Monday, September 5, 2011

An identity crisis?

Suffered a bit of an identity crisis this past weekend. (Note: Sparks, I blame you!! You too, Jim!)

It started by my going to the SouthEast LinuxFest (AKA SELF), this past June. Jim and Charmaine Brady, owners of Morning Dew Coffee Roasters, were there, giving away free samples of caffeine (good tasting ones!). They were also selling various coffee-themed cups and t-shirts. I managed to buy one of their t-shirts before they ran out. It has "sudo make coffee" printed on the front, over a steaming cup of coffee. On the back is a flow chart for making coffee.

In any case, I was wearing the t-shirt during the weekly run to Walmart, thinking nothing of it. Should have known that it'd draw a comment, my "Evilution" having previously triggered comments by an offended manager. As I started to unload my cart onto the conveyor, the young cashier commented that she "got" the "sudo" joke. The older lady in line ahead of me quipped, "You should see the back of his shirt. It's the algorithm for making coffee." While the cashier was processing my choices, she went on about how she like Linux and how she's not been able to convince her husband to abandon Win7.

The short version of the story is that I'm worried that I've ceased being cutting edge and have faded into "mainstream". What are the odds of three random geeks being in the same checkout line? Could it be that Linux is more popular that currently assumed? In any case, I was unnerved enough that I spent the remainder of the weekend building Xen kernels and bridging various XMPP services together.

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