User Profile

[Editorial note: I guess I wrote this lot when I was 19 or so. I'm leaving it here as a testimony to the staggeringly pretentious arseholery of my younger self, since that probably serves quite well as a bio.]

I'm a computer scientist at Churchill College, Cambridge. Now, who AM I?

I'm a geek who would be cool, had he the personality to go with that particular persona :)

I used to be an inveterate video gamer, but I've become increasingly bored with them. These days my primary interests are music, film, politics and science. My subject is Computer Science, but I'm probably most interested in biology and psychology, plus some aspects of physics. I'm better at compsci than either of those, hence the choice.

Music-wise I'm mainly into classic hard rock (The Who, Lez Zep, et al) plus modern music that sounds in that vein (The Darkness, Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines). I'm also into Radiohead, Muse, The Eels and so forth in a fairly big way, and in order to drop the obligatory music-geek names, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and Tom Waits :)

My favourite film of all time is currently The Shawshank Redemption, solely for the duet played to the prison about half way through.

I hate total geeks who bury their heads in nothing but computers and geekery. Fair enough, it's reasonably interesting stuff (to me, being a compsci), but there's more important things out there which are more in need of your attention than the relative merits of Redhat and Debian. You know, Israel's right to exist, the erosion of our public services. That sort of trivial matter. These people tend to like me, though.

I love interesting people who are not the above. Unfortunately, my entirely crap ability to hold a conversation with someone I've just met means that generally these people don't get on with me terribly well -- which is probably karma for shunning the geek squad :)

I'm not sure what my political views actually are anymore. I used to be a screaming liberal, all with the "tax the rich bastards" and so on, but I'm not sure that's a sensible point of view anymore, after speaking to much wiser people since coming to Cambridge. I certainly retain my social liberalism (to my mind the Dutch have about the right policies), especially my hatred of the American, ultra-paranoid, money = power system, but economically I think things are roughly okay as they are now. Though I'd still like to see the major public services kept public-owned (ie. health, education and the railways).

I also like biscuits. Yay biscuits.

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