Anecdotal evidence suggests that as a homepage owner I am most likely to be a white American male in my early twenties, probably in a computer-science related discipline or faculty. This statistical bias is shifting but is still surprisingly true.
In fact I am at least one third of the way to being, as the National Lampoon once noted, "a member of the oppressing colour, race and sex" and I have worked as a programmer in my time, though not currently. A brief biography follows.
I was born in February 1969 (this makes me 33 at time of writing) in Middlesborough, England, where my father was briefly employed. Neither my mother, my father nor myself have anything good to say about Middlesborough and I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland (as opposed to the one on Tristan Da Cunha, one of the last remaining vestiges of the British Empire. The office I work in has more inhabitants than the whole of Tristan) some four months after my birth where I have lived ever since. I am, incidentally, the only member of my family born outside Scotland for several generations, my parents' families being from the far north of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides. I regard myself as Scottish but I'm not partisan about it -- the "Scottish Parliament" is a fatuous, self-serving waste of time and money.
I have only Secondary School qualifications having never completed University although I have some higher mathematical qualifications. I work for the Life Assurance Company that is Edinburgh's second largest private employer, currently as a test analyst, formerly as a programmer, audit assistant and for a while I was officially a "Calculator". For the record, Edinburgh's largest private employer is Scottish & Newcastle breweries.
I am not an anarchist, nor indeed do I belong to any political organisations. I am an orthodox atheist, requiring neither the Big Beard in the Sky nor any other form of creating or guiding anthropocentric impulse. I am also a sceptic but I recognise the importance of open investigation of ideas and the mutability of opinions. Doubtless I will come to regret the foolishness of my various views whilst burning in Hell for all eternity or spending my next few reincarnations as a diphtheria germ. I am married, have two children and five cats and my principal hobbies are birding, literature, The London Underground and working out the opinions presented on my pages. I am also a very amateur musician and have a particular interest in electronic music. You can read some more about these leisure interests on my personal links page.
While the fact that I'm not a professional programmer at the moment will doubtless be blamed for the rather "flat" appearance of my webpages (other than link banners on my front page there are no graphics at all), the truth is rather that I have other, better, things to do with my time than build Flash movies or design brushscript headers for all my pages. I'd rather these pages were interesting to read rather than exciting to look at. And if it comes to the choice between taking my children swimming for an hour or spending the equivalent time making animated gifs of the cats to pep up the front page, then there's no contest really.
I have no deeply held personal beliefs other than
The origin of my nom de net, incidentally, comes from a friend's early attempts to devise an artificial language for a fantasy novel. Illustrating the sound system, he ran my name through it and Arcoddath is what came out. And there weren't any others on the net so I kept it.
If you wish to contact me, there is a mail link on my main page. If you wish to see pictures of me, my family or my cats then you're out of luck.
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