995. I started by experimenting with the first two distributions of Linux which were ygdrazil and Slackware. I switched to Debian in 1996 because this gave my first really useable Linux workstation. Bandwidth and speed was very poor on telephone dial-ups in 1996, and so I joined John Winters and a few others in what was called "The Linux Buying Consortium" (LBC) to import Linux CDs from USA into Britain. For a few years I provided help and support to Linux users on the LBC discussion list. This was necessary for most users in those days because installing Linux on any machine required a manual search for any suitable drivers for all the bits of the hardware, followed by a long and hair-raising process of many iterations of re-compiling the kernel to include different versions of each driver till you arrived at something that worked. This was followed by a complete manual configuration of everything, by editing the config files in /etc using vi. For a short time many years ago, I tried becoming a Debian Developer. But that was in the era of the "Debian Flame Wars", and I couldn't stand all the stupid, aggressive flames and bad language, so dropped out quickly. I have been using Ubuntu for the last 5 years. I used to programme in C and Perl, though I'm a bit rusty in programming at present. I am slowly learning Python, because this has become one of the most used languages in Linux. I am currently one of the developers on the OpenShot Non-Linear Video Editor for Linux (<A HREF="https://launchpad.net/openshot">https://launchpad.net/openshot</A> and <A HREF="http://www.openshotvideo.com/).">http://www.openshotvideo.com/</A>). I am developing the documentation and Help Manual using Gnome Help. I am also heavily involved in testing each version as it is committed to Launchpad. I used to be a research scientist working on machine vision, developing mathematical and statistical methods for automated recognition from digital video images. Then I ran away to join the circus! I am now a member of a circus troupe of aerial acrobats, and I teach aerial acrobatics on trapeze, ropes and silks (corde lisse & tissus lisse). We specialise in Contemporary Circus (Cirque Nouveaux), which is a fusion of contemporary street theatre and improvised physical theatre with acrobatics and other circus arts. Contemporary Circus tells a story! I am also involved in producing videos of our circus troupe. There are three strands to my filming projects here: 1) Training Videos for aerial acrobatics, and for our Instructor Training Programme 2) Promotional Videos 3) Performance Videos of our artistic productions These films are all in full HD, and all the editing, compositing, processing etc is done entirely on an Ubuntu workstation using OpenSource software. Software I use for this: <TABLE WIDTH="100%" BORDER="1"> <TR> <TD ALIGN="left"> OpenShot </TD> <TD> Non-Linear Video Editor </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> The Gimp </TD> <TD> Image processing </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> Inkscape </TD> <TD> titles, scrolling credits, transition masks etc </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> Blender </TD> <TD> 3d animation </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> Audacity </TD> <TD> Audio editing </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> NoteEdit </TD> <TD> Musical composition </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> LilyPond </TD> <TD> Musical composition, rendering scores </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD> LaTeX </TD> <TD> Script writing, and other documentation </TD> </TR> </TABLE> Best wishes, Helen McCall 2009-08-14 at 05:34 +0100, Rachel Sands wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> Hi, I thought I'd introduce myself. i've been using ubuntu since 8.04, so okay, not a really long time :) just wanted to get involved in the community a bit, so I did some Googling around and I saw ubuntu-women I know some HTML, CSS and PHP. Apart from that, I know how to operate a linux system :) I'm based in the UK at the moment Hope I can help the community -- Rachel Sands <rachel.sands.(nospam).<A HREF="mailto:uk@googlemail.com">uk@googlemail.com</A>> </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> </BODY> </HTML>