When the teacher is ready

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There’s an old axiom that when the teacher is ready the pupil or pupils will present themselves. Today at work I sat down in our high school library to install software on a new MacBook. A student next to me had an older Dell Inspiron 1100 and I asked him if it was his and how much he’d paid for it. He said he traded an XBox 360 for it. He was running Windows 2000 and was using Microsoft Write to do some word processing. I told him about Software for Starving Students and how I could give him a CD-ROM that had 57 open source programs on it that would help him use a better word processor like Open Office. He seemed somewhat indifferent. Just then some other young boys began to congregate around me and ask questions about the MacBook. Continue reading “When the teacher is ready”

Humanity to others

I’m a Ubuntu Linux user and a Ubuntu affiliate. I’m always looking for ways to use open source software and I’ve often thought that the open source philosophy is very biblical. There is a real tie to relationship with others in the open source community. Today in my reading I came across a wonderful story about how a poor man in San Francisco was helped at St. Anthony’s, a Franciscan mission to the poor and homeless much like St. Francis Inn where I volunteered last summer.  St. Anthony’s networks with some other Bay Area ministries and tries to help the less fortunate gain the skills they need to obtain a higher paying job. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awrK28aV-Rc]