David Both

Last night we attended a “Change is Coming” party/meeting in our neighborhood — one of many held simultaneously all around the country. This is a very important and exciting continuing use of the organization developed by Barack Obama for his campaign and takes us to the next step, which is actively working for the change for which we voted.

We were really impressed because over 60 people signed up for this event and most of those folks showed up. We all have a great deal of energy in creating this change and so it was a very fun and exciting event.

The basic idea was for us to list all of the things that are important to us and then select the top three upon which we will focus in the coming months. We did choose three and this information will be passed up the communications links to Obama headquarters where they will aggregate it and determine the priorities of the administration.

Our priorities here in North Raleigh are:

• Health Care
• Environment
• The Economy

These priorities go a lot deeper and broader than the list would suggest at first glance. As one example, for health care it is important that we have universal health care that is easily available to all. It should travel from job to job with you, be free of exclusions due to pre-existing conditions and without regard to socio-economic status.

Each of the three items also includes commonalities such as creating new jobs, feeding the hungry, reinvigorating the economy, freeing the United States from the tyranny of dependence upon foreign oil, developing new sources of energy, and ensuring social justice for all.

In addition we have formed local groups around these items at the top of our priority list and will be working locally on these items as well as nationally. And we will also be working on some of the items that did not make the top three, but with less emphasis; they will not go away and also need our attention.

It is truly exciting to have a voice in determining the directions for the next few years — and hopefully far beyond. We are once again energized and feel empowered by the political process instead of alienated as we have been for the last eight years.

I will post more here as we further refine and define our goals and we begin to act for change.

Yes We Can!

The “Complete Kickstart” article that I co-authored with Bruce Garland, a colleague at Cisco Systems, made #9 in the Linux Magazine Top Ten Best Articles list for 2008.

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7195/

My job at Cisco is moving to India — And I am not going with it; I have not been invited to. However I have a good transition package which gives me some time in which to find a new position.

So I am now searching for a new job as a Linux Administrator and Guru. My resume contains all of my relevant data, but here is a quick overview.

Technical Skills

• I have many technical certifications including RHCE and Sun Certified System Administrator.
• I do a great deal of shell scripting, especially in BASH and Tcl/Expect.
• I am an expert Perl programmer.
• I was an instructor at Red Hat and taught their RHCE classes.
• While with IBM in 1981, I wrote the original training course on the IBM PC.
• I wrote a regular column as a contributing editor for the Phoenix OS/2 Society, Inc. (POSSI) newsletter “EAs”
• I have contributed articles to LAN Magazine, Windows and OS/2 magazine, OS/2 Magazine, Carolina Computer News, Fedora News, Linux Magazine and Linux Journal.
• I am a Coauthor of the book “Inside OS/2 Warp”, New Riders Publishing, 1995, having contributed the chapters on File systems and Troubleshooting.
• Author of the “DataBook(tm) for OS/2 Warp”, 1996, 2000.
• I have many awards and letters of commendation from Customers, IBM, MCI and Cisco.