He started the conversation...

Pretty rainy today.

Yup.

What's your name?

Willy. What's yours?

George. Where do you live?

In Costa Rica. How about you?

Live here in Nicaragua, over in the next town. How long you been living in Costa Rica?

Five years. How long have you lived here?

About that.

Did you come from the US?

Yup. Won't go back.

Why?

Figured things out. I'm a programmer, threw everything in the dumpster and moved here. Figured out where things are going. Can't handle it, can't do it.

What do you mean?

Well, the last job I had was for an insurance company in New Jersey. They were having me work on this database. At some point during the project, I asked what they were actually going to do with the software. Turns out that they were cross-referencing what their policy holders were buying in stores. They were figuring out who was higher risk based on what they bought and dumping their policies if they didn't like it. They decided what it's permissible for you to buy in the grocery store! Man, I couldn't do that.

Well, I don't have one of those grocery store cards anyway. Just seems like a hassle.

Yeah, well a lot of people don't get it. Before I left, I saw a guy in front of me let the cashier run his grocery card, then put 20 boxes of small ziplock sandwich bags on his credit card. I asked the guy, what are you going to do with all those bags? He said, make sandwiches. Yeah, right. The only thing he had in his cart was sandwich bags. No salami, no peanut butter, nothing but small ziplock bags. People are stupid. Eventually they're gonna track stuff like that. Maybe they already do. Can I buy you a beer?

Sure!

(Brief beer ordering, opening, and drinking interlude)

So, what are you doing now? No computers?

Nope, threw them all in the dumpster. Well, I have a laptop. But I'm making money working on old cars. Old cars have good engines, you can always fix 'em. They're not disposable like the new designs. People don't get it, they haven't figured out that all this pollution control verification is just to get them to buy new stuff they'll have to throw away in a cupla years. What do you do?

I'm writing articles on how Linux is spreading to lots of countries and changing the world.

(Eyes brighten) Linux - - isn't that like Unix? I used to do Unix. Now I've got this Windows on a laptop someone gave me. Don't even want to use it, but sometimes I get on the Internet with it. Pisses me off, I type really fast and sometimes I hit a wrong key. I look up and all this weird stuff gets on the screen, or some little window pops up and I have to do a bunch of stuff to get back to what I was doing. Wish I could just go back to vi.

You know vi? Vi comes with Linux distributions, you could use vi again if you get Linux.

Really? What should I get?

Well, to start off you could get Knoppix, it's on a single CD so you could just try it out. It has a Windows manager...

No, I just want a command line for the stuff I want to do. Vi is fine, I can do everything I want to do with vi.

Just about any distribution comes with vi. Try Knoppix, you won't even have to install it, it just boots and runs. There are some other small distributions that will do that, but Knoppix is very well done.

What?

You don't have to install it on the hard drive. You make a CD image, and it's bootable. You can even take it to an Internet cafe and work there, you'd have to get permission to get the proxy setup and login if you want to get on the Internet. But it just runs right off the CD drive.

Cool. I'll try it. Where can I get it?

Just go to a high-speed internet cafe and download it, get them to burn a CD.

Ok, I will. Cool. What about documentation?

You can download that, too. Anyway if you know Unix command line stuff, you can probably already do a lot without any books.

Cool. Ya know, that reminds me, another thing that really got me upset was when I was working for this company that made control systems for atomic reactors. All this redundant, certified stuff, sensors, actuators, dual systems, data displays. Anyway, we shipped systems to third world countries first to test them out. Then after a few years we shipped one inside the US. After a few months of running, they said it kept hanging up. They sent me out to troubleshoot it. I tried for days, got to where I could bang the right butttons really fast and simulate weeks of operator usage. Couldn't find anything. Finally, after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions, it crashed. I figured out it was a memory allocation problem. Memory wasn't getting reallocated, so eventually the system used up all available memory. This was on a certified system.

Why didn't it happen in the other countries first?

They finally sent someone out to some of the sites. They found out that the operators there were also having the problem. But they thought it was their fault, so they weren't logging the failures; they just rebooted the systems when it happened.

Wow.

Yeah. This is for control systems for nuclear power plants.

Wow. Hey, good to meet you, I gotta run. Thanks for the conversation, you're a very interesting person. And thanks for the beer.

-----

Gee, this guy already runs vi and drinks beer. Guess he's ready for Linux. But the other thing that this brought to mind was a discussion I had recently with Phil Hughes and a couple of other guys. You might remember that I had written about the possibility of a country inviting geeks to live there in order to help with development. We were talking about this again and had pretty much decided that it wasn't going to happen, at least in the foreseeable future. So, we were talking about setting up a geek settlement or ranch within a country. In fact, Phil is taking a trip to Nicaragua to see about doing it there. But, I was arguing that people weren't going to be moving out of developed countries anytime soon unless they had a good reason. I was thinking of more terrorism or something else catastrophic, but after talking to George, maybe I am wrong...

Willy Smith, back in Costa Rica