Things I've overheard about my Linux laptop while on public transportation | Hacker News Reader

Things I've overheard about my Linux laptop while on public transportation

arsgeek.com

On a nice morning when I'd overslept a bit and couldn't make it to work on time using only my bicycle (15 miles each way), I rode to the bus stop and threw my bike in the rack on the front of the bus. Since I'd woken up late, I didn't get to my usual email/news routine and I cracked the laptop open on the bus, fired up my tether, and proceeded to check up on things. I'd noticed the lady next to me was just gawking, like she'd never seen a laptop before. After about five minutes of this, I asked her if I could help her with something. The conversation went like this:

Her: "I just wonder why you aren't saving up for a car!"

Me: "Excuse me?"

Her: "Why did you buy a laptop if you can't even afford a car?"

Me: "I have a compact car and an SUV. I rode my bike here because I only live two miles away and it's a beautiful morning!" (the truth is I hadn't driven my car to get to work or to a bus stop in over a year, regardless of weather conditions)

Her: "I see. So you got your license taken away?"

Me: facepalm

My laptop is a heavily-stickered 2nd-gen Black MacBook from late 2006. I've also had a few transit riders ask me if I'm a "hacker." My typical response is "Define hacker." They usually get it wrong.

I've been a bicycle commuter for close to a decade. Several years ago, I was picking up my son after school when another parent approached me. "I think it's great that you come here every day to pick him up."

I thought this was a bit odd. Maybe she meant me as a father rather than his mother? I said, "Yeah, I really consider it a luxury to have that kind of flexibility in my day."

She didn't seem sure what to make of this. "I mean it's great that you're so responsible to come and get him every day."

This was getting stranger and stranger. "Well, it is my responsibility."

"I just mean, it's great to see you being so responsible to pick up your little brother every day when I'm sure there are lots of things you'd rather be doing."

Wait, what?

Not sure whether to be flattered or appalled, I spluttered, "Um, I'm his father."

She turned red. "Oh! It's just that I saw you riding here on your bike and assumed you were coming from high school."

This sort of thing is why I have a beard.

I get a lot of "you're so brave to ride all the way to work!" (2 miles on back streets and one major road to cross. Aside from that road I'll maybe see 2 cars the whole trip).

I ride in pretty heavy traffic but normally I feel very comfortable sharing the road with motorists (my city has very few bike lanes and for the most part they're non-continuous).

I follow the rules of the road (Ontario Highway Traffic Act) and best practices (e.g. Ontario's Guide to Safe Cycling). On multi-lane streets where passing vehicles are dangerous, I assertively lane-block.

Interestingly, I've noticed in the last month that driver hostility toward my presence on the road has increased dramatically. Almost every day I experience an act of driver aggression, from honking at me to passing too closely to deliberately cutting me off. I consider myself a seasoned cyclist but it's starting to get unnerving.

I ride similarly for errands etc. I have noticed such a similar reaction from drivers. I live in a college town, and most drivers are pretty OK with cyclists -- there is the occasional "use the sidewalk" or close pass w/ horn, but mostly cool people. This past month, since the snows have gotten all wintery, I have also noticed increased agression.

I think the cause here may be surprise -- drivers are already nervous about the crappy road conditions, and they can't fathom how a bike is even ridable in winter. They view my riding as extra dangerous (both to me and them) and their stress level increases even more. Such a thing frequently comes out sideways as anger/agression.

I think it's funny that people would be stressed out about your riding being dangerous to them, but as a reaction would cut you off, or drive too close to you.

"I hate how dangerous you're being; therefore, I'm going to be even more dangerous! I definitely showed you!"

I suspect it's more akin to: "Jesus! What the hell are you doing riding a bike in this weather?! Do you want to get yourself killed? You nearly gave me a heart attack! Asshole!"

I've been unemployed for about a week, and I think bicycling is the only thing other than a paycheck I'm missing. I have trouble riding for ride's sake. I ride for transportation. I've done some really long rides (a 135mi/~225km ramble once, with a friend, and a couple of 70mi/120km one-night bicycle camping trips) but as a general rule, I ride to the grocery store, post office, bank, to the office, and just to get around.

a 30mi/48km round trip commute by bike takes just about an hour each way for me, and it's great cardio. I'm still fat, and not terribly fast on my bike, but I feel good. At my last job, I had a great route that used mostly frontage roads along main highways. Folks who wished to go fast would use the highway, and cyclists were a common enough site on the road I used that we all got plenty of respect and room most of the time.

The worst offenders of cutting it too close? Prius drivers.

I've commuted by bike for five or six years, and the main thing that seems to boggle people is that I ride through the Michigan winter. It's a lot easier to handle a fixed-gear mountain bike on ice than a car, though - if the rear tire starts to lose traction, the pedals jump due to the decrease in rolling resistance, and my legs reflexively stabilize them.

Fifteen miles with snow is probably pushing it, though - I've only done up to six in the winter.

The opposite is really no fun either. Went to the hospital with my brother (3 years younger than me) to pay a bill and the lady behind the desk thought I was his father. I just smiled and payed the bill.

A lot of people are similarly confused by my biking when I tell them I don't have a car, and that I decided to use the money for down payment on a house instead. Typically they think I'm talking about living at the very edge of my income or something. They offer to help me figure out how to save better and get all pissy when I tell them I have enough cash saved up now to buy a new car, I just am waiting for one I like to come along.

Sadly, this says a lot about the stigma of public transportation in certain parts of the world (esp. in the US).

"Oh, so you're poor."

I would agree with you, but she drove to the bus stop in a Lexus, like a lot of folks out here. And she probably drove two miles or less to get there. I live in the most affluent county in the region and "public transit" is in place ONLY for the 8a-5p suburbanites commuting to downtown. A few buses in the morning go downtown. A few in the evening come back out to suburbia. It's worthless for anything other than getting to and from work for an average work day.

Good point. In my mind, I was picturing taking the bus in some random relatively small city. But in certain places, public transit is mostly used by the relatively rich people who live in the comfy suburbs.

True. Maggie Thatcher one said

"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

The poor walk.

Public transport in my city in the UK is too expensive for me. I have the choice of lunch or bus. If the journey is longer it's usually cheaper to take the car (which we need for our business just not normally for commuting) unless the parking is going to be very expensive.

Often I'll walk home in the rain (just over a mile) and have several buses pass me - though if I'm away at 5pm I'll pass a couple of them - the buses are practically empty and I wonder why they couldn't drop the price and fill the seats. Perhaps they could have budget airfare style pricing with a cap?

The only people who regularly ride the buses here appear to be those with free passes - pensioners and those on benefits.

The stigma is true, but is also somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy (at least in much of the US), in that if you can afford not to take public transport, you probably wouldn't want to.

The one time I rode the bus where I live (for about 1.5 miles), my experience was as follows: Around 1pm, I wait at the bus stop for about 5 minutes and start talking to the other guy waiting. The bus comes and we get on. On the bus the guy tells me he just got out of jail and has been working at Wal-Mart for 2 weeks. A guy gets on at the next stop and starts yelling at the driver, who then pulls the bus over. The driver and the passenger get into a fist fight and the driver shoves the guy out of the door and tells him to go fuck himself. Then I get off the bus at the next stop and walk to the car rental place as quickly as I can (my destination).

Certainly my experience was unique and depended on the part of town, but it didn't inspire me to ride the bus again. I commute about 98% of the time by bike. When I lived in Europe I rode the bus every day and didn't think twice about it.

May I ask which city you live in? Different cities seem to have different perceptions of public transit.

I live in Johnson County, KS, the whitebread predominantly wealthy cluster of suburbs to the southwest of Kansas City, MO.

Ah, the JC.

One time on an airplane I was doing some erlang programming. I had about 10 terminals and Textmate open. After about half an hour I get a tap on the shoulder from the smoking-hot woman sitting behind and to the left of me. She says, "Excuse me, but I find what you are doing to be utterly fascinating. What is it?". I explain that I'm programming, and she asks if she can watch. I said "sure", but I was so self-conscious that I couldn't get any real work done after that. I just ended up flipping between Textmate and my terminals, typing random commands. Sadly, I didn't get her number - we were both on a connecting flight to different cities.

You should have told her you were an ASCII portrait artist, and that you'd love her to model for you.

Sort of an inverse experience for me: Last year, I took my car into Mr. Lube for the first time. The technician craned the monitor around for me to see the items he was going to work on, and the cost breakdown, recommended maintenance schedule, etc. I listened for a short while, but then my attention was fixated on the fact that the screen was showing me Gnome, running on Ubuntu! You could see the taskbar, the Gnome "start" button, and the window decorations. I asked him if he were aware that they were running Linux here, not Windows. He raised his palms and just said, "You would know more about that than I would, sir."

Now, for basic car maintenance, I only go to Mr. Lube. :)

Anyone know of any other businesses or establishments that use Linux for customer-facing or POS machines? (I'm in Canada.)

Whilst switching between workspaces with the compiz fusion cube effects enabled I overheard someone say "That's one in the eye for Bill Gates right there".

A chap on the train once asked me if I was looking for work when he noticed my Thinkpad had a GNU sticker on the lid.

I'm not sure I get it. Is there something about GNU specifically that makes it funny, or just in general that he would assume that Linux users are unemployed?

I assumed he wanted to hire people with GNU/Linux experience (and maybe had trouble finding them normally).

I suppose the sticker (which the FSF send to you when you sign a contributor contract) implies a certain amount of technical knowledge.

Thanks. It makes sense when read on the first level. I think I read it right after some of the bike commuting comments above and was expecting something funny, so I looked for something that wasn't there.

One time, I took my laptop to a restaurant that my sister and I were meeting some of her friends at because I was curious about the restaurant's WiFi connectivity. My sister's friends in this story are film students. After exchanging pleasantries, as they were all talking, I took out the laptop and started kismet inside gnome-terminal.

My laptop happens to be a MacBook Pro, upon which I dual-booted OS X and Fedora, but mostly used Fedora.

One of my sister's friends leaned over and beheld that I was using Linux on my MBP -- they've tinkered with OSes a little bit so they know what Gnome looks like -- and proceeded to freak out. I was bombarded with questions like "Why would you use Linux when you have OS X?", "You could be using OS X right now! I understand why you'd use Linux if you had a PC but you have OS X!", "OS X is so much better and friendlier than Linux, and you can do so much more on it, why are you using Linux?", "Sure, a _developer_ can use it, I guess, but why would anyone else?", etc.

This discussion took over the night. All three of them now hate me because I chose to use Linux instead of OS X.

> All three of them now hate me because I chose to use Linux instead of OS X.

Seriously, or hyperbole?

Some people choose to stake their identity on the operating system that they use.

Seriously, for at least two of the three. I think the one thinks it's all a little silly and doesn't care so much, but the others defriended me on Facebook and tell our mutual friends that they still like them even though they hang out with me too.

Wow.

In response to #4, would have been a perfect time to bring up a Matrix screensaver.

Or "cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-F0-9 '"

A little better: echo -e '\E[32;40m'; cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-F0-9'

Less magic: tput setaf 2; tput setab 0; cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-F0-9'

Can you explain what that does?

tput setaf 2 makes your prompt green

tput setab 0 makes the prompt background black

The rest displays random letters A-F and numbers 0-9 on your terminal.

tput setaf 2 -- queries the terminfo database for the proper escape sequence for setting the terminal foreground to color 2 (green) and echoes it, turning your foreground that color tput setaf 0 -- ditto, but for black background

Last semester the guy sitting behind me asked, "Dude, are you a hacker or something?"

The same thing happened to me a while back when I was bored in history class and was solving some Project Euler problems in Ruby + Vim. The guys behind me just bluntly asked me if I was a hacker and if I could get "into" the school network ..whatever that was supposed to mean!

One of the most joyful things for me is see someone try working with my pc (ubuntu, no panels, gnome-do and compiz). It often results in a fair number of shrieks.

Before I had my macbook I had a lot of people, including mac users, assuming I was running a hackintosh, despite the previously mentioned lack of panels.

Just curious: why no panels?

Compiz, guake, two screens and awn :) plenty of space and commands to see everything and switch between them. I'm thinking of ditching awn.

Though to be honest, I do have a small dock with the notification area, it's hidden most of the time.

I run Linux on my Mac laptop, which is always good for a few WTF moments when someone takes a look at it.

I dual-boot OS X and Windows 7 in bare metal on my MacBook. That gets me a few serious "WTFs" as well. I also run several other OSes in VirtualBox, usually full-screen. Karmic is one of them, but OpenBSD and Arch Linux are more common.

Why do all those people think that the author is lying? Those are very plausible, I'd even say likely!

I ride MUNI to downtown San Francisco. Maybe I should open the laptop instead of reading a book during my daily commute?

I'm by far not alone as an Ubuntu user around here, I wonder if I'd overhear any comments at all?

I'm sure as a unicycle rider you're overhearing plenty of comments already!

Strange things happen when you use linux, my sister is a CE student but didn't care much about linux apart from the whole no virus threat thing. We have a triple boot (ubuntu for her, arch for me and windows for work/guests/my gaming needs). One day we got a different maintenance from our usual technician to install a new UPS. He just looked at my work in setting up the arch part, my work in making the grub boot screen preety, my work at completely changing ubuntu into something between mac and a kde desktop and my work in setting up arch to do maintenance cron jobs and got impressed. And you know what he did?Gave my sister a job offer to do some linux dev stuff for his startup(I was not at home during all this btw).My sister who cannot even install things using synaptic and I dont even wanna go into how she sucks at using gcc for her college work. And all this why?Because she has the degree and I dont.

PS: She turned down the offer btw for her obvious incompetence.

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