Intro, Revised and Reformulated

[Zachary Hamed]

EDIT: Sorry, I just read the Fedora requirements for this introduction
email, so I'm resending my previous one with corrections. Please
disregard my previous email, and sorry for the inconvenience.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi everyone,
My name is Zachary Hamed, Zach for short, and I live in the New York
City area, USA. I'm a sophomore (grade 10) high school student at
Collegiate School, and I got interested in Linux in general about a
year ago. I tried OpenSUSE and found the installation to be a huge
pain, so I switched to Fedora and have been using it ever since
(dual-booting with Vista (1) because of school work and (2) because I
can't get my Broadcom WiFi card to work with Fedora 8...grr...). I
also just finished reading two books about Linux and the Open Source
movement (Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution, by
Glyn Moody, and Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental
Revolutionary, by Linus Tovalds and David Diamond, both of which I
highly recommend).

I have a bit of programming experience. I can program pretty well in
BASIC, and my dad is a computer programmer for a living. I'm also in
the process of learning Ruby (and Rails for that matter). I've written
a book on computers (www.joiningthedigitalworld.com) that I edited
completely by myself, and of which I've sold about 200-250 copies
(available on Amazon, BarnesAndNoble.com, and other retailers online).
I'm now working on a project called Ease of Tech (www.easeoftech.com),
which is kind of an Adobe AIR type overlay system to an OS...can't
really get into it in detail here.

In terms of what I would like to do for the Fedora Project, I can't
really contribute much to the coding side, but I would love to help
out in any way I can (I know it'll look good on the college
applications; hoping to go to MIT!). Additionally, I am a very good
English student (not my favorite subject, but I do well), so I would
like to edit as many documents as I can, and I can even write some
docs on newbie things (as I am one anyway). One thing I think is
lacking for the documentation project is some kind of complete guide
for complete newcomers to Linux. Ubuntu has been attracting a lot more
users because of this, and I think Fedora could be a real alternative
to Mac and Windows for older people if they had a comprehensive guide
to just about everything up until the post-install period—it's also
something I wouldn't mind working on.

I think I'm a good match for the project because I'm a hard worker, am
good in English (and getting better with programming), and really want
to contribute to the community.

I looked over the Style Guide and the associated rules, most to all of
which I am familiar with (my school has a grammar proficiency test
every year which I always pass, thought it's pass/fail so I can't
share any grades with you). Again, it would be great for me to be
another step in the editing process, or to even make a guide of my
own.

Can anyone tell me where I go from here? What you guys are doing so
far? I should get the gist of it once I get daily mailing list
digests, but just in case...

Thanks,
Zach

P.S. This email is in no way representative of my "formal writing"
writing style; I had to rant and use parentheses a bit more than I
usually do.

P.P.S. I'm still new to the idea of signing emails with this key. I
submitted the key (or what I think was a key) to pgp.mit.edu, but is
the stuff below in the correct format? I saw what format it *should*
be in on the Fedora intro-email page, but I don't want to screw up and
send out my private key, because apparently that would be really bad.
All I did below was paste the text copied when I right-clicked on my
key and selected "Copy Public Key" (this is in "Passwords and
Encrypted Keys").

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