The road not taken

 

The road not taken

 

When the road is lost in the woods we just wake up to our capacity to make a choice that makes a difference. That is what the poet Robert Frost urges to  us to do in the poem 'The Road Not Taken'

 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I ----

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

And that has made all the difference....

It was winter of 2002. Our personal computer had crashed once again. The recovery effort had destroyed all the data . I prepared myself for restoration of the most popular operating system .  I was hurling through the CD box for the right CD.

My  eight year old bubbly daughter was helping me finding it. Then suddenly the cylinder shaped box dropped resulting in scurrying of all the CDs on the  floor.  She ran after them . Within little time she came back with couple of CDs in her little hands. Holding a colorful CD in her hand , She extended it to me and said

'Dad, What's this ?'. It was a Red Hat-7 linux CD that came with some magazine. In never ending enthusiasm she asked me ,' Papa, what does it do ?'.  Suddenly I thought this was the right time to try it out. I said,' Yes ! Lets see what does it do '. We popped open the CD tray , put the CD in and then me and my daughter went on looking at the screen.  

With some difficulty here and there the Red Had linux 7 got installed on our desktop computer.

 

Then the  sound card was not working , the modem was not detected .But by the evening with little tweaking the modem (for going to Internet ) started working. With the help from Internet (mostly from Linux User Groups.. LUGs) before the end of next week our PC was rocking with latest mp3 songs. My daughter was loving the board games ,that came with the operating system.  

From that day onwards I never looked back to the popular operating system. The road I took that day has given me enough courage to explore new things.  I have understood the fact that only If we take risk we develop maximum. More the risk we take more the growth we achieve.

Since then I have went on using this operating system in various capacity in my office [OS-Mumbai] and in home. My whole department is now running on this system with tons of other  open source softwares from it. The beauty of this operating system is that it never ever hanged nor did it attacked by virus. 

All my projects that have appeared all over are all based on these open source softwares.

The road I took that day I am still traveling.

 

 

S.Bera

NTPC – Mumbai

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