Let me introduce you to my friend Steven Shaw, or “Fat Guy,” as he likes to be called.
Fat Guy lives in New York City, is a lawyer, and over the last three or four years, has cultivated a second career as a professional food writer — and a damn good one, too. At 32, Fat Guy was one of the youngest men to win the James Beard Award for Food Journalism.
Some other interesting facts: Fat Guy owns a seventy-pound, drooling bulldog named Momo, Fat Guy likes to wear fish pants, and he has an Indiana Jones-like wife that frequently leaves for months on hiking trips through Nepal, Mongolia, and other far-flung regions of the earth. Fat Guy’s also the co-founder of my food web site, eGullet.com.
Fat Guy is a Windows user, just like most people that use a PC. So, it came as something of a surprise when one day he called me asking for help. (It seems I’m the resident computer expert among my group of friends and family.) The conversation went something like this:
“I’m sick of getting all these goddamn viruses and spyware! Can’t you do something? This is a Pentium 4 that’s only two years old, and it’s going as slow as a 286 from all the crap that’s clogging it up!”
“Well, we could re-install Windows and put on some more aggressive spyware, firewall, and anti-virus software, but perhaps you should consider moving over to Linux.”
“Linux? You mean…
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