Drew Kwashnak

1754 points
User profile image.
New England, CT

I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.

Authored Comments

MS Publisher is one of those "thorns in my side" as my wife uses it frequently and I have not found an alternative that provides an easy to use interface with the same positioning and text-flow capabilities.

LibreOffice Writer doesn't handle the placement and interaction of text and pictures very well. I find I nudge something just that little too far and everything on the screen scatters! Maybe it's gotten better.

I actually think LibreOffice Draw is better, but some formatting is not intuitive.

Scribus I haven't used in a long time but when I last used it, it seemed very basic and non-intuitive.

When I sat my wife down in front of Publisher on my work laptop she not only finished the project, but she started exploring and playing with the program. She is an artist and not interested in computers (like most of us here) so this was significant.

Now for image manipulation I use Gimp and all of the computers, Windows and Linux, have Gimp installed so I can help them out on any of the systems without adjusting my thinking for different programs (or "now how do THEY do this?..").

"What makes me mad at work?"

Somebody who is willing to go round-and-round and waste both of our time without coming right out and saying "I don't know"

If you don't know, then say so, and we'll then go to trying to figure it out together!