Matthew B-M: Questionnaire

Someone suggested that perhaps people should do this questionnaire. I'm not sure what it reveals about me, but perhaps you, the reader, will get some valuable insight into my character that you'd rather not have seen.

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE ME:

1. George W Bush
2. Tony Blair
3. The Home Office

THREE THINGS I LOVE:

1. Choral Music
2. Computers
3. Interesting Problems

THREE THINGS I HATE:

1. Spam
2. My life
3. PC Hardware

THREE THINGS I DON'T UNDERSTAND:

1. Why the x86 architecture is so popular when it's such a crock
2. Why I left someone I actually cared a lot about.
3. Why the web is so popular for application development when it's virtually impossible to do properly.

THREE THINGS ON MY DESK:

1. Laptop
2. Empty Coffee Mug (yes, it'll get re-filled shortly)
3. Monitor for Desktop

THREE THINGS I'M DOING RIGHT NOW:

1. Filling in this questionnaire
2. Trying to work out how to do my work
3. Wondering what I could possibly do for a research project

THREE THIGNS I WANT TO DO BEFORE I DIE:

1. Do some research for more than about 5 months.
2. Come up with something new and interesting in my field
3. Learn to be a bit more patient

THREE THINGS I CAN DO:

1. Rant
2. Administer UNIX boxes and programme in Perl
3. Make strong coffee

THREE WAYS TO DESCRIBE MY PERSONALITY:

1. Cynical
2. Pessimistic
3. Unconventional

THREE WAYS TO DESCRIBE MY LOOKS:

1. Scruffy
2. Jeans and a T-Shirt
3. Razor, what razor?

THREE THINGS I CAN'T DO:

1. Get off my arse and do things
2. Feel content with anything I've aimed to achieve
3. Not get stressed with people on mailing lists

THREE THINGS I THINK YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO:

1. Bach's Mass in B Minor (all the way through, and then again).
2. Mike Oldfield - Songs of Distant Earth
3. Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant

THREE THINGS I SAY THE MOST:

1. <x> is Evil, Bad and Wrong (or EBW)
2. What the F*** is this!?!?
3. In RFC<n> you'll find that...

THREE OF YOUR ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE FOODS:

1. Fresh pasta
2. Balsamic Vinegar
3. Vegetarian Sushi

THREE THINGS I WORRY ABOUT:

1. Is the company I work for going to actually last
2. Whether everyone hates me
3. Whether I'll ever manage to achieve any of my ambitions in life

THREE THINGS YOU'D LIKE TO LEARN:

1. Haskell (though any decent functional programming language would probably do - OK, Christophe, CL if you like. :-)
2. Italian
3. More security-related stuff.

THREE BEVERAGES YOU DRINK REGULARLY:

1. Coffee, of various qualities
2. Adnams Broadside (but any other real ale will substitute. This just happens to be the best on offer at the pub next door to work)
3. Milk & hot water (something shown to me by my now ex-girlfriend, but very comforting at the moment, when it's cold and I have no central heating)

THREE SHOWS YOU WATCHED WHEN YOU WERE A KID:

1. Blue Peter
2. Tomorrow's World
3. The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (every year)

(of course, we didn't actually have a telly for ages)