Return from the Abyss

It has been nearly 10 years since I wrote anything that was published "online" purely for the sake of writing. When I worked at Red Hat, among the many things I did, I helped market the Red Hat brand. Part of that involved writing a column for an "electronic newsletter". So, I wrote a few hundred words on whatever happened to be on my mind at the time the marketing folks reminded me it was time to send out our next newsletter. In many ways, I've missed that basic one-to-many communication that allowed me to rant, complain or praise as appropriate. To that end, I've decided to take time out of my schedule and continue in that tradition.

Since I brought up Red Hat, I think it is fitting to spend the remainder of this entry discussing what I miss from my Red Hat days. More than anything, I miss the free spirit that built that company. When I started, the entire engineering team fit in one car, albeit cramped, to go to lunch. While the people that made up that early team were as diverse and unique as you can imagine (we had virtually nothing in common except our passion for Open Source and Red Hat), the bonds between us during those early years was very tight.

I remember fondly the events that led to my getting hired. I was a graduate student at Montana State University working on a masters degree in engineering when I got this idea that I should get a job or an internship or something. At the same time, I was using Slackware Linux not Red Hat, but Red Hat was the up and coming distribution. There was a guy named Donnie Barnes who worked at Red Hat and posted heavily on various mailing lists and USENET groups. At some point in time, he mentioned that Red Hat was looking for people to come work for them. I sent a email off to Marc Ewing, the co-founder of Red Hat. After a couple of back and forth email exchanges, he asked me what I wanted could do, I told him I was really good at breaking things and he offered me a job. It was kind of surreal so I tried to catch him on the phone and talk to him in person, which I eventually did. It was a brief call during which he advised me that Red Hat "paid dirt and I had to bring my own shovel". Turns out that "dirt" means $30,000/year which sounded real good to me at the time as I was making about $1,000 per semester as a research assistant.

The stories that I could tell about the early years are many, but I'll end this entry with the story of my first day at Red Hat. After finally finding Marc's office in the suite of mini offices that Red Hat occupied on Cornwallis Drive in Durham, NC, he showed me around the place ending up where I was going to call home. I was introduced to Donnie in person for the first time and that Donnie and I were going to share an office. Let me clarify the term "office" a bit, the office was a room that was so small, when Donnie wanted to leave the office, I had to leave too. Donnie showed me to a pile of very random looking computer hardware and told me to dig through to find a working computer that would be my workstation. I didn't know it at the time, but this pile of hardware was the Red Hat test lab that I was going to be in charge of very soon. Some digging revealed an Axil 311 which is a Sparc clone that was paired with an enormous 19" color display (known as the Hulker) that had 256 colors but was so dim that even in near total darkness, I could usually only make out shades of black on it. And let me tell you about "Stump Boy", my first chair at Red Hat. The most ungodly uncomfortable chair ever conceived by human beings. I believe that chair would have been banned under the terms of the Geneva Convention had it been used in times of war. I ended up using that chair for most of my first year at Red Hat and then proceeded to drag it around to all of the offices I ever had and even back to Montana when I returned years later. The chair has since been removed to an undisclosed location...

Thanks for reading this far, I'm sure I'll put up many other interesting stories along with rants, raves and general rambles. And much to Alan Cox's delight, I'm certain there will be many wangerisms posted over time.