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Come to the Jan. 27 meeting of TUGNET — The User's Group Network — and hear me speak to whoever shows up.

My topic: Evolutionary computing: Making the leap to free, open-source
applications and operating systems.

What I'll be trying to do is bring the worlds of this blog, which explores the inner reaches of my own geekiness, with that of my print column, Tech Talk, which is aimed at a more general audience.

Both the blog and column draw heavily on my own experience, and I wouldn't have gotten wherever it is I am now if I worried about what I didn't know. I've said on many an occasion that I'm hear to learn and to demystify the process of wading into the technological waters.

Enough of that. What I'll be talking about is my own journey from a garden-variety user of proprietary software to one who aims to use free and open-source solutions wherever possible.

While I burned and ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007, I first got my feet wet in the world of Unix way back in the 1980s through a free on-campus account at UC Santa Cruz, where average (read: non-technically inclined) students were encouraged to use Unix to write and print out (on a bona fide networked laser printer ... and this was right around the time Apple released its original LaserWriter at a cost of $6,995) our essays and anything else we did for our classes.

At TUGNET, I'll talk about the advantages of using free, open-source applications in proprietary environments like Windows and Mac OS and how that makes it all the easier to make the transition to FOSS operating systems that include a few hundred active Linux distributions and four key BSD projects.

I'll be providing tech tips, as well as book and Web-site recommendations on how to learn more about free software, and I'll talk about why I'm using OpenBSD these days more than Linux (and why that could always change because I'm a major proponent of choosing and freely changing both hardware and software to best do the task at hand).

I'd like to thank TUGNET president Marian Radcliffe for inviting me.

And dear reader (as I weakly invoke Jane Austen), I hope to see you there.