New User

A new gardening buddy can be lured into the world of computing.   Let me explain. I’ve long admired the yard and tidy little house of a neighbor down the street.   On a couple of occasions as I’ve passed by I stopped for a minute and asked her questions about the plants she had and she was kind enough to supply me with the answers.   Turns out she’s a two-house person and spends the weekends here and goes back “into town” during the work-week.   She’ll be spending more time in this house as time goes by.

Our friendship has developed slowly due to the time constraints each of us has but we were finally able to visit each other’s homes this weekend.   She’s an avid gardener and wonder-of-wonders, has no computer, because she hasn’t anyone to set it up and help her learn.   But she’d like to.   Lights and bells went off in my head.   What fun to lure another trusting soul into the addictive world of computers!

She came over to look at our computers, grabbed a mouse and with a minimum of fuss and bother, was using our Debian Linux box, Googling all sorts of subjects that interested her, changing wallpapers and copy/pasting from a web page to a text editor.   This was the first time she had used a computer.   We all laughed at her delight at changing the desktop to a beautiful picture of flowers that she had snagged from the web, saved, and framed with a gradient she made herself.   This is powerful stuff, y’all. It’s all about choices.

Don has been scrounging/refurbishing/building computers and loading them with whichever Linux distribution is most appropriate for the computer’s resources.   Most of the time this means Debian Stable.   It has everything a new or intermediate computer user could want, and since most people don’t get past that point, it’s all they’ll ever need.   He has given away five so far, to people who need them, for a variety of reasons.   We have both been learning as many Linux distributions as possible so that we can provide lessons and tech support.

This experience brings home an old adage: the best way to learn is to teach.   And this morning our new friend knocked at the door, with a gift of home made wild plum jelly.   This woman needs a computer.

Lisa Miller