Matthew's Journal

The idea of this meme is that someone asks you about three of your interests and three of your user-pics. the_lady_lily enquired of me as follows:

Explain to us why shell hackery does not involve the seashore, why cam.misc is apparently a source of endless delight, and I give you full permission to wax forth on early music.

The shell is the program you interact with at the command-line of most computer systems. On Unix systems (at least), its most basic mode of operation is to execute the commands you type at it - if I type foo, the shell will go away and try and find an executible called foo and run that for me. The shell also provides the ability to string a series of commands together in a shell script, as well as containing some useful language features itself (looping, variable substitution, globbing, etc., etc.). This means it's possible to write a vast range of programs consisting mostly or entirely of shell commands. It can sometimes be fun to hack up a solution to a problem in shell, rather than using a "proper" programming language, hence shell hackery.

cam.misc is a newsgroup local to the Cambridge (UK) area. I still read it, despite no longer living in Cambridge; as well as a useful source of location information, and forum for discussing local issues, it has an entertaining range of characters, injokes, and pedants.

Early music. What to say in a brief meme answer? One of the things that interests me about early music is the variety; whilst plainsong chanting is what many people think of if you say "early music", that's really only a part of a huge range of musical expressions, some of which played with tonality in ways that would only become common again in the twentieth century. That was one of the key things I tried to get across in my CUR1350 radio show.



Then, elucidate why you have an image for Sweden, tell us if it is really you with your hand up a cow's bottom, and reassure us that the scary axe really shouldn't concern us.

In 2006, new_brunette ran an LJ-sweepstake for the Football World Cup, and I drew Sweden. I obviously needed a userpic to illustrate posts on the topic :)

The veterinary photo isn't of me, but I have performed many rectal examinations. I just don't think anyone was wielding a camera at the time. I'm fairly certain the animal in the picture is a horse not a cow.

The axe is mine - we got it to deal with fence panels that had blown down in Girton, and it has been useful since from time to time. It's a Canadian felling axe, I am reliably informed...