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Moshe Bar wrote in BYTE January 2001:

We penguinistas sometimes believe we are having more fun than anybody. But then I lean over the fence and discover the FreeBSD folks are having a hell of a party, too. And their OS is as fast as I have seen. I have to ask myself why I don’t just switch my server to FreeBSD.

After five years I decided it was time to see if he was right. Let me be clear: I am a Linux evangelist and have been for years. I have preached to the uninitiated and shepherded them to the promised land. I have preached to the blunt minded masses, dispelling doubt and sewing hope. I have designed, implemented, and supported solutions built upon Linux and open source. I have converted enterprises from Windows to Linux. Through all of this, FreeBSD remained distant and unapproachable until a few months ago. My co-worker Dave, an avid supporter of FreeBSD, invited me to sit through a FreeBSD server build recently. Dave exhibits an energy when working with Unix that is only rivaled by his passion for Texas Hold `Em, Louis XIII, and date night with his wife. His skill at the console was impressive and his knowledge deep. In a few short hours he had sufficiently demonstrated software installation, configuration, and maintenance. I felt I was ready to try it for myself. Installation was straightforward: carve up your disk how you like, label partitions, format, install, and boot into a working system. Installing packages after the intial OS installation is a breeze. FreeBSD maintains a system of ports, over 14000 open source applications ready for you to utilize. Installation is simple, change into /usr/ports, locate the package you desire to install, and issue a make install clean. After a few downloads, configuration, and compilation your software is ready to use. System updates are cake: because the entire system is source based, a simple cvsup -g -L 2 supfile connects you to a FreeBSD cvsup mirror server to pull down the most up-to-date bits. I am so thoroughly impressed with FreeBSD that it has become my server OS of choice. We recently migrated our core business systems from Fedora Core to FreeBSD — the performance increase was notable and the ease of maintenance and patching with a well designed source based system saves me time. If you have the itch give FreeBSD a whirl you will not be disappointed. Moshe Bar is a regular contributor to BYTE maintaining the Serving Linux section and is also Project Manager of the openMosix Project.

While reading a review during a lull in my TechServices shift, I came across one of the many adverts for VoIP service. This one, however, was special.

VoIP experst???? What the hell? I have tried for some time to not notice errors like this, but my world is rife with them. Technical documentation, once known for its high standards, is no longer. Product collateral and reviews — the same persistent issues: lack of quality and oversight. Perhaps we need to get back to basics. Perhaps we need more copy editors.

We all have lists. Grocery lists, book lists, todos. Some items are for the near term, others for the long. The items on these lists often give our lives dimension, colour. Sometimes they only lend clutter and angst. After the birth of our first child, my fun lists went away and my todo list blossomed into an intimidating hairy green monster.

I resolved to change all of that this evening. I made myself a few small promises: start writing again; be it blogging, short stories, poetry, no more excuses; clean my inbox of the five thousand items that have clogged it; organize my bookmarks into a resource I can leverage. I am pleased to report that I have completed all of these items, which frees me to begin work on my domestic responsibilities. I have atrophied in suburbia: my muscles and mind. I will get back to zero and rebuild. It only takes crossing a few items of a list to get the momentum going.