I log on to /. in hope of those hard to find nuggets of technical insight that propel me along to a better understanding all things binary.

What I frequently end up reading are the stories about new nerdy games (GTA), new nerdy movies (Star Wars Episodes, LOTR, the Matrices, etc.) and -- occasionally -- politics and literary criticism.

The modding system was what made me feel safe enough to eventually create an account and begin tentatively posting items and replies.

I'm told by my user interface that I'm pretty much invisible to everyone here, but I've realized that I still enjoy the company. I get a lot of gratification from reading other members' exchanges and the stories that are posted here.

For me, /. is an oasis that supports a free, tolerant and curious community of total dorks.

I've been reading /. off and on for several months. It surprises me that I have been.

I'm not technical in that my tech education in underfunded rural schools was probably subpar and, more significantly, math and related subjects come hard to me despite the most heroic efforts of my teachers.

(My younger brother seems to have no trouble and actually makes his living as a coder. My computer needs were met by Apple well into the 90s.)

When I took over management of a small rural branch office of a nonprofit law firm four years ago, I had no technical budget. My office inherited a network of four old computers was a peer-to-peer dos potpourri of hardware, Win95 and headaches. My predecessor was a cranky luddite who had never turned on his machine.

Suddenly I had an extreme need and curiousity to understand how thes machines worked. Our office depended in the extreme on our ability to produce a high volume of heavily formatted and edited legal documents. Our low-income clients had tremendous needs, but I had no technical budget to cure my many, many technical obstacles.

Around this time, I began, with my brother's help, to take a problem machine apart after hours. I also came across the phrase open source technology.

At some point, I figured out that if I put together a machine at home, I could learn about the guts of the computer, play around with open source and -- though I deceived myself that this was a small part of my motivation -- play Sim City III.

I had NO IDEA that I had started a four year gauntlet of humiliation, pain and lost partitions.