Memories of contributing to Open Source

I was reminded of my first contribution to an open source project. It was a documentation patch to Perl about rand(0) being the same as rand(1). Here is the actual email with the patch. I waited with anticipation for the usual "Thanks, applied" from Jarkko. That came a few hours later, but if you look close enough at my email, some of you may notice the subtle typo in the email text. I did run spell check, and it came back clean. For those of you who still don't notice it, look up the difference between gentile and gentle. I got a private email back from a prominent p5p list member to me and to Jarkko asking if he had to smear bacon all over patch to make it gentile. My embarrassment quickly disappeared as the comedy of the whole thread. I responded with some lame attempt at humor that has sense been forgotten. Somewhere I have a copy of that email thread, and if I am able to dig it up, I'll post it here.