User:Tomrue

I am a licensed mental health and chemical dependency counselor by day, employed by the people of the great State of New York; and a FreeBSD [1] system administrator wannabe by night (not about to give up my day job though). I am not entirely self-taught in Unix-speak. I have to acknowledge Dan Rue [2] of Carver, Minnesota as an online friend and mentor when it comes to FreeBSD, and I owe him not just a mention but my sincere thanks. My good friend Google [3] has also been a very effective teacher when Dan has been busy or unavailable, but having having an expert to send questions to when I'm stuck is a godsend.

I enjoy digital photography and have learned over the years that if one takes enough pictures, some will invariably turn reasonably out well. I walk a few miles a day and often take pictures as I go. Digital media allow a virtually infinite number of shots (limited only by the constraints of time) at no more cost than that of the camera. Building web pages since 1995, my preferred application in Windows (which I haven't altogether abandoned yet, though a house without Windows is my eventual goal) is Dreamweaver. Drupal [4] manages much of my website content, together with PmWiki [5]. For graphics, I use Gimp[6], PaintShop Pro, or Photoshop CS.

After recently upgrading to FreeBSD 6.1 on my server, I did not reinstall XWindows and don't know of or when I will. For security and speed, I am thinking that I would prefer to keep my Apache [7] web server dedicated to that purpose. Sooner or later, I'll upgrade one of another desktop to FreeBSD and use XWindows [8] for everyday production purposes; and eventually perhaps even dump WinXP from my Gateway laptop in favor of the free version of Berkeley Standard Distribution. The only thing holding me back on the laptop is the lack (as far as I know) of a wireless network driver that works well with FreeBSD... yet. Please tell me if you know of one.

For more information, see tomrue.net.

Peace.