Just For Fun: The Story Of An Accidental Revolutionary
by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond

I had to go back to the essay of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time written November 2005 in order to find the formatting that I've been using for these things. I do have a template I could've just used for this. But I'm learning Vi, the Unix text editor, to write this. I still could've used the template, but then I wouldn't have the bragging rights of having written this from scratch in Vi. So there we are.

Now that I think about it, it's kind of ironic that the first book I'm essaying from Vi, which is clearly a text editor only a geek would use, is Linus Torvalds'. I like Linux and all, although I've only ever had old crappy computers to put it on. Someday I would like to build or buy and new system and put a more modern and powerful version of Linux on it, preferably a Debian I think. That notwithstanding, this book wasn't terribly interesting. He's a genius computer guy, nobody would argue that, but his story is about as compelling as software documentatin, which, in a way, this is.

Even worse, he takes the opportunity to rant and rave about things. They must have had a lot of pages left over to fill up. Just because somebody can write an operating system doesn't mean they're some kind of expert on the meaning of life. But you've got to expect that going into a book like this.

The most interesting bit of it as far as I was concerned was the explanation of his family's ethnicity. They're Swedish-speaking Finns. It never occurred to me that anyone in Finland would be anything but Finnish-speaking Finns. It turns out there are also Swedish-speakers there. And the Torvaldses are among them.

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