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...

I'm unconvinced by the anonymous-comments meme. So, I have devised a variant. Here is how it works:

1) tell me something in a comment to this post. I will screen all comments. Please also say if you're willing to participate in step 2).
2) I will publish the comments in an entry, anonymously. I will, if people generally consent, publish the names of the consenting authors too, but not which comment they wrote.
3) People can try and guess who wrote what, but I won't reveal anyone's secrets.

The later post on this topic will be fiends-locked.

Fire away!

I saw this on rmc28's LJ, and am in the mood for procrastination...

Look at your LJ userpics list. If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em. List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it's interesting to you, what significance does it have.
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I think I'd would have preferred to pick 5 userpics to talk about, rather than just "every fifth", but never mind, eh? If anyone wants to ask about other of my userpics, I'll gladly wibble about them ;-)

In unrelated news, I find myself hoping this gets laughed out of court.