Re: [Pan-users] How to use Numeric Pad 'Delete' key

[Duncan]

Lacrocivious Acrophosist posted on Fri, 20 May 2016 04:17:51 +0000 as
excerpted:

> But there is a center of gravity for the Pan project, and now it moves
> back to that center, as it has done for decades. That center is Duncan.
> 
> Without Duncan, Pan would not have survived the lean times that have
> come more than a few times during Pan's history. Duncan embodies the
> institutional history of the project, groks the evolution and
> intricacies of Pan in ways that are unique and probably without peer,
> and for decades now he has offered quality help to anyone who asks for
> it.
> 
> Duncan is Pan's rock against the tides of entropy, and Pan is the better
> for it. Is it odd to offer such praise to a non-developer? I don't think
> so. Every project needs glue, and continuity, and Duncan has and
> continues to provide that, and I for one am very glad he does.

Thanks.  That is powerful, man!

In all humbleness I had thought somewhat the same myself from time to 
time.  Those months and years without a pan dev do get lonely and there 
was a time when I was actually beginning to wonder if it was time to 
uninstall pan and shut off the lights on my way out.  But fortunately, 
KHaley, and then Petr Kovar and Heinrich Mueller, came along, and we even 
got some pretty huge and long on the drawing board features, so pan is in 
better shape now than it ever was.  And in part, they had something to 
come along /to/, because I was still here as a community nucleus around 
which a community could re-form.  =:^)

But it's hugely different coming from someone else, and the way you put 
it was powerful enough I was even tearing up to some extent!

I'll be 50 next year, and while I expect and hope I'll still be around 
FLOSS and even pan 20 or 30 years from now, when I'm in my 70s (dare I 
even think 80s?)...  Imagine some 80-year-old with a walker or wheelchair 
in a nursing home running gentoo, and on some mailing list for the pimp-
ass-gopher-client...  In 30 years that could be me, still holding forth 
on the possibly otherwise long abandoned list for the pimp-ass-
newsreader, which he's running in some container or VM with an old 
platform as it just doesn't work on wayland 2046 and won't build with gcc 
53!

(Much as today I still run the only slaveryware app I still run on my 
computer, the old 1993 DOS edition Master of Orion, in the DOSBox DOS 
emulator.  And given my rate of usage, if they're still around then, I 
may still be using my current $50 TB block account from astroweb, too.  
Most of my news usage is actually text, on gmane's list2news servers.)

Pimp-Ass Newsreader.  It's been a long time since I mentioned what pan 
actually originally stood for.  Back before the C++ rewrite that was 
introduced as 0.90, I used to insist that the proper form was always all-
caps, PAN, because it was an acronym.  But the term pimp-ass isn't 
exactly politically correct these days, and I took the opportunity the 
0.90 rewrite introduction presented to switch my self-consistency to the 
lower-case pan, which is after all both easier to type, and the actual 
name of the executable.

... Now /what/ were you saying about pan historian?...  =:^)


Anyway, I've been thinking.  I'm old enough now, reality suggest I'm not 
going to learn C/C++ and be a good developer, as I had hoped years ago 
when I switched to Linux.  And I may or may not eventually switch jobs 
and be a Linux sysadmin, professionally as well as literally adminning my 
home systems as I've been doing now since the 16-bit DOS and DOS-based MS 
Windows era.

But you know, just as the Linux and programs I run are the work of 
literally thousands of people and multiple millions of person-hours, both 
developer, and artist and documentor and list regular answering my 
questions and those of others, I really have made a direct difference in 
at least hundreds of people's lives, if not thousands (there are more 
lurkers and people later finding answers via google than many appreciate, 
and indirectly, counting the folks that depend on the systems whose 
admins I have helped, in the MS groups before the turn of the century and 
on the Linux lists like the btrfs list I'm on now after, it could be tens 
of thousands).

But it's not just me.  It's all the devs and artists and documentors and 
regulars on the lists, that have helped me and others, just as I too have 
done.  It's all that, that makes the FLOSS community.

And I may be just one person in that community of hundreds of thousands, 
but I'm proud to be able to say I've done my part.

And you know what, no matter where or when I die, and no matter what my 
eulogy states if I'm not just some other unidentified dead guy ITRW (in 
the real world)...

I know that somewhere, someone online is going to be wondering what 
happened to that Duncan fellow, and missing his help and explanations.

And *THAT*, along with pan continuing to live today, is my *REAL* eulogy!

Thanks for giving me a glimpse of it, just now.  As I said, it's powerful 
stuff.

And what it has given me is the best feeling in the world![1]

Now if you will excuse me, there's this liquid on my face I gotta deal 
with (for about the forth or fifth time writing this)...

---
[1] I remember the first time I caught that high.  I was still back on 
the MS IE groups, and someone had been on vacation, to come back and see 
partial quotes of something I had written, but not my original post, as 
it had unfortunately already expired.  They asked for a /repost/.

A repost from !me!!  Anybody that has been on newsgroups for awhile... if 
people are asking for reposts, you've hit it big, and can rightly claim 
to be among the elite of the elite among posters from that group.  And 
they were asking for reposts of !my!! posts!

I was walking on air for a week!

Of course this one's a bit different, particularly given where I took it, 
but it's every bit as powerful!

I've some real-world challenges (no I'm not sick, thanks, but moving, the 
landlady sold the the property to the city to make way, so the renters 
including me gotta move, but at least the city's paying for the move) 
coming up, but this will stay with me thru them.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman