So who am I? Good question. Born in 1969, I grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England, but now I have lived in Swansea on the coast of south Wales for almost as long.
I arrived on the net comparatively early (my saved email goes back to 1990) and stuck around. I used to contribute quite a lot to various efforts on the net, most of it to do with do with free software or with GNOME. I still use Gnome and Linux and the rest, but I rarely contribute. I got tired of the fractious mailing lists and the attitude that requiring contributors to be polite would be curtailing their personal liberty. Life is too short. I still lurk on the Linuxchix mailing lists, which do require people to be both polite and helpful. Life is far more peaceful as a result.
What most people know about me, though, if anything, is that I married a hacker and for some time wrote about living with him in a journal called the more accurate diary. That also has gone, largely because I got fed up of obnoxiousness related to that, too.
Off the net, I read just about anything. Including dictionaries. I like bookshops and libraries. I like games from cards—especially cribbage— to running around an old house trying to outwit the zombies (somehow, I feel explanations would spoil that). Despite a disastrous university career earlier in life, I returned to education via the Open University, and worked out what I should have been doing in the first place. So it is back to the books, but this time I want to be there. In the meantime, I try to tame Alan's spider plants, I try to tame the rest of the house, I try to placate the postman whose sack has doubled in weight since Alan discovered Ebay (groan, how I hate Ebay), and I wait for builders. When I am fed up of this, I wander along Swansea beach or around Gower and pine for the beauties of the rest of the area which I could see if I had a car. But alas, we don't usually need a car and thus don't have one, so I have a bus timetable and one day the buses will read it too.
Still hanging around on this site are the following. They are updated only in the sense that when something gets out of date, I delete it.