Question time.
Well, Livejournal:ewx has asked me five questions, so here we go …
Cut — Caution, boredom awaits…
Phew. Hope that answers them well enough. As per the meme’s structure, feel free to comment/ask additional questions in the comment space below, and also feel free to ask for question sets.
- Why “pepperfish”?
Unfortunately this has less of an awe-inspiring story than I would have hoped, so here goes with a brief-history of Pepperfish…
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Approximately two years ago, a group of friends, some of which are on LJ (Livejournal:nunfetishist for example), and I got together to purchase a computer to get hosted in Telehouse in London. Once it was installed, some more friends of ours approached us saying “Can we have some space?” or “Can you host a website for me?” and we realised that we could charge a minimal fee for this, and still they would come. We needed a name for this machine, calling it `195.149.39.195` was wearing quite thin, so we all pooled the domains we owned at the time and tried to choose one to use. For a reason none of us could quite fathom, one of us owned the domain `pepperfish.org` and we decided that we could come up with computer names for that (calling them all fish for instance) so we settled on calling the box `salmon.pepperfish.org`. As more and more people wanted hosting, we decided to try and look a little more professional, so we designed a logo and called ourselves ‘The Pepperfish Consortium’ and got on with things.
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These days, we are Pepperfish Limited and we continue to grow.- If you could wall off any town or city in Britain, which would you choose? Would you be inside or outside?
Crikey, go for the hard ones eh?.
I’m not a great city person ~~- I far prefer the country~~- but having grown up there, I’d have to say that for the safety of the rest of the world, we should immediately wall-up and dome-over Birmingham. It’s for the good of the Earth I tell you. (And yes, I’d be outside)- What what be the ideal length of a day?
I’m afraid I have to be rather selfish here. I think work-days should be about 6 hours long (but staggered) so shops are open from 3pm until 9pm on week-days and stuff like that. Weekends should have the days elongated by six hours each, so that I can have a huuuuge lie-in and still get everything done.- What was the last book you read, & was it any good? Ditto last film.
The last book I read was Robert Rankin’s The Greatest Show off Earth. It was extremely odd and really rather good. I think I’ll have to re-read it before I’m satisfied with leaving it alone for a year or so. Just prior to that, I read my first Alexi Sayle book: Barcelona plates which is a collection of short stories which really punch your sense of reality around a bit. Very good and I’d recommend it to anyone with a compatibly odd and slightly dark sense of humour.
The last film I saw was The Matrix Reloaded which I think was a very good film. The Wachowski brothers have out-done themselves I think. Although the CGI broke down in places and became a touch-too-obvious, it was overall a bloody good film.- What’s on your desk?
Let’s take this one in two parts: Firstly, on my desk here at work there is… a document describing a presentation on bridging busses between hypertransport and RapidIO. Also an OpenMOSIX HowTO document. An install/documentation CD for a Netscreen hardware firewall. Various other bits of paper, and my work notebook. Also my wallet, keys, phone etc and my calculator. Finally there’s a tube-map with various stations ticked-off as we use tube-stops as our naming scheme here at work.
Now, at home, I have a desk which is covered in bits of paper, CDs, a keyboard and mouse and various other bits of guff. However I tend to sit downstairs on a comfy chair with my laptop and an 802.11b card, so I guess my desk in that sense is the coffee table, which has a copy of Private Eye some unopened letters, and all the remote controls for our HiFi and TV etc.