What a busy day. I haven't submitted a Fozzolog in a few days, so I might as well do it today, right?

I had an appointment this afternoon with my audiologist (who also plays my father-in-law in this film) in South Jordan. So, I worked until about 2 p.m. and then left for Salt Lake. First, I stopped at XMission to drop off some flyers for the Free Software and Linux Forum coming up next week.

Then, I went to my appointment at 4:00. He checked out my ears which looked fine and then we made some adjustments to my hearing aids - to try to improve sound quality and minimize feedback. So far, it has seemed to do some good.

Accidental Celebrity Lookalikes

After that, I met up with my brother-in-law Jay and his wife Jenni at Fazoli's in Draper for a meatball sandwich. Very good. There was a young girl there who looked like Natalie Portman. I asked her if anyone had told her that. She didn't know who Natalie Portman was!

"Queen Amidala from Star Wars Episode I?!"

"Oh," she replied. She didn't seem to believe me. I should have gotten my digital camera out of the car to show you all. Maybe I'll have Jay go over there and get a picture of her. :)

This reminds me of a similar incident. About two years ago, I was in American Fork videotaping a wedding reception and this young girl, probably about 14 or 15 years old, was serving refreshments. She looked like a teenage Gillian Anderson. Just as today, when I asked this young girl if anyone had told her about the resemblance, she didn't know who Gillian Anderson was.

"Agent Scully on the X-..."

"YES! People have said that!" she yelled at me with her eyes bulging.

Ian Murdock visits SLLUG

After dinner, I drove up to the University of Utah to attend the Salt Lake Linux Users Group meeting. It's amazing I made it because I'd never been to the Engineering and Mines Classroom building - and I had to find it in the dark. Fortunately, I was able to find a handful of students walking on campus who were able to direct me. I found a parking spot by the Union building and ended up only being two or three buildings away, so I got lucky.

I was a couple minutes late for the meeting, but they hadn't started yet. I had e-mailed the SLLUG guys ahead of time and told them I wanted to make an announcement about next week's Forum in Logan, so they let me do so and I passed out a bunch of mini-flyers as well.

The guest speaker at tonight's meeting was Ian Murdock. Ian is known as the creator of the Debian Linux distribution and the DEB packaging system used by Debian. He's been incredibly involved in many Open Source and Linux-related projects and was a founding member of Progeny - a Linux dot-com that hasn't done so well, unfortunately.

Ian is now a researcher for the University of Utah.

Ian gave an excellent presentation which included a lot of history of Linux and Debian as seen through his eyes. He also encouraged those involved in the Open Source community to do their part and give back to the community by participating in open source projects.

Ian said a lot of interesting things, but a couple really stuck in my head. First, he pointed out that most open source projects have been free reiterations of commercial/proprietary tools. He cited MONO and the GNU compiler as examples of this. He said that the open source community needs to stop "chasing the taillights of commercial software" and start innovating on its own. He said this should be very possible because members of the open source community have nothing to lose.

I asked Ian if he thought Linux would have done so well during the years 1993-2000 if Windows products had not sucked so bad. He said he didn't think Linux users used Linux because they didn't like Windows; they used Linux for more fundamental reasons. I disagree. I know too many people who were either attracted to Linux or switched to Linux because they were frustrated by the instability of the Windows platform.

In a way, I think Microsoft contributed to Linux becoming their "number one threat of 2001."