Wow. Blast from the Past

Just got off the phone with Scott Pfeffer. Scott was my Teaching Assistant for my first computer programming class way back in Spring '87 when they still taught Pascal as the first programming language. He was a terminally quirky geek with very few social skills. But he was brilliant and likeable and he encouraged me to learn more about this thing called UNIX. He, along with my very good friend Byron Jeff, took me in and made sure that I was learning the stuff that the didn't teach you in class. Like what UNIX was and how to get access to more resources than the standard student had access too.

Scott had a nervous breakdown at one point and he fundamentaly was never the same again. He eventually recovered and found religion. Judaism in fact, since that was his family birthright. He is now living in Israel and goes by the title/name of Moshe like a proper Jewish man. He's also married and working in Jerusalem doing Technical work. After 10 years after from it, he's about to get back into using UINX. And he is interested in Linux. So he did some googling and discovered that I had been involved with the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts that had been based on Tech's campus for years (hell, I founded it along with about 6 other folks). And that I had a bit to doo with the Atlnata Linux Showcase (hell, me and 12 other insane folks founded that). And that I was fiddling around with Linux here and there (been a professional developer on various parts of the Linux kernel and linux-centric applications for 5 years) so he called my cell phone to chat.

I got him downloading SuSe 9.1 personal-edition to fiddle with. His machien is a 500Mhz Pentium with 192MB of ram and a 40GB disk. He should be fine. Once he is up to speed, he can choose a distribution that suits him better. SuSE is just my first choice for a mostly windows-centric person with some old-school UNIX skills.

It was good to hear from him and reestablish friendship from so long ago.