jimstapleton's Journal: Who Am I?

Quick blurb to give my posts context.

OS of choice:
FreeBSD and Windows.
I like operating systems where I don't have to spend a lot of my time getting them to work, where problems are trivially fixed, and documentation is pretty good. That leaves these two. Believe it or not Windows Help and Microsoft's website actually /do/ have useful things in them, and web searches turn out a lot of nice things also. FreeBSD has the handbook, and the makers don't have the misguided oppinion that putting useful examples in the man pages is a crime against humanity/nature/computers/whatever. Also, the community of the former is alwys friendly and helpful. In the Linux world, I've only gotten that from Gentoo, the rest tend to be arrogant elitists who think they have the best thing in the world and no one should even try anything else.

Both systems have minimalized the issues with Dependancy Hell, which, even with things like yum, apt get, and the updater in Ubuntu, have been painful in Linux due to conflicing requirements. (Ubuntu's updater is the least problematic in the Linux world, after Gentoo in my experience, but... it's also the only updater that made my computer unbootable once, even Windows Updates can't claim that.)

OK, according to this, Apple is also a valid contender, but... I think the GUI style is ugly (so is the XP style, but that's what "classic" mode is for), and I don't want to pay a premium for average quality hardware.

OSes I've used extensively:
Windows: 98, 2000, XP
Linux: Red Hat 6, Red Hat 7, Red Hat 9, FC2 to FC4, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Knoppix, Gentoo
BSD: FreeBSD
VMS
True64
Solaris

Operating system I think you should use:
I'll take the FreeBSD users stance on this one: Whichever one you like. Just give them a try before claiming to know their pros and cons.

Closed vs. Open source:
I like what gets the job done within my budget. I could care less if it is open or closed source because I'm not going to be fiddling with the source most likely, and to be honest, the different development models focus on different sets of needs, tending to produce products with their own sets of pros and cons. What I can say is that Close Source tends to go from "product idea" to "useable product" faster, but while the gears are slower in open source, they tend to make a better product in the long run.

Programming languages:
I Know and Like:
C, C++, C#, D, SQL, PHP, Python
I know and am indifferent
VBA, VB.NET, LISP
I know and don't care for
Java, Perl

Profession/education:
I have a BS in Molecular Biology and Computer Science. I have previously worked in computational genetic analysis, but now am a computer system administrator, someday when I don't have to worry as mucha bout money (read: own my house without debt, have plenty of money saved), I hope to teach.

Hobbies:
Programming, pen & paper gaming, authoring, reading (technical, sci-fi, fantasy), playing video games (RPG), doing most of the latter (except programming and authoring) with PEOPLE.

Oh, and my spelling sucks. That's not going to change. I'd like it to change, and I work to get better at it, but it's a no-hope kindof thing. Deal with it. My inability to spell in a langauge that is extremely irregular in it's spelling does not make me a moron. My brain tends to minimize memorizing things, and do everything by logic, unfortunately I haven't convinced it that english spelling doesn't follow logic that well.