٠١ n i f t y b i t s ١٠

١١ about andy.

I live in the North West of England. Spent a lot of time earlier in my life as a student, learning Physics, Cognitive Science, Science Policy, and Sociology and Philosophy of Science. I have enjoyed playing with computers since I was a teenager (ZX-81 / BBC Micro), and lately I've been getting back to my geek roots by learning programming, electronics and web design. Most of my work is done using the GNU° / Linux° Free Software Operating system, which you can download for no cost from various places on the net - I use Debian° which is the largest GNU / Linux distribution still run on a volunteer basis. I seem to have become a mainly sedentary animal lately, browsing on the global information stream through keyboard, mouse, monitor and computer. The digital hunter-gatherer / pot-builder / jewelry-maker / cybershaman fantasy still appeals, but I may be getting a bit slow to keep up. I can write code though, and have done various small projects in Perl, C, C++, Java, and Visual Basic. Occasionally I forget that I have a body, at which point it's time to go dancing or cycling or something like that.

Once upon a time I used to go rock climbing, and mountaineering and stuff - I still enjoy being out in the hills and fresh air, but I haven't been seriously into outdoor pursuits for a while. I'm not working at the moment; I'm currently living on sick benefits, trying to get through a hard time in my life - i was sectioned to a mental hospital back in January 2000, and life has not been easy since. There is some stuff about this, and my views on the mental health system, on this site.

I'm also interested in Taoism, T'ai Chi and pagan and shamanic beliefs, both as healing arts and as a way of exploring the spiritual side of life. I have some interest in politics, especially environmental issues, but admit to being somewhat ignorant about a lot of real life political issues, and at the moment I'm more interested in trying to find creative things to do in the world as I find it that make some kind of sense to me personally, than trying to change or understand the world on a grand scale. At the moment, I'm putting my effort into learning computing, electronics and digital media to the point where I can do projects in these media that I think are worthwhile.

١٠٠ site design / layout.

It's worth saying a few things at this point about how I've laid out the site. I've deliberately not included any kind of site map, because I think sometimes it's nice to get lost if you're not in a hurry. I remember when I was about ten discovering that I couldn't get lost in the woods across the heath from our house any more, and being kind of disapppointed. Everything I want people to find easily can be reached from the front page or a level down anyhow.

The site is quite small at the moment, but as I build it I'm planning to stick to the classic hypertext style, where pages are linked to each other mainly through links from words on other pages. External links which go off this site are marked with a degree sign°

Thanks to the wonders of Unicode / UTF-8° I've managed to stick to very simple html and still include some nice graphic elements - the section headers are (meant to be) binary numbers in arabic script. I've built the site using bluefish and konqueror running on Debian GNU / Linux, so it's likely to look best with this combination. If it looks wierd or ugly in your browser, perhaps you could email me and let me know.

١٠١ digital images.

The Folly Gallery / Elm House ones are some work I've done as part of a photography and mental health project run over six weeks at the drop-in centre I go to. You are welcome to copy these images for any personal or non-commercial use not including any form of publication; for anything else, please email me first to ask.

١١٠ mental health.

Stuff about living with mental health problems. Aka being a nutter / freak /wierdo.

• Spirit and soul in Mental Health - short document I wrote a while ago to give to my psychiatrist about problems with the purely medical view of mental health. HTML

١١١ miscellaneous.

Various other stuff

• Some cartoons by the New York artist Art Spiegelman about his personal reaction to Sept 11th 2001 and what has happened in the world since.
• My GNU/Linux desktop.
• My home web server and anon ftp site. The web server is used for testing various projects. The machine isn't always on or open though.
• Rippls is a wrapper script for streamripper which lets you record shoutcast style mp3 streams direct to your hard drive, and choose which tracks you want to keep as they are playing.

١٠٠٠ sites i've done.

I've done a few simple web sites. The best one is the lothlorien site - I'm pleased with the java tour guide applet. You are welcome to use the source code however you wish, as long as due credit is given to me for the code I have written. I would also appreciate it if you let me know that you are using it.

• Lothlorien Therapeutic Community. A place up in Scotland where you can stay for a while to get your head together.
• Chemical Reaction. Campaign against a polluting factory in Lancaster. (not been active for some time.)
• This site. (Very much a 'work in progress'...)