Nice and helpful

[cosmolinguist]

At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seent he shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision ... Will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
--The Republic, Plato

This is from the famous allegory of the cave, of course, in which prisoners have spent their whole lives in this cave, chained so they cannot move and can see only the shadows of things behind them that obscure the flickering firelight. The above quote is what happens when one of them is released and shown what he has been missing.

And I think I have found an instance in which I am that prisoner, because I have been freed. I am no longer the driver of a crappy station wagon, but a free (and frighteningly powerful) tank. Things here are somewhat like what I'm used to, but sometimes unrecognizable, and it's then that I'm told I'm living in a truer world. It blinded me at first, but I think I'm slowly becoming acclimated, and realizing that though there's a lot I don't know yet, I know there are people who know a lot, and I believe them when they tell me it's better here. In the course of a weekend I went from (nominally) being lke 90% of computer users to being in some much smaller fraction of the population.

And when he remmebered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity him?
--The Republic again

Yesterday I told Katie about how it took half an hour to get the CD-ROM drive to work, and then remembered that she might not know the context of this epic battle, so I asked if I was making any sense, and she said, "Yeah, the 'Linux,' " and it sounded like it should have quotation marks around it like that, which is why I put them there. And then it occurred to me that there may be a person or a few people around here who have only heard of Linux because of me or Matthew or Seth.

Yeah, Seth was caught by its allure too and asked Matthew about putting Slackware on the part of his hard drive he doesn't use much anyway. Another freed mind. Ha!

Yestrday Josh said he didn't know if he'd ever want to switch to open-source software. Until he got to the last word of the sentence I'd been expecting it to end differently; I told him there's a difference between open-source software and an open-source operating system, and that I'd been using stuff like Gaim and Mozilla for most of a year, after being introduced to them when they showed up on my laptop, which Matthew put Linux on when he borrowed it last fall. They're basically indistinguishable from the programs he's used to, I told him, except they make sense and people actually try to fix things when they go wrong. He wasn't convinced, but that's okay.

Matthew: I've probably written almost half of this report now.
Me: I wish I'd done something so productive.
Matthew: Like what?
Me: My inability to come up with a good answer to that question is probably my problem.
Matthew: You could have been learning programming languages!
Me: I suppose. Why do I want to do this again?
Matthew: Right now, because you wished you were productive.
Me: Yeah, but what do I need programming languages for?
Matthew: Being a geek.
Me: Oh yeah.
Matthew: Actually you could just start with figuring out more of Linux.
Me: Hey, there's something useful.
Matthew: Since Seth has it, too, you'll have to be careful or he'll get ahead of you.
Me: He knows more than me anyway!
Matthew: Then you're already behind! You'll have to work fast to catch up.
Me: You're so mean to me.
Matthew: I'm not.
Me: This is all your fault. I could be a happy, stupid Windows user, but no, you had to go and enlighten me.
Matthew: That's not mean. It's really a very nice, helpful thing.
Me: Oh, so you're nice and helpful.
Matthew: Yes.

It's a rough job. But somebody's got to do it.