Rob Marshall → Contact/About → About Me

Robert Daniel Marshall

...is me. I was going to write this page in the third person and try to sound really professional, but screw that. Here goes nothing:

Up to speed

At the time of writing I'm about 19 ¹⁄₈ years old. I was born on 11th September 1988.

I'm a British computer geek born and raised in the town of Beverley, East Yorkshire. I'm in Year 13 in the English system studying for Advanced GCEs (A Levels) in Chemistry, Maths, and Physics.

Rob, Robert, Marshall, RDM, "oi, nutter"

I don't think I'm that interesting a person, which I suppose goes to prove something about people with blogs. I wear glasses, I like loud music, I smell, I spend far too much time on the internets.

I wouldn't say I'm religious - I generally identify with whichever silly joke cult is most amusing me this week. If I was being serious I'd probably say I was an agnostic, which to me means a lack of all religious beliefs/disbeliefs, and a healthy skepticism that a real god would actually care whether I "had faith" or not.

So what do I believe in? People. At least I try to. They make it hard sometimes.

B129919

In September 2005 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I'm currently in remission.

Cancer is a funny thing. I don't think it's given me some amazing new philosophical view of life, but whether I like it or not it's something that's "part of me" now. The word itself seems to be a highly efficient sympathy generator, though I try not to abuse it...

Why am I here?

I was hoping you could tell me that. I have no idea why I have a website, a blog, an "About Me" page. Maybe it helps me to organize my thoughts. Maybe it makes a permanent record of stuff-I-said-I-would-do-but-never-did. Maybe people actually care what I think.

Wait, scratch that last one.

I'm on the Interblag because it's there and everybody else seems to be. Nothing more profound than that. Really.

Geek

...is our word, and we want it back. Same goes for "hacker", but let's not get too bothered about words.

I don't know why, but for as long as I can remember I've been pretty technically-minded. There's just a certain way that some things immediately make sense to me. I realise I'm not ancient, but I like to think having used a BBC Micro and an IBM PC (yes, with a Model M) makes me pretty old by today's standards. That, and I don't mind having missed out on punched cards...

I've coded lots of stuff, but the languages I keep coming back to are PHP and JavaScript.

Which brings us on to Mozilla. I first used Firebird 0.6.1 in 2003, and liked it straight away. Whilst I'm not a major contributor to mozilla.org, I do test releases, file bugs, and hang around on IRC. I also contribute the odd patch to ChatZilla, a Mozilla-based IRC client.

With a capital H

tundraH, my online nick in various places, doesn't really have much logic behind it - I picked it fairly randomly one night whilst playing Worms 2 online. It happens to be Hardnut backwards, but that's really not part of the meaning anymore. It shortens to tH when I'm feeling lazy (again, most of the time).

Generally it's pronounced as "tundra" with a silent H, or simply "tee-haich", though if I'm feeling irritating the official pronounciation is to make a noise like you're clearing your throat when you get to the H.

Where now?

I've also no idea (this is a theme, isn't it?) what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I'm just not thinking that far ahead. "One day at a time" would be an exaggeration, but I guess if I can survive the next month or two with minimum stress I can think about doing something useful after that...

Changing the world would be nice, but if the world changes me first then that's cool too.