Episode: 1098
Title: HPR1098: My Journey to Geekdom
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1098/hpr1098.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:53:45

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Hello, Hacker Public Radio. My name is Becky Nubra and some of you may have heard me
recording on HPR before as I've previously taken part in some collaborative programmes
like last year's New Year's Eve Party. I've also jointly recorded a congratulatory
message for HPR's once-thousandth episode, and I did that with my husband, and I'm
the mature one that's blowing raspies rather loudly. And also recently, or Camp 2012, Ken
Fallon, he, I'm well, cornered, me I suppose, is what you could say in a nice CD hotel. In Liverpool,
you shoved a microphone in my face, backed me into this corner, gave me nowhere to run, and
basically asked me all about the Lincoln Linux user group of which I'm the lug mistress.
This episode, however, will be my first ever Hacker Public Radio podcast off my own back.
And oh boy, have I procrastinated long and hard about what to talk to you about.
Today, I'm an old person, so I actually want to do what most old people do, and that's
we like to reminisce. So come and take a short trip down memory lane with me, and maybe
compare some experiences as I explain how my journey to Geekdom started.
My first introduction to tech, probably about 1981-1982, when the BBC Microcomputer came
into schools in the United Kingdom, and my experience of that was actually, they were locked
away in a room, and our maths teacher, Mr Morgan, knew as little about them as the kids did.
He did, however, have an awesome beard, so that qualified in to take on the computer lessons
in our school. I can't actually remember what we did in those lessons, and I definitely
can't remember what I learned, but however, I was impressed with what I saw. My next piece
of tech, probably, that I picked up was the Cassio Scientific Calculator, and I used them
for all of those scientific reasons, such as spelling words like shell, hello, and all
of those really mature rude words, such as boob, boobs, boobies, boobless, bogeys, and
it doesn't matter how old you are, those words never get old. My teenage years, probably
like most of us, were spent in my bedroom hiding from my embarrassing parents. My teenage
daughter does that now, so I'm guessing actually that nothing has changed across the generations.
So in 1982, 1983, probably the highlight of my adolescent week was recording the UK Top
40 chart on a Sunday, and that was something that all teenage kids do. I used to play
the tapes back so much, and then keep fast forwarding the DJ talky bits, that the tape
used to get stretched, and when you couple that with dying batteries, it definitely made
for some very interesting noises coming out of my bedroom, I can tell you. Next was Christmas
1984, and wow, what a Christmas. We actually got a ZX Spectrum 48k, and suddenly my parents
had gone from zeros to hero overnight. There was a downside though, it was a joint family
present, which meant that I had to share it with my fantastically annoying eight-year-old
brother James. We only actually had two games that I can remember playing on the ZX Spectrum,
there was a 3D death chase, and there was Jet Set Willie. 3D death chase for those of
you that can remember it, was a motorcycle game where you chase motorcycles through trees,
and it could either be single player or two player. And that actually was the game of choice
for my dad and my brother to play. Jet Set Willie, because it was a platform game, and
it was single player, with levels to complete, that definitely suited me more. So that was
my game of choice. However, both myself and my brother and my dad to be fair, we were
never allowed to play on the ZX Spectrum for very long, because my mum, as I'm sure many
mums at that time were doing, used to constantly moan about how much electricity was that thing
using, and then coupling it with things or statements like money doesn't grow on trees,
we've got a mortgage to pay, bills to pay, and like I said, I'm sure my mum wasn't the
only one at the time using that as an excuse, probably around their ignorance of what was
actually in their living room and being played with. So that was my adolescence. I left
school, and I left home as soon as I could. So basically, in 1986, I'm 16 years of age,
I want to leave home, where do I want to go? I want to join the Air Force. So I did, I joined
the Royal Air Force, and I actually joined as a data analyst, and I was stationed at RFI
Wickham. So a data analyst does exactly what it says on the tin, I analyse data. During
my basic and my trade training, the actual role of data analyst was salt to me as being
a scientific research role, but in actual fact, all it was, because of glorified number
crunching, and being a clerk. I was luckier than most of my intake though, that when I was
posted, I was given the job of calculating aircraft wing and fuselage fatigue for certain
types of, at the time, UK aircraft. So it was on the Buccaneer bomber, the Hunter T7 and
T8 training planes, the PR9 Canberra, which does for dear to photo reconnaissance, and
the Victor, which was used for refueling, can't even say it. The reason for calculating
the fatigue was basically to try and calculate the amount of life that was left in the aircraft
and to make sure that they were flying within the safe stress limits. We didn't want any
nasty crashes in the RAF. Whilst as in the RAF then, and working at, well, strike command
type Wickham, the RAF actually wanted the data captured in a database to analysis, and
at the time there was no off the shelf product available for them. So it was a lot easier
if they sent me off to London for a week to go and basically learn how to program in DB3
or DB3. I'm never ever going to forget this. The IF and the THEN commands, all I can
ever remember now is that they had to be aligned. Where you started the IF, you had to make
sure that you then ended it with a THEN and that they were aligned, that you knew that
the conditional statement was open or that you closed it off properly. So even now, on
the very few occasions, when I do do some HTML, I still want to tab in my elements and basically
my husband Philip laughed at me for this. One of the drawbacks I suppose of working
with computers all day in the Air Force, I then actually didn't want one for home use,
and it wasn't until 1996, when I actually thought about maybe getting a computer into
my home. I do remember having to take out a bank loan, and I do remember paying about
£1.5,000 for it. Getting onto the internet in those days was also a bit of a bind. We
had over here free-served dial-up, and I remember it costing a penny a minute, however,
if you'd been on for longer than 60 minutes, they used to break the connection, they used
to kick you off because that was their max. Again, because I use computers all day at work,
the one that I had at home, I just wanted to play games on, and I do, or I remember playing
the game's risk, certainly theme park and sim city, they were definitely my favourites.
My husband has since commented that I do have megalomaniac tendencies, apparently. We're
now going to drop forward a few years, just to 1998, and this was actually when I got my
first mobile phone. It was a Motorola D520, and it had an extending aerial. It was actually
a just in case you need it phone, because that was all a mobile phone was to me in those
days. However, nowadays, I do tend to use my mobile to browse the internet, take pictures,
check email, stream podcasts, play games, so actually very, very little text messaging
or phoneing goes on. My current phone of choice is a gait, gait, oh, I can't even say it,
Samsung Galaxy S3, and in fact, this is the phone of choice for our whole household,
and we're all really sad, we've all got the same colour case. Bringing us more up to
date then, so I met my husband, Philip, who is now my, well sorry, I met Philip, who's
now my husband, 2004, and through him I actually got my first introductions to Linux and
open source operating systems. I've never heard of them before, I met Philip. He used to
come to the my house, and he used to laugh at my old Windows machine, and he'd keep offering
to make it better for me, I think he actually meant to make it disappear. I just do distinctly
remember him, saying one day, so I remember saying to him that there was no way that he
was going to be put in that open source shite on my computer in my house. How wrong was
I? By the time he'd moved in, and by the time that we had got married, not only was I
using Zuban too as my default distribution of choice, he'd also stripped out the Windows
PC from the house, he'd got each of us laptops, and that was very opulent I thought, because
had up until then been me and my daughter sharing some cranky old Windows machine in the
corner. This was also the time that actually he made his home project that he'd been working
on part-time in evenings and weekends, available to everyone on the interwebs to download,
and this project some of you may know, some of you may not, it's actually CrunchBang Linux,
and this is his own derivative distribution that was originally based on Ubuntu, however
now it is solely Debian based, and it did become a little bit popular, and there was a thriving
and a growing forum community that was increased downloads, increased forum membership every
time he put out a new version. So, being the supportive wife that I am, wanting to learn
more about Linux and open source in general, I did offer to look after the forums forum
in the early days, monitoring user registration and moderating comments and conducting the
search and destroy missions for spam posts and links, actually not realising what I was
letting myself in for. Now, we have a dedicated forum moderation team for the CrunchBang forums,
and for that I am eternally grateful. Philip also introduced me to some tech events, such
as Log Radio Live and Ocamp, and it's been through attending these events and meeting
like-minded people, and coupled also we're doing the community management bit on the CrunchBang
forums that actually inspired me to want to go out and do more in my local community, so
I did last August I set up a local Linux user group for Lincoln, and that pretty much now
brings us back up to date on my journey into Geekdom, other than the fact that I do have
a new experience to add to my list now, and that is recording this podcast that I'm going
to contribute to Hacker Public Radio. Thank you very much for listening, I hope you've
enjoyed what you've heard. My name is Becky Nubra, thank you and good night.
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