Washington DC
By day, a consultant for NOVA Web Development. By evening and weekend, he dons his costume (which looks remarkably like the jeans and T-shirts he normally wears), and goes out doing battle against the forces of proprietary software. He was the team contact for the Ubuntu DC "LoCo" and one of the hosts of the former OLPC Learning Club/Sugar Labs DC. (He has also served as a Red Hat Ambassador.)
Authored Comments
Ah. I misinterpreted "neither the need nor desire" as "and therefore never sat down with". So, calculator, slide-rule, lots of paper / pen / chalkboard / chalk? Or a brain that's just "wired for it"? It just seems like a field where you'd have needed to do a fair amount of complex math relatively quickly -- spoken as one who is most definitely NOT an astrophysics Ph.D.
People I tutored used to assume I was good with math. I responded "Hell, no! Why do you think I use a computer?" Truth be told, I was good with theory, but on standardized tests my "clerical speed and accuracy" put me in the third percentile in the nation. The "verbal reasoning and logic" score, however, was at the other end of the spectrum -- 96th percentile. Not that I put a lot of stock in those tests, having seen the ugliness of how those particular sausages are made, up close and personal, as part of my career.
This is one area in which I think the community has a long way to go. It's getting better, but for a long time, when someone said "community edition" or "the open source community", it meant insiders who had been involved for a long time. In many meetings / mailing lists / chat environments, tolerance for "newbie" questions decreased as the community aged. And even the highly tolerant forgot what it is like to be unfamiliar with something, responding to questions with what appeared to be a foreign language ("Simple! Just pipe it through grep and redirect stderr to the null device." WTF is that supposed to mean to someone just starting out???)
It's important to remember that new blood coming into the community will keep it thriving, and we all need to nurture that if for no other reason than enlightened self-interest. In addition to making friends that might become future developers, answering newbie questions hones ones documentation skills.