Tom Anderson
Tom Anderson <mailto:twic@urchin.earth.li> is the founder, engineer, host, administrator and (absentee) tyrannical despot of the OUSFG Wiki; his official title is Absolute Sole and Sacred Omni Imperious Arch Grand Arch Sovereign Omni Imperious Arch Grand Arch Proprietor Omni Imperious Arch-Grand-Arch-Emperor Supreme.
Pages To Do:
Recently read:
Authors to read:
He will add more stuff to the Twic I engine if you ask (leave a note on the Twic I Wishlist page). It may take some time, though.
He thinks that the OUSFG Wiki needs more editing of what's been written and more general SF content. If it had that, he propounds, it would get more general use.
As far as books go, he likes Arthur C Clarke, Larry Niven (sometimes), Greg Egan, Ted Chiang, Ken Mac Leod (of whom he hasn't read enough), Stanislaw Lem, Chris Priest, Brian Stableford?, Brian Aldiss, Jeff Noon, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, John Barnes, Victor Pelevin, Jorge Luis Borges? and, ooh, loads of people (including, recently, the grotesquely brilliant HP Lovecraft). Books by some of these can be found in Tom Andersons Library. He deplores Tri Logies and, indeed, novels.
He likes to think that he is an expert on Eating In Oxford. He also likes to think about beer, especially Deuchars IPA. He really likes Insane Shit. He wants a Scanning Tunnelling Electron Microscope.
He is an investigator at the Google Meme Observatory.
He is assembling an SF Reading List For Non SF Readers.
Here are some of his random musings:
- The only way you can create a new page on wiki is by writing a link to it on an existing page and then following the question-mark link (well, or by munging a URL directly, but that'll only be for l33t haxxorz); thus, wiki enforces an invariant that every page is reachable from somewhere, and, by induction, that every page is reachable from the first page created (which is itself created by fiat, rather than as described). Of course, the inbound link can then be deleted, so this isn't actually an invariant at all, but there you go.
- Hopefully, a wiki will prove ideal as a sort of 'web notebook'; there are always little things i want to jot down, but i usually haven't got anywhere to jot them (paper in the pocket is too fragile and not hyperlinked, my website requires logging in an using a text-mode editor, files on my computer are only accessible when i'm at home, etc). Maybe now i'll be able to quickly jot them down here, like this. Oh; is this why Web Log!s were invented?
- This was at the Cowley Road Carnival?: http://www.rinky-dink.org/ (and it was very cool)
- Must find out about 'action semantics', which, apparently, "can specify the semantics of ... object-oriented ... programming languages.".
- I suck. You must suck. We all suck http://www.suck.com/
- F'r instance http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/13/
- CUSFS has (or had) GROGGS, RITSCI? has Lotus Notes (of all things!), now we have OUSFG Wiki and, finally, i can show my face at those international university SF nerd hacker cocktail parties without shame. Well, with less shame.
- Yeah, GROGGS: gopher://gopher.publication.org.uk:70/1/rgtp/index%3Fgroggs but don't get carried away (in fact, since this portal is now closed, you'd have a dashed hard time getting carried away) [yes... some groggers were upset about random people being able to turn up and read GROGGS. Besides, the text might have ended up on Veronica or somewhere. -- Marnanel]
- And while we're on the subject: GROGGS, Live Journal, Danny O Brien? and Wiki - together at last! - http://marnanel.org/projects/
- Must look up ANDF?; this turns out to be complicated, invented by DERA?, very well documented, but impenetrable
- Maybe look up TWAIN
- IBM Common Rules? (<http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/commonrules>) (vs JESS? etc); what's Rule ML?, then?
- Let's specify and Internet Pong Protocol
- Reading some Charlie Stross (which is excellent, by the way - cheers, Niall!) makes me want to explain about Problems And Algorithms?, Algorithmic Complexity?, what it means to be NP Complete and How Cracking NP Would Change The World? (possibly visiting the Discrete Logarithm Problem? along the way) ... geek mode on!
- The Best Page In The Universe!
- Useful:
- I want a DC06
- We Like The Moon!
- Aaah, mozilla custom keywords: <http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html>
- Downloadable robot templates: <http://www.robo-t.com/r-kata.html>
- <http://www.popsci.com/popsci/hometech/article/0,12543,458641,00.html>
- Overclocking is good; what can we overclock other than computers? Well, let's start with Jesus: <http://bbspot.com/News/2002/03/ocjesus.html>.
- Japanese emoticons: <http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/index.html> (another reason to use unicode!)
- Alexander Shulgin's books
- Fallen Angels is good (no, really!)
- Must ... join ... Scotch Malt Whisky Society? ... <http://www.smws.com/>
- Ethics: <http://ethics.acusd.edu/>
- Werd: <http://www.the-scream.co.uk/html/resources/dialup.html>; most useful if you're trying to use an ISP without installing any of their bagbiting software
- Must read up on Alan Turing? and mathematical biology <http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/morph.html>
- Move Sig: http://www.livejournal.com/community/indiefucks/4586086.html?thread=49797990#t49797990
Category Wikizen Category OUSFG Member