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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

People pay me to design and organise large-scale technical infrastructure. That normally involves things like supercomputing facilities, research centres, and data centres for banks. I trained as a cognitive scientist, so what I do has very little to do with what I was trained to do.

In my spare time I tend to wander off into the middle of nowhere, or go up the side of a mountain. I prefer my vacations cold, below -25°C is best. My house has four bass guitars, a mandolin and lots of amplifiers and speakers.

I write a lot of things that nobody ever gets to read and paint things that nobody ever gets to see, generally oil on canvas.

Occasionally I'll write or say something a little bit outrageous for the joy of the ensuing argument.

Snarfodox is a contraction and rearrangement of Snarf and Paradox. A paradox frequently points towards a boundary condition or a limit, or self reference. Boundaries are interesting things in complexity theory. Self reference, particularly strange loops, can lead to some beautiful, oddly arranged hyperspaces. The 'o' is there because I'm using a QWERTY keyboard and I wanted an 'o' rather than an 'a' in the word to increase the speed with which I can type it. Like every other name it made sense at the time.