About D E Evans

I was raised Mormon, but left after a successful, but disillusioning, mission to England and Wales, ending in 1995. I am the webmaster for St Stephen's Episcopal Church, and am a member of the Confraternity at St. Gregory's Abbey.

I play percussion instruments of various types, for various types of music, including drum kit and middle eastern drums. I have a passion for books, literature, and the humanities. I have a passion for science fiction and have attended the Conduit Science Fiction Convention in Utah since its beginnings. My favourite authors are Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Tolstoy, Bernard Malamud, and Edith Wharton. I enjoy the game of chess and snooker; I also enjoy golf, soccer, baseball, and fly fishing. I love the band Rush, and enjoy listening to Mozart, Jazz, and New Age music.

I met my wife Tonya at the end of 1997, and in February of 1998, she asked me out for a movie, which we went to on 22 March 1998. On 1 May 1999 we were married at the Hotel Utah and have been happily married since. Tonya's passion is belly dancing. She served over 11 years in the US Army Reserve. She served with the 200th Medical Detachment (PM) in Kuwait/Qatar/Iraq, 10 March 2003 to 19 April 2004, and during the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. Tonya was honorably discharged 13 May 2008. We have three pets: two Senegal parrots, Lux and Ury; and a brown, pure bred chihuahua, Caru (KAHR-ee).

I am a hacker for the GNU project, and was Chief Webmaster for the Free Software Foundation. I am also an examiner for Red Hat, and a GNU/Linux instructor for Guru Labs. I'm interested in the C and Scheme programming languages. I don't like JAVA. I have a passion for XML.

I choose to use free software over non-free software, because I believe that free software promotes knowledge and learning in a way that non-free software cannot under current copyright and patent law. The purpose of copyright and patent law, according to the US Constitution, is to promote the arts and science (learning). Unfortunately, current enforcement, and the obnoxiously long terms (70 years beyond the life of the author), give power to the copyright holder to suppress knowledge, not promote it, and enable censorship, or in more recent times, laws have been passed that make copyright a way to control your computer. I don't believe it is theft, or piracy, to make copies of copyrighted programs, but as a Christian I also give to Caesar what is Caesar's, so I respect and follow the law I am governed by.

I've been using computers since I was seven, learning BASIC programming on an Atari 400, 800, and 800XL, the latter of which was the first computer my father brought home when I was eight. He purchased two BASIC programming manuals for Atari so I could learn to program. When I tried to copy some games, he told me I shouldn't, because it was prohibited by copyright law. At the time, I objected, but agreed to obey the rules. I spent much of my time as a teenager working with text and word processors. I professionally entered the computer industry in 1996, working for Packard Bell NEC/Zenith Data Systems, and purchased a NEC Pentium workstation with Windows 95. It was horrible. After about two weeks, I got fed up with it, and purchased a license to BackOffice 2.5, which I ran for a little less than a year. At the time I was looking for an alternative to Windows 95, my friend Lynn showed me a copy of Red Hat 4.1. Another friend I worked with (Mike) introduced me to Slackware. I have experimented with other distributions, too, especially SuSE early on, but found that I liked Slackware and Red Hat better. Since becoming involved with the GNU Project, I have started using other distributions recommended by them. I ran Ututo-e for awhile, as well as BLAG, on my previous laptop (a Toshiba), but I finally settled on gNewSense for that system. Currently, my main server (a custom Intel server built by iXsystems) is running Ubuntu. I run OpenBSD on my Sparc IIi server. My laptop (a T61p Thinkpad) runs Fedora. The problem of blobs (binary only drivers imbedded in source code), and non-free microcode firmwares, have plagued me in getting my hardware to work, and I continue a quest to use only free software on my systems, and to support the use of GNU software. Lately, I have been recommending GNUstep Live and gNewSense as my distributions of choice.

Please support the GNU Project and its mission to preserve, protect, and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users...the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet, the right to use encryption software for private communication, and the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies. To obtain free software, see the Free Software Directory, sponsored by the FSF and UNESCO.