about

A long list of not very interesting facts about me, in no particular order:

• I live in Fribourg, Switzerland. It's a French-speaking town, I speak no French, but I am learning German.
• I am first and foremost, a Wellingtonian. Like all Wellingtonians, I wear a lot of black, am a coffee snob and think the Matterhorn is somewhere to get a good gin & tonic.
• I was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on the 19th of April, 1980.
• I identify very strongly as a New Zealander.
• I lived in London for 6 months and completely loathed it.
• I work at Liip. My focus is open source in Education, particularly e-learning. I've been a Moodle developer since mid 2004, and a Mahara developer since its inception.
• I have an awesome boyfriend
• I feel the cold, and love electric blankets, heaters, and fires
• I prefer command line interfaces to graphical ones. Really the only graphical UI I use now is a browser. I often make scathing remarks about pointyclicky interfaces.
• I am one of those annoying outspoken version control system people. I like git.
• I have a cat called Nothing, named after a character in a book I read when I was 16. She came all the way to Switzerland with me from Wellington.
• I like my mail to arrive at least digitally signed
• I fight the urge to write an 'email etiquette' article and point people to it frequently. One day I'm sure this will happen though as people who breach email etiquette make me grind my teeth with rage. To summarise:
  • Reply to all is almost never ok
  • BCC field is useful. Use it for bulk email
  • Never send me HTML mail, it will make me angry
  • It breaks the way I read stuff
  • > Please don't top post
  • Yes, I have many email addresses. This doesn't mean it is necessary to send your email to all of them, it will just irritate me and make me less likely to pay attention. If it's work related, send it to my work address. If it's not, send it to my home address. I do not just check work email at work and home email at home, I will read it at roughly the same time. But if you send me "zomg puppies" to work, I will get angry
  • Remember, if you make me angry, I will write a procmail filter to get rid of you
• I have visible tattoos and piercings
• I greatly prefer postgres to mysql
• One thing that makes me really, really happy is to wake up in the morning after a storm, and have From the Edge of The Deep Green Sea by The Cure stuck in my head
• I am generally reading about 4 or 5 books at any given time
• My parents are both archaeologists, I grew up with weird artefacts in my house that my friends laughed at
• I went to boarding school, and I hated it
• I was vegan for a year and a half, and vegetarian on-and-off for about 5. Now I am a shameless meatmouth
• I make clothes and jewellery
• Spelling errors get me really embarrassed
• I used to be a foosball shark
• I try and convince everyone I know that they should install Linux, preferably Debian
• Which often means I end up being a one-woman helpdesk
• My favourite books are Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins, and Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
• My favourite movie is Amélie and every time I watch it I cut my hair short again, even if I've been trying to grow it
• I used to be an emacs fangirl. These days I'm using and loving vim, but I still use emacs for diff mode. I haven't so far found a good way to use vim for this purpose
• When I'm really tired, I often incorporate the alarm clock noise into my dream and keep sleeping
• I can get obsessive about books, movies, and bands
• (Obviously) I like lists
• This website is based on Serendipity which I track with git
• I have trouble staying on chairs and often find myself falling off and causing an avalanche of headphones, keyboards and mice that fall with me from my desk
• I am café and bar loyal, but it changes. In Wellington it was Mojo and Matterhorn. I have not yet found Fribourg equivalents, but I am considering the Belvedere for my bar.
• I drink far too much coffee, someone I work with describes me as 'gritty' after too many coffees. I sometimes give up for a few months, but inevitably return again.
• I do not like it when people end a parenthesised sentence with a smiley face (like this ;)
• Additions from my boyfriend:
  • "I explode in a firey ball of rage when someone uses apostrophes wrongly"
  • "I like *matching* $ANYTHING"
  • "I like colour sorted bookshelves"
  • "I like cooking"
  • "I am a control freak extroardinaire"
  • "If my boyfriend gets a toy, i want it too, even if I don't need it"
  • "SHOES!"
  • "I dig my claws into whatever is closest, usually my boyfriend's skin, upon sight of ponies"
  • "I am actually a cat"
  • "I watch television and often can be found cackling on the couch"
  • "I like to stay in bed all day"
  • "I expect my boyfriend to bring me coffee and laptop to bed in the mornings"
  • s/expect/am training/
  • "I AM INFINITELY CUTE AND A KLUGES KEKSCHEN"