[CS-FSLUG] Road Kit

[Tim Young]

Ed,
What you are doing, desktop support focusing on free and open solutions, is
fairly similar to what a small team of us do for missions.  If you need some
extra visibility, you could try joining missionarytechsupport.com for a
short-term trip.  Basically what they do is go out to the field somewhere (say
Guatemala) and go to a mission conference.  Between 50 and 200 missionaries
show up and bring their laptops with them.  The team simply sits around all day
fixing laptops and drinking awesome south-american coffee.  Actually, the team
spends most of the evening and wee-hours of the night doing this also.  It is a
very intense, but very good trip.  Shawn usually uses Linux on his desktop, but
most of the missionaries the team would work with will have Windows desktops.

You would probably also get a lot of other things out of the trip.  Shawn
Parrish from missionarytechsupport.com has a large collection of drivers,
patches, etc. that he travel with.

On top of that, it would probably make for some awesome advertizing.  Few
churches allow you to stand up and say, "Hi, I am Ed and I want you to pay me
to fix your computer."  But you can get up in front and say, "I am Ed.  I am a
home-computer fix-it person, and I am raising funds to go to Guatemala to fix
computers there..."  It spreads the word locally, you get to meet Shawn (who is
way-cool), and it will probably give you some extra experience with free tools
that you might not have otherwise. And besides that, it is a missions trip with
all the benefits of that.  He will also help you work through a number of
ethical questions you probably have not asked yourself like, "what do you do
when you find pornography on a christian's computer you are fixing," or "what
do you do when you find pirated software on a christian's computer you are
fixing. etc.

Anyway, it is a thought...

    - Tim

Ed Hurst wrote:

> (snip)
> > I'd also consider an rj45 crimper and punchdown tool (and appropriate
> > ends) if you are going to be in a network environment.
>
> Wouldn't do me much good, since I have no idea how to use them. I'm just
> a desktop guy.