John Dierdorf's Home Page

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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

— Benjamin Franklin, 1755

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

— Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary necessities are the greatest cozenage that men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules by.

— Oliver Cromwell, 1654

Why of course the people don't want war. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament or a communist dictatorship, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.

— Hermann Goering, at Nuremberg trials, 1945

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.

— Mark Twain

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

— W. Churchill, Nov 21, 1943

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

— Voltaire

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

— Edmund Burke

Dulce et decorum est pro oleo mori.

— George W. Bush

Phone number: 512/345-3912

E-mail address: dierdorf@io.com

Feel free to drop me a line about this web site, or about anything else that does not involve money being transferred from me to you, which will probably run afoul of my spam filter and wind up in the great bit bucket in the sky.)

SnailMail Address:

8109 Greenslope Drive
Austin, TX 78759
USA

Remember, it's your tree and your stamp.

When wearing one hat or another, I am:

Founder and former Sysop of the Central Texas PC User Group.

Portrait and glamour Photographer. (New pictures recently added.)

Leader of the Linux Beginners Special Interest Group (SIG).

If you really want to know, you can get Personal Info about me, too.

Words, Words, Words

One of my hobbies is reading dictionaries, and my few friends and many acquaintances have learned the hard way not to get me started on the subject of word origins. If you're game for examples of this showing off, check my Words Page to see why pen is unrelated to pencil and cube is unrelated to cubicle, while pork is related to porcelain, Queen Guinevere is related to a penguin, and an apple pie comes from a magpie!

Have patience. This is a big page and can take a while to load and render, even with a fast connection and fast computer.

Another hobby is reading historical fiction, and recently I've put together a web page called You Can't Say That! on the subject of how the English language has changed over time, so that a novel set two hundred years ago, for example, can't use some now-common words, and the sense of others has changed greatly. If you don't believe me, check the link to find out about the four-year-old girl's orgasm, or the man drinking wine that had been defecated by his butler.

For unpaid political announcements, click here or here

Go here for pictures of the December, 1999 meeting with Lois Bujold and Elizabeth Moon.

Linux Presentations

On January 5, 1999 I made a presentation on "Linux for the Windows User" to the Centex PC User Group. Due to many requests, I'm making it available here for browsing or download. Click this link. I plan to update it on the fly as (a) I get more information, and (b) I get better ideas. It was last tweaked on 03/30/99; suggestions for improvement are gratefully accepted.

This is a pitch on Emacs and Vi that I gave to the Austin Linux Group, and also to the Linux Beginners SIG on April 3, 2007.

This is a presentation on Intro to TCP and Packet Filtering that I gave to the Linux Beginners SIG on March 12, 2002. Note that the animated movie shown at that meeting is called "goodwarriors.mpg". The home page of the group that produced it is warriorsofthe.net. It's an interesting page, with a lot of info on how and why the movie was produced, as well as the ability to download it in several different resolutions and languages. The version shown was the highest-res version, it's about 125 MB in size. There's even a handy table pointing out that the big version would take twelve hours to download at 28.8 bps, so if you have a slow modem, I'd highly recommend cultivating a friend with a broadband connection and a CD burner. If another SIG would like to show the movie at their meeting, it's on the club laptop as D:\Linux\goodwarriors.mpg. It's 12 minutes long and well worth the time.

Dorothy Dunnett Presentation

On September 23, 2000, I made a presentation at the Dorothy Dunnett seminar in Philadelphia. Go here for a copy.

The graphical text images on these pages were generated by cooltext.com, a free site (Linux/Gimp powered) which renders fancy text, buttons, etc. online.

Recently, this site was honored with the following award: