hnpcc | interview meme again

Questions from

hawkida:

What's with the wedding plans after so long together without getting married?

We'd sort of been planning to get married for a while without actually doing anything about it for a very long time. At least we'd assumed that we both wanted to and just let it slide. Why now? Well, dunno really. Dean was joking about getting married in Vegas when we were in the US in 2000, and we've been joking about having the wedding at Kinglake since...

sardy and

polyhedra got married. What changed? Nothing major. Dean was waiting until we went to Adelaide to propose (heh, good thing we actually ended up going then given it was delayed four times!) Mostly it's the wanting to start a family thing I think... it was a strange coincidence that myself and both my sisters all managed to get engaged in the same month though. And two of us were on the same day. Given that both of us are fairly crap at organising anything I don't know if we'll actually manage to get hitched any time soon though.

What do you remember of the time we actually met up?

*grin* All of you (you,

gamemaker and

shnetti) being amused (I think, it could also have been amazed) by how noisy my car was. Waiting at the airport wondering if I'd recognise you from the photos I'd seen. You having absolutely no idea who I was (actually from something

ang_grrr said the other day I wonder if you'd actually seen photos of me at that point? I thought you had but I could be totally wrong),

gamemaker being way taller than I expected, you being shorter than I expected, your accents, and having tea somewhere. Oh yeah and

gamemaker eating those weird two minute cheesy noodle type things. And it was reasonably warm out and I nearly ran over

shnetti at the shopping centre. Oops. Oh and you were wearing black.

Look at the object closest to your computer mouse. Does it have a story? Tell it. If not, keep moving further away until you find something that does.

OK, I'm a work. Next to the mouse is the new computer. Nothing interesting. Then there's another two carrels with new computers. Then there's another two carrels, then my carrel. Hm, stories. I might have to reanswer this question at home, actually. :-) So at home there's a chest on the floor which has the printer on top of it. The chest has my great-grandmother's name and destination (Melbourne, Australia) stencilled on it, and is the chest that she packed everything into when she came out here with my great-grandfather and my Nanna, who'd been born in Manchester. My Nanna had it in the hallway, with linen and stuff in, I think it's mostly got photo albums in it now. My great-grandfather was born out here, incidentally, he'd returned to the UK for some reason, gotten married and then brought his family back. My extended family have a very complicated migration history: they keep going back and forth and just because one generation was born in Europe doesn't mean their parents were.

What's the most recent novel you read and would you recommend it?

OK.. Stiff, by Shane Maloney. Set in Melbourne it's a sort of humorous crime novel. It's very funny if you live in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, I really don't know how well it would travel outside of Australia though - especially given some of the slang used, which is mainstream and not hugely offensive (um, depending on context and tone - so much of insults in Australia depend entirely on tone) but which I know is extremely offensive in the UK. Still, my favourite quote so far:

He seemed to feel that Federal Politics was designed as a career structure for Monash University graduates who would otherwise be unemployable. Heh. He also takes the piss out of a lot of local figures, the ALP, the Herald-Sun, and a fair number of local attitudes.

When did you first get online and what did you initially use the internet for outside of official school/work use?

1994, with a lab based e-mail account which was shared between 10 people. I don't think I used the internet at all in 1994 for official business... oh maybe OVID. But actually I think that was still CD based, so.. um.. no. So what was I (as one of the heaviest users of said account in the lab and of our new, you beaut "Mosaic" browser) actually doing? Hm. Well I started a relationship with a guy I met via aus.sf.star-trek, I exchanged dodgy e-mails with my friend in the physics lab, I looked up Birmingham for one of the PhD students who'd just gotten a postdoc there (we found the "curry trail" site: much amusement had by all): pretty much similar to now actually. 1995 was the first year I got a personal (still work based) account, and I did much as I had the year before, only moving to atvrd after a very nasty flamewar erupted on aus.sf.star-trek and I broke up with the guy. atvrd was my primary non-work based use, although I did start using Medline in 1995 and there were a lot more work e-mails going through my account. Not least because my supervisor communicated primarily that way, being out of the country for large chunks of time.