Shan Smith - Introduction

Without making this sound like a 12 step meeting, we're all going to be introducing ourselves, so you know what kind of background we all have.

My name (of course) is Shannon Smith. I'm a professional photographer, and own 831 Photography (along with my wife and our partner).

I'm an artistic geek by heart. I went to school on a dual scholarship of music performance and computer science. I've been working with computers since 1982. With my music background, I used mac quite a bit in college, and with my computer science background, I've used dos, windows, and linux. I'd say I'm quite well rounded when it comes to computers.

Basically, I need this t-shirt:
(BTW, if you want a shirt like this, or plenty of other fun geek stuff, go to http://www.thinkgeek.com )

The reason I originally wanted to use ubuntu was simple: I wanted something different. My laptop had Vista, and while I had no problems at all with it, I kept seeing more and more information about linux, and specifically, ubuntu. So I figured I'd see just how far along it has come from my college days. Just to be safe, I purchased a new hard drive, downloaded the installation disk, and fired it up.

Boy, was I impressed! Not only did it seem easy enough for the average user, it had some serious power behind it. I was really surprised to see how much support for raw processing it had built right in. I mean, it shows thumbnails for raw files - new cameras too! I still don't think vista does that.

I had already been using open source software - firefox (web browser), thunderbird (email), open office (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, etc). It was an easy transition, as all these programs looked exactly the same.

It's been 9 months now, and rarely do I have to use another computer (some of my photo labs have windows only software for speciality product ordering - I'm still working on them :-) ). I organized this group to see what their impressions were, and if they thought it was truely ready for prime time.

I'll be posting helpful hints (since I'm one of the more experienced ubuntu users) as well as keeping everything flowing in a quasi-organized fashion. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

See you soon!

Shan