[Newark] Newbie

[Peter Adams]

On 7 October 2010 16:05, Steve Caddy <steve.m.caddy at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> We're quietly active. We were visited by some members of Mansfield LUG a while
> back, and I think the terms used were "Busted! Beer drinking society".  If 5
> people turn up for a meeting, it's "busy". If 6 turn up, it'll be an
> attendance record.

I've heard stories about people going to English LUGs and then going
to the local Real Ale meets and basically finding all the same people
there. Maybe they were talking about your guys? Do we have many beard
and sandal wearers here? ;)

In my old LUG in Belfast we usually found that any more than 6 people
turning up was cumbersome and the group usually split in two. It's
also hard to fit that many people in a snug in our local, but for
organised talks etc where a venue has been booked and arranged we
usually got a reasonable crowd.

> As Chris has said, I've run a few C workshops, although that's gone a bit
> quiet recently (maybe I cooked Craig's brain?). I don't mind meeting on an ad
> hoc basis, but generally last Tuesday of the month is set aside for a beer
> and/or curry. We missed last month - I ended up in Grantham playing a cribbage
> match.

It's always nice when a LUG is newbie friendly and folks aren't afraid
to ask for help. Most luggers I've know tend to be quite happy to
school people in their chosen passion or field. I've been using Linux
now for about ten years, mainly to a hobbyist extent as I've yet to
have an employer that's even open to the suggestion of a move away
from the spiel of their Microsoft rep, but always felt like a new user
since there is ALWAYS something new to learn and always another user
introducing me to some new facet or use of the OS or some new distro.

At the moment I'm running Ubuntu on a Desktop machine and Crunchbang
on a netbook (which I'll admit also dual-boots Win7). I started with
Mandrake (the Ubuntu of it's day) but moved onto Debian mainly because
all the other Linuxes users I knew used and recommended it. I'd still
be using it now if it wasn't for that machine burning itself out a few
months back. I plan at some point to put a new server machine together
when I'm settled in, at the moment I don't even have a working net
connection at home and have to patronise Starbucks on a daily basis to
use their wi-fi.

-- 
Peter