Who is Ross?
Funny you should ask, actually, I'm not all that sure myself. What I do know is that I'm thirtysomething, Scottish by birth, and somewhere on the geek-nerd spectrum.
I am passionate about computers and technology, flying and photography. I enjoy science-fiction and fantasy literature, broadly enjoy cycling and can occasionally be found torturing innocent pianos. Some things I made can be found on the workbench.
These pages are largely static. You can get a more dynamic insight into my digital life from my other online presences - see the links bar.
Writings
- Things I made and notes I wrote about them
- Articles about Contract Bridge
- Recipe collection
- The "Request for Assassination" form. This is based on a post in ucam.chat by Peter Clay on 2000-06-29 and is available in gzipped PostScript, PDF or as the original LaTeX source.
- Total Eclipse 14/11/2012
In 2010 I made my first (short) film, a spoof weather forecast for Middle-Earth.
Contacting me
I used to publish the email address ross at crazyscot.com on these pages, but it got so much spam that it's now heavily filtered. By all means email it if you like; it still works, but some systems cannot reach it. Instead, webcontact at crazyscot.com is a better place to email in the first instance. Alternatively, if I've given you a different address, probably best to use that.
In case you really want it, I have a GPG key. (There may be a more up-to-date version on the keyservers.) If you know what to do with that file, you'll find it has some other email addresses in it - the one which begins with the digit zero is unfiltered and hence your best chance in case of problems.
About these pages
I hate the longer-winded chores that hand-writing HTML gets you into. I also hate the horrid HTML that a number of content management systems emit. (Don't get me started on SGML or XML.) What's missing is a middle ground: a place where I can have the annoying bits done for me by software but not have ridiculous overbloated pages which take too long to load. Well, I have concocted a smattering of perl, m4 and make which automates the tedious bits of maintaining these pages. It's horrible symbiosisware, not fit to publish, but it works for me.
Those of you viewing in a new-fangled Technicolour browser with sufficient CSS magic will be treated to a shiny version of the navigation bar; in earlier browsers the bar appears at the bottom.
Kudos to Eric A. Meyer for the most excellent CSS resource.