New volunteer

[Hans Rumland <gu...@earthlink.net>]

Hi, I would like to volunteer to help with documentation for OpenOffice because I am fed up with Microsoft’s software which I use, but hate.

My name is Hans Rumland. I am a self-declared citizen of the planet (while I am here) and I have been, consecutively and concurrently, a German, a Canadian, and American citizen ( while I am/was there). I also qualified for, but declined, the privilege to be a  for citizen of the Dominican Republic, where I lived for 20 years.

English, Spanish and German are the languages I speak, read and write fluently, aided by Latin and Greek from my school years.  I have authored, edited, illustrated, translated and published proposals, contracts, annual reports and training materials in all three languages. My catholic reading habits maintain my vocabulary in many areas such as electronics, cosmology, and recently, age-related medicine.

Computer hardware and software have been my companions since computers entered my workspace in instrumentation (DEC PDP-8e with hand-toggled bootstrap and 4kb of hand-wired memory) and later when the personal computing came into being; that means the era before Microsoft when I earned my living writing newsletters, proposals and contracts on a Tandy Model II with 32kb (yes, thirty-two kilo-bytes) of ROM memory, TRS-DOS Basic and Scripsit, Visicalc and Profile software, delivered on an 8” floppy disk. Those were the days when the business community said: Do you have $5,000 to spend on a computer that has no software? Get an IBM PC! If you need work done, get a Tandy Model II!  My system (CPU, external floppy drive for three 8” disks, software and a wide-carriage dot-matrix printer) cost  over ten thousand dollars but generated more than that in the first year of use, all of it for office work. Ever since then, my computers at home or at work, have been the tools that allowed me to make a good living.

Other office productivity tools I bought and/or used included the Microsoft Office suite (since 1989) in which I reached expert level in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and in Access, when it came out; I never became proficient in Publisher. 

Other skills and tools that helped me to earn money and to enjoy myself are those related to photography in the field and in the darkroom as tools for the illustration of reports and presentations, and the use of AutoDesk software for the design of homes, from beach-houses to town-sites and, last but not least, my own home, which I built with my own hands and the able help of my wife and daughter from 2002 to 2004. 

What could I do to help? I would enjoy proofreading of text written by Anglo-Saxons and containing words in German, especially those that include the ranks of German military personnel. I am open to other suggestions provided they fit into the somewhat reduced time table and speed of an eighty year old.

Hans Rumland

P.S. I once found an error in the spell checker of a well-known word processor programm. It supplied two spellings of gonorrhea for the misspelled word February. H.