User:Darkliquid
About Me
Not much to say, I'm just an average computer geek with many eccentricities and strange medical mysteries. I love coding, electronics hacking, reading, writing and music. I just mill around in Poole and Bournemouth in Dorset, living out my life as a professional Ruby on Rails developer and web designer.
Elsewhere on the web
Darkliquid's answers to frequently asked questions
You can also find out more from Darkliquid's
forum profile.
What is the origin of your username?
I've been using this name since I was young. Its just something I randomly came up with following the 'standard' formula: adjective+noun. However, it means something more than that to me, something intangible, something I can't quantify.
darkliquid - it's just my name.
How did you get to spacefem.com?
I seemed to spend so much time reading over DruidX' shoulder while she perused this cool forum full of interesting people that I decided to join in myself.
Where is your user pic from, and what does it mean to you?
My name - darkliquid
My avatar - a dark liquid.
Pretty sef-explanatory really.
It was part of a cool icon set made by an artist I found on the internet called darkalloy.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I've wanted to be a astronaut, and robotics engineer, an AI researcher, a mathematician, a genetics researcher, a psychologist and a computer programmer.
And I AM a computer programmer! Wheee!
What general things should we know about you?
I'm a geek, plain and simple. I've been using computers since I was 5 when I started programming BASIC from a textbook into my Amstrad 464 CPC. Nowadays I know several programming languages including C, C++, Python, Ruby, Assembler for various microcontrollers and a bit of C#. I can easily build computers from parts and upgrade them.
I'm trained as an computing and electronics engineer and have dabbled in robotics and telematics, but I just like messing around really and electronics is just a hobby for me. Professionally, I am a Ruby on Rails developer, have been for a year and I'm loving it.
I love all kinds of music from black symphonic metal to j-pop, from industrial trance to classical. I tend to dislike most stuff you hear on the radio, the 'mainstream' hip-hop and pop I find annoying at best and insulting to my intelligence at worst.
I hope to learn the drums, but I doubt I will ever be good if I ever do get a kit.
I like writing and reading, I have hundreds of books and have several half-finished novels laying around on my computer.
I am a Linux and open source enthusiast.
I hate political correctness, restrictions of freedom in the name of 'protection' and willful ignorance. I belive in equality for all and hate all the narrowminded bigots and hypocrits that taint the world with their hatred and ignorance.
I'm in love in DruidX, have been with her for 5 years, lived with her for 8 months and am looking forwards to being her husband.
How do you generally stand on political issues?
No single part seems to match exactly what I feel. I consider myself mostly liberal, but I have wildly different and conflicting views on various things.
Generally I avoid politics as usually I end up having to choose the ones that are 'the least bad', and that I find depressing.
What do you feel is your greatest achievement in life?
Getting a job I love purely on my own merit and not due to stupid, 'certifications' or 'degrees'. I've been working as a Ruby on Rails coder for the past year, using entirely self-taught knowledge, and have 1000's of lines of code running tens of websites in production environments as well several tools I have written or helped to write to ease server administration.
The fact that I've done all this on my own, and that nothing I have learned at school other than Maths has contributed to this I view as my greatest achievement. Screw you school for wasting my time in the name of meaningless qualifications!
Describe any animals you live with.
Unless I count my flat mates, I don't live with animals. Though when I was living with my mum, I played with Bill - our dog. He is a tiny, ancient jack-russell terrier and he is so cool. He is lazy and doddery like an old man, but with the occasional sparks of puppy like enthusiasm and energy.
He is about 14 years old now, so what, 98 in dog years?
What are your favorite books of all time?
Gridlinked, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Cowl, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech and Polity Agent by Neal Asher
The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
The Bridge by Janine Ellen Young
The Turing Option by Marvin Minsky and Harry Harrison
The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov
The Dune series by Frank Herbert, and later by his son Brain Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
The Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy series, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council by China Mieville
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind
And finally, the most awesome series of books I have ever read in my life:
Neverness, Broken God, The Wilds and War In Heaven by David Zindell - these books are profound. A book - a story, has never meant this much to me as these books have. If its possible to love a story, I love the one told throughout these books.
What kinds of music do you like?
I like a lot of music, [url=http://www.last.fm/user/darkliquid:29j7b1i8]my Last.FM account[/url:29j7b1i8] is probably best for getting an idea of my musical tastes.
Currently, I'm really into Industrial (Metal, Rock, Trance), Alternative (Rock, Metal), Symphonic Black Metal, Electronica, Progressive (Metal, Rock), and Doom Metal.
[url=http://www.last.fm/user/darkliquid/charts/?charttype=overall&subtype=artist&range=108:29j7b1i8]Here are all the bands I listen too currently[/url:29j7b1i8] (I'm always looking for new music as well)
For the people too lazy to click on links, a very small selection of the artists I listen to include:
Frontline Assembly, Anathema, Deathstars, Gothminister, Iron Maiden, Sonata Artica, Dream Theater, Theatre of Tragedy, Nightwish, Meatloaf, 32 Leaves, Incubus, Foo Fighters, Scarlet Soho, Blind Guardian, In Flames, Tool, Norther, Chroma Key, Delirium, Porcupine Tree, Machinae Supremacy and Mansun.
What do you like/not like to wear?
I prefer being naked or wandering around home in underwear or a dressing gown, but when I have to be dressed, its jeans with a geeky t-shirt and maybe a jumper, and when outside add my trusty leather trenchcoat.
I don't really care what labels or stores my clothes come from, I just get what ever is cheapest. I prefer plain, block coloured clothing, I don't like being a walking advert for things I don't really give a damn about and most modern fashion looks shit in my opinion.
Just plain colours for me, usually black, but blue, red, green and greys are good too.
I don't where shoes because I have weird feet, so I usually wear walking boots since I do a lot of walking and they are usually the only thing I can get in my size (13.5 UK) that don't hurt my feet.
What is your gender?
Male
list every job you've ever had, in any particular order
Temp Waiter
Temp Labourer
Supermarket Assistant
Web Application Developer
What part of the world do you live in? Do you like it?
Poole, Dorset, England
What is your religious identification/lack thereof?
I find the concept of belief limiting, to focus ones viewpoint through a lens of belief leaves so many different view points, ideas and concepts forever hidden from view.
I guess the only thing I believe in is seeing things from ones own point of view and observations and not feeling forced to label things as true or false. Just accepting that the given definition of anything holds for as long as your learning and perceptions remain the same is good enough for me. I try not to make the presumption that anything I know, think or experience is not subject to change, errors or misrepresentation.
What's your Myers-Briggs type?
ISTP here. Project-wise I have lots of ideas and no implementations. I've tons of things I want to do but very little things I've actually done. I find it way too hard to actually drum up the motivation to do anything outside of work when by myself.
Some abortive projects of mine are: MAME cabinet, developing yet another tile-based RPG engine (this time in Ruby), properly planning out a roleplay campaign in my Dockyards setting, making an electronic drum kit from scratch, inventing a new kind of electronic instrument (I have some basic notes based around lasers, vocoders and capacitance touchpad sensors but no actual plans), making a Stargate DHD-style device that is a fully working PC compatible keyboard and making a hardware mp3 player built from scratch (just from electronics, not actually from absolute scratch, I'm not really capable of designing a mp3 decoding DSP core from scratch).
I AM however very slowly developing an entire computing architecture from NAND logic upwards, it's an arse though because there doesn't seem to be any decent HDL simulators for linux that are also free so we are mostly just doing basic planning at the moment.
