Photo by Carina

I want to visit the stars, change the world, do something - just so long as I can get off of this planet...

Welcome to my vanity domain. I am currently porting all the interesting technical stuff over to Open Research. When that's done, I'll come back and write a much simpler introduction to me than the old one.

In the meantime, here are some projects I'm involved with:

For a living, I'm available for hire to do amazing technical things with computers, under the auspices of Snell Systems. In my remaining spare time, I pursue my own projects (most of which I am now releasing source for as Kitten Technologies, and experiment with metalwork when the weather's good.

My wife Sarah and I share a blog, www.snell-pym.org.uk, so our mutual friends can keep track of us. However, I've been putting rather a lot of technical ramblings up there, so I've divided it into categories. For stuff purely to do with me, visit http://snell-pym.org.uk/categories/alaric/; for stuff relating purely to our mutual affairs, instead see http://snell-pym.org.uk/categories/the-family/.

You can find more about me by exploring my FOAF.

My Amazon wishlist contains A tiny subset of the things I want

One day I'd like to:

Go rock climbing frequently.
Build a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, a Tesla coil, a compulsator-powered railgun, and an Explosively pumped flux compression generator, amongst other things.
Implement all of Open Research and ARGON.
Build a wearable computer.
Master metalcasting, blacksmithing, and machining.
Write lots of technical books.
Invest in the stock markets and all that.
Open a Swiss bank account.
Be a gentleman scientist, spending all my time doing bizarre and eccentric research out of pure curiousity.
Establish a habitable colony offworld.

Here's my geek code:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/CM/E/S/TW/O d+(-)>x s+: a- C++++$ UB++++$ P- L- E$ W++$ N+ w>--- 
PS+() PE Y+(++) PGP+ t 5+ X R+++>$ tv-- b+++ DI++$ D++ 
G e++ h--- r+++ y+>++++ 
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Click here for a decoding

Here's my OmniCode, too:

---------------------- OmniCode 0.1.6 -----------------------
sxy cm180 kg70 skb86435 ha382720 ey292a1f es#.{L} sp= Ag1979 rl? LAEN Crc(5)
anE hdd Lo51,48N-2,12W ZoA RlM Kd0y1x PeC.black&C.black_and_white&C.black_and_white MBINTJ FHS IN12 Edc
AdO.Learning PrToo_many_to_list(8)^(9).See_'addictions'_section. MvD.Van.Ford_Transit
----------- Omnicode http://www.gadgeteer.net/omnicode/ -----------

Click here to decode it.

Lastly, I of course have a PGP key. My key ID is 7371086A, my fingerprint is 306D A79D 37DE 29DE 1781 AA59 460C FF58 7371 086A, and my public key can be found on subkeys.pgp.net.

I'm a proponent of the Web of Trust model - I will happily sign keys. Show me a government photo ID and I'll use caff to sign your key at cert level 2, or level 3 if I know you personally anyway. Give me reasonable evidence of your ownership of a pseudonym and I'll sign that too. Since I'm also into RDF, as well as sending you signatures by email using caff, I'll also publish my assertion about the mapping between your name and your key in my signed FOAF file (linked above); if you receive the signature caff sends you and I notice it's been uploaded to the keyservers, or I have other reason to trust your email address is yours, I'll add an mbox:sha1sum statement to my RDF on you, thus publishing the same statement in RDF.

There's a detached signature for this page.