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Friends and family

		Facebook has a page for me.
		Simone Pearson is my sister.
		Sean Tonner is my nephew (my sister’s son).
		Joan Pearson is my mother.
		Alan Pearson (who died in 2003 at the age of 82) was my father.
		Roger Burgess is my best friend and was one of my Stage 1 computer science students from 1998. Now he works in Christchurch as an I.T. expert for Nurse Maude.
		Andreas Kacofegitis was my ex-flatmate when I used to live in 29 Tika Street, Riccarton, Christchurch.
		Timothy Moss is my ex-neighbour from when I used to live at 511 Manchester Street in Christchurch.
		Graham Dockrill was another one of my Stage 1 computer science students in 1998. Now he runs a successful Web design company called Hairy Lemon .
		Diane Maclagan was my classmate during the years of 1992-1994 while I was at university studying mathematics. She was always getting better grades than me, which was very damaging to my ego, and to top it all off she is now at the University of Warwick . The best that I can do to try to beat her brilliance is for me to try to make my Website a lot cooler than hers. I hope that I have succeeded! You can find pictures of her using Google Image Search. She is honest, diligent, knowledgeable, and keen to develop her skills.
		Tim Sturge is another of my classmates from 1992-1994 while I was at university studying mathematics.
		Frank Pearson (who died in 2003 at the early age of 63) was my uncle (father’s older brother) in San Francisco.
		Chris Wright was an old school mate from the years 1986-1991 at Christchurch Boys’ High School . Although he died in 2015 at the early age of 41 he was a grand-master chess player, one of only three in New Zealand! He worked as a professional chess tutor tutoring young players for the junior world championships. If you are another graduate of the class of 1991 then I would like to get in touch with you.

Favourite people

		The Warriors are New Zealand’s rugby league team. The term ‘‘warriors’’ comes from the fact that the New Zealand Maori race were a bunch of warriors. The term ‘‘Once Were Warriors’’ comes from a book by the same name by Alan Duff . The warriors have their tongues poked out as a threatening gesture. This look was borrowed by Albert Einstein (see the next entry) although Einstein didn’t use it as a threatening gesture. I have borrowed the gesture for my website.
		Albert Einstein Esoteric Information Warning: He discovered the special theory of relativity (in 1905) and the general theory of relativity (in 1915) and also the photo-electric effect (in 1922) for which he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics. Here are two quotes from Einstein: ‘‘Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity [or H.S. for short].’’ ‘‘I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’’
		Sir Isaac Newton Esoteric Information Warning: He discovered the inverse square law of gravitational attraction and who proved that Kepler’s equal areas in equal times was a consequence of the inverse square law of gravitational attraction. He also proved under the inverse square law of gravitational attractions the orbits of planets form conic sections: circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas.
		Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States of America. He led the United States through its civil war and freed the slaves and was asassinated at his moment of greatest triumph: the preservation of the Union following his victory over the Confederate States of America. Here is a quote from the Rap group Public Enemy about Alan Freed a white D.J. who popularised Black music: ‘‘ Allan [Freed] freed the waves as much as Lincoln freed the slaves. ’’ Notable quotes attributed to Lincoln include: ‘‘ You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can not fool all of the people all of the time ’’ and ‘‘ No man stands so [metaphorically] tall as when he stoops down to help a child ’’. Check out the following quote attributed to Lincoln: Voice of a certain Englishman Mr. Ethan Allen: ‘‘ What about that picture of George Washington over the toilet seat in my house: Isn’t that a fitting tribute for a likeness of him to be placed there? ’’ Lincoln’s answer to the question: ‘‘ Yes where it will do good service. The world knows nothing will make an Englishman shit quicker than the sight of [General] George Washington!!!.’’
		Bjarne Stroustrup . Creator of the C++ programming language. My feeling about C++ is that if it hadn’t been invented yet and I was as intelligent as Bjarne Stroustrup, then I would have invented it! Esoteric Information Warning: I believe that Stroustrup got his clever and useful idea of C++ classes and privacy from the Simula language .
		Richard Stallman . Founder of the Free Software Foundation , the GNU Project and principal author of (among other things) the GNU Emacs text editor, the G.C.C. compiler and the GNU Debugger , which ultimately led to the GNU/Linux operating system. He’s also quite a character as I found out when I went to one of his lectures. Esoteric Information Warning: I believe that Stallman wrote Emacs by copying the existing Lisp systems at M.I.T. where he worked, and wrote G.C.C. using the design decision of having no calls to the free C library function so that it ran with a bigger memory footprint than other compilers but vastly simplified the design of the program. This worked because the memory requirements of the program are proportional to the size of the source file being compiled.
		Donald E. Knuth . Esoteric Information Warning: Knuth created the TeX programming language which put the best font foundaries in the hands of everyday people. His program also excels in the typesetting of mathematics. He also wrote an unfinished series of books entitled The Art of Computer Programming.
		Sir Charles Darwin who excelled in his arguments for the theory of evolution via natural selection and sexual selection. Check out the following quote attributed to a certain Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Mr. Thomas Huxley from the 1860 Oxford Union Debate in England: Voice of Mr. Wilberforce: Which side on your family tree is the monkey related to you: your grandfather’s side or your grandmother’s side? Voice of Mr. Huxley. I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for my ancestor but I woould be ashamed to be connected with a[n intelligent] man who uses his great gifts to obscure the truth.
		Richard Dawkins who in his book The Selfish Gene (first published in 1976) updated Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution by natural selection and sexual selection to include such developments as the discovery of D.N.A. in 1968. In his book he expands upon the arguments for evolution and shifted emphasis from creatures of the same species competing with another to that of selfish genes selfishly spreading themselves in the gene pool.
		Mahatma Gandhi was a charismatic leader of India whose views on passive resistance influenced such luminaries as Nelson Mandela.
		Sir Winston Churchill was a charismatic leader of England during the Second World War. Here are a couple of quotes from him. Following the defeat of France by NAZI Germany Winston remarked: ‘‘We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, We shall never surrender.’’ In anticipation of the Battle of Britain, Winston said: ‘‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their Finest Hour.’’’
		Linus Torvalds for inventing the Linux operating system.
		John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States of America. A famous quote about the Cuban Missile Crisis attributed to him was: ‘‘We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.’’’ and the single line from his Inaugural Address (in 1961): ‘‘My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you —- ask what you can do for your country.’’ This call to public service resonated with what J.F.K. called ‘‘ the new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage .’’
		Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States of America.
		Bill Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States of America.
		David Lange was the 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand. David Lange took part in the 1985 Oxford Union Debate in England on the proposition that ‘nuclear weapons are morally indefensible’. His opponent was the American evangelist Jerry Falwell. New Zealand’s opposition to visits by nuclear-armed and -powered ships was criticised by the United States, the UK and Australia, who feared it might influence other countries. Lange denied that was the intention, but the Oxford Union debate undoubtedly focused international attention on New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance. As this clip illustrates, he used the occasion to demonstrate his quick wit on the subject: ‘‘I’m going to give it to you if you hold your breath just for a moment… I can smell the uranium on it as you lean forward!’’ Lange also championed the cause against nuclear weapons by making New Zealand a nuclear free zone.
		Jacinda Ardern was the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2019 - 2023. She was a charismatic leader who featured twice on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert .
		John McCarthy (who died in 2001, aged 84) for inventing the Lisp programming language, and founder of the A.I. labs at M.I.T. and Stanford. Click on the following link for information about Common Lisp including a video interview with John McCarthy. This link was provided to me by Bryan Innes (Email: bryan  <dot> innes  <at> wiht-email  <dot> com).
		Shawn Hargreaves for producing the multi-platform games library Allegro . I wrote my first P.C. game called Dangerous Driving under Allegro and I have used it to write six computer games.
		Eli Zaretskii (eliz  <at> gnu  <dot> org) for helping me overcome my install problems and learning difficulties with GNU Emacs (via the Internet newsgroup gnu.emacs.help).
		DJ Delorie for producing a GNU system inside MS-DOS called DJ.G.P.P., short for DJ’s GNU Programming Platform. His first name is not an acronym but is literally DJ which causes much confusion on the part of banks who insist that DJ stands for something. I have adapted his motto: ‘‘ Making it harder to hate computers ’’ to ‘‘ New Zealanders making it harder to hate computers’’. for my Website.
		Frank Tipler for writing a book explaining how religion will eventually become a branch of science. I have written an article about his book on my Website.
		James Gosling for creating the Java programming language ,
		Nelson Mandela (who died in 2013, aged 95) for his ability to unite people for a single cause, namely equality for all, regardless of skin colour. Because of his achievements he is often referred to as ‘‘ The Father of the Nation’’ (namely South Africa).
		Bill Gates who along with others founded Microsoft . Because of his tremendous success in business we all love to hate him, but it is hard to deny his intelligence that caused him to succeed so dramatically. For example, when he first wrote the Microsoft Windows operating system it ran like a dog at the time but he foresaw that computers would rapidly get a lot faster than they were at the time, rendering Windows usable. He also recognised that people tend to favour standardisation in the field of computers, and foresaw that his operating systems would become the default standard. Despite Microsoft’s present domination of the computer software market I believe that a free operating system (such as GNU/Linux ) will ultimately triumph.
		Sir Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web.
		Sir Edmund Hillary (who died in 2008, aged 88) is probably New Zealand’s most famous New Zealander. He was the first person to conquer the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest. Then he re-payed his debt to the local Nepalese people by building schools and hospitals for them. Although he is now dead, Hillary is the first living New Zealander to appear on our national currency. It must have been believed that the probability of Hillary turning into a child molester was low enough to risk placing his face on every $5 of New Zealand currency.
		Sir Peter Jackson who put New Zealand on the map as a place to make high quality high computer graphics content films such as most notably Heavenly Creatures , The Lord of the Rings movies and King Kong . His earlier splatter films (such as Bad Taste and Braindead ) are worth a look too.
		Mike Leigh is one of the world’s greatest living film directors. All of his films are groundbreaking in different ways. Happy-Go-Lucky , Secrets & Lies , Career Girls , and All or Nothing are emotional dramas that are impossible to hate, whereas Vera Drake and Topsy Turvy are compelling period drama, and Naked is dark and shocking, although too dark for most tastes.
		Kim Stolz from America’s Next Top Model . Why is that the most attractive women are lesbians? (This is just my opinion of course!)
		Simone Biles is a gold winning Olympic gymnast. You can view a video of a move named after her.
		Shawn Johnson is an Olympic gold medal winning gymnast for the Balance Beam at the 2008 Beijing Olympics who is particularly gorgeous to look at. You can watch her gold winning performance in the following video .
		Kerri Strug is an Olympic gold medal winning gymnast. She famously did the vault with a strained ankle in the finals of the 1996 Atlanta Gymnastics Olympics. You can watch a video of her performance at that Olympic Games. She also participated in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
		The Wizard of New Zealand is one of Christchurch’s most famous living individuals. His views on women are controversial. When I saw him one day he was talking about a woman who complained about getting bruised fingernails from clawing the eyes out of her husband... to which I replied to him: ‘‘You’re trying to become a woman in the 1950’s sense of the term’’. He then quickly changed the subject to something less controversial: the history of religion. And that was when I left him.
		Dennis Conner , an American who New Zealanders (A.K.A. Kiwis) love to hate said the following to David Barnes, New Zealand's skipper at the 1989 post match press conference following the unsuccessful Kiwi challenger to Dennis Conner. I was sailing a cat[amaran], somebody else was sailing a dog... <expletives deleted> you're a loser, get off the stage. With the arrival of TV3 in 1989, TVNZ faced competition in the presentation of news. Their response was to introduce a half-hour current-affairs show fronted by Paul Holmes. Holmes got off to a spectacular start with an interview with America's Cup skipper Dennis Conner. Conner had won back the cup for the San Diego Yacht Club in Fremantle in 1987, and the following year Michael Fay put in a New Zealand challenge with a big boat. Conner responded by racing in a catamaran, which many Kiwis felt was unfair. Holmes challenged Conner about his alleged ‘cheating’, and asked Dennis Conner for an apology for his "You're a loser, get off the stage" offensive remarks to David Barnes resulting in the interviewee storming out of the studio. Watch an excerpt from that first episode, which established the show's reputation.

Disclaimer: The above list is not meant to be< exhaustive!

Useful Websites

• Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. Has over 5,040,833 articles in English and almost all written to a very high standard of scholarship. I use Wikipedia almost exclusively for the links on the The Greatest Artists of all Time page of my Website. You can view the pages I have written for Wikipedia. I have also written an article about Wikipedia versus Britannica. This Website heavily borrows from the layout style of Wikipedia, especially the (lack of) capitalisation of titles/headings and the (lack of) italicisation of certain items.

• The site wiktionary.org is Wikipedia’s version of a wiki-based Open Content dictionary.

• TradeMe is the definitive site for buying and selling goods within New Zealand. Be warned however that this Website is highly addictive.

Favourite T.V. programs

• The Simpsons . Favourite ten episodes listed roughly in order of decreasing merit:
  
  

  Rank	Episode	Season	Code	Synopsis
  1.	‘‘ You Only Move Twice ’’	8 / 26	3F23	Homer is hired for a new job on the basis of his supposed expertise.
  2.	‘‘ King Size Homer ’’	7 / 26	3F05	Homer purposely gains 61 pounds in weight in order to qualify for a disability allowance.
  3.	‘‘ Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish ’’	2 / 26	7F01	Mr Burns runs for mayor.
  4.	‘‘ The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show ’’	8 / 26	4F12	A new character is added to the Itchy & Scratchy Show
  5.	‘‘ Simpson and Delilah ’’	2 / 26	7F02	Homer finds a miracle treatment for baldness.
  6.	‘‘ Last Exit to Springfield ’’	4 / 26	9F15	Homer becomes a union representative.
  7.	‘‘ Brush with Greatness ’’	2 / 26	7F18	The Simpsons visit Mount Splashmore and Marge paints Mr. Burns.
  8.	‘‘ Some Enchanted Evening ’’	1 / 26	7G01	The Simpsons face a babysitter with sinister intentions.
  9.	‘‘ Marge vs. the Monorail ’’	4 / 26	9F10	Springfield invests in a monorail.
  10.	‘‘ Homer’s Enemy ’’	8 / 26	4F19	Homer meets his nemesis with hilarious consequences.

  
  

  I have found the List of The Simpsons Episodes helpful to compose the above list. In my opinion the earliest episodes are better than the more recent ones, due to an apparent lack of good new ideas in the more recent episodes.

• Seinfeld is famously known as a show about nothing, or more accurately: pondering over the minutiae of everyday social interactions.

• Whose Line Is It Anyway? The older British version has a wider range of jokes and comedians than the newer American version.

• Fawlty Towers is the greatest British comedy series of all time and it seems like a travesty that they only produced twelve episodes. It tells a story of a long-suffering man Basil Fawlty whose spirit is regularly crushed by his domineering wife Sybil. He is constantly entering into hilarious misunderstandings with his waiter Manuel whose command of the English language is frustratingly poor. Basil is also rude, sarcastic and cruel so that the audience is not disappointed when he gets his just desserts. Their funniest episode is called ‘‘Communication Problems’’ and is about how Basil secretly makes a winning bet on a horse but is foiled by a near-deaf woman who refuses to turn her hearing aid on because as she says: ‘‘It runs the batteries down!’’.
  
  The concept of a flawed character ultimately receiving negative consequences applies to most artistic works. The most beautiful and morally superior characters in an artistic work almost always never receive negative ultimate consequences while the uglier and morally inferior characters almost always do receive negative ultimate consequences. Most artists seem to be aware (either consciously or unconsciously) of this principle. The purpose of this principle is to increase our enjoyment of a work of art. Our emotional investment in the beautiful and morally superior characters is always rewarded with dividends and our emotional divestment (hatred) of uglier and morally inferior characters is also rewarded with dividends of the opposite kind. An example of this principle in action is horror movies where the people who have extramarital sex are almost always killed while the virgins almost always survive to the end of the story.

Free computer programs that I find useful

Ubuntu is a distro for GNU/Linux that I use for my programming work.

GNU Emacs is a text editor and a religion in itself that is available on almost all platforms. Here is a list of its features, listed in order of decreasing coolness: Support for editing programs in virtually any language. I use Emacs to edit the following file types (in alphabetical order): Bash Script , binary , Blitz BASIC , C , C++ , C.S.S. , Emacs Lisp , H.T.M.L. , Java , JavaScript , LaTeX , m4 , Makefile , MyS.Q.L. , P.H.P. , and Pov-Ray . If Emacs does not support your favourite language, it can be easily made so that it does. Built-in Emacs Lisp programming language for implementing virtually any conceivable feature. You can read an article about some of the features that I have added to Emacs . Here is why Emacs is so good: Customisable Syntax Highlighting C/C++ keywords, comments and strings in their own colours. C/C++ global variables in a different colour from local variables (a feature invented by me). The downside of this feature is that global variables must be prefixed by the word global_. Using too many global variables can be a source of bugs in a program, so it is useful to have syntax highlighting of their use. The dabbrev feature (see below) helps to mitigate the cost in terms of extra typing from longer variable names. C/C++ Super Comments (a feature invented by me). Super Comments start with /// and end with the end of line. Super Comments are highlighted brighter then normal C/C++ comments and are analogous to Java’s /** ... */ comments in that they contain text for the programmer to read rather that just commented-out code. C++ Allegro graphics library function calls in their own colour (a feature invented by me). Whatever libraries you use, it is possible to set up syntax highlighting for those libraries. You can view a screen-shot of Emacs’ syntax highlighting using my personal choices of colours. Note: keywords are in bold black, function definition names are in bold black foreground with yellow background, types are in blue bold, comments are in dark green italics unbold, super comments are in red italics bold, strings are in black foreground with a blue background, variable definitions are in blue unbold, class properties are in orange bold and global variables are in green bold. I am using a variant of the much maligned Hungarian notation so that Emacs is able to highlight global variables and class properties in different colours. Without Hungarian notation such as prop_* for properties and global_* for global variables it would be impossible to do the syntax highlighting so that is why I use it. Integrated make, gdb, grep, dired, info, calendar and eshell etc. means that programmers almost never need to leave Emacs while doing useful work. Dynamic Abbreviations (dabbrev). For example: press z, and then repeatedly press Alt-/ to cycle through all words in memory that start with ‘‘z’’. This feature allows you to use long variable names (which are more descriptive than short variable names) without needing to type them in every time you use them. Automatic indentation, so there is no need to waste time aligning code by hand. Unlimited undo/redo. Find matching brackets. Re-definable keys to reduce the risk of developing R.S.I. (Repetitive Strain Injury). For example I have defined all of the function keys F1 - F12 to achieve different commonly-used operations, such as F1 for help, F2 to save all currently edited files, F3 to save and purge all currently edited files, F4 to delete all but one window, F5 to activate cbrow my own C++ class browser, F6 to toggle the value of the variable selective-display for folding and unfolding of buffers, F7 to toggle read-only status, F8 to undo and F9 to compile, F10 to go from *.hts files to *.html files, Shift F10 to go from *.html files back to *.hts files F11 is bound by Ubuntu to toggle maximisation of the current frame, Shift F11 is bound to dmp-complete-file, F12 is bound to eval-last-sexp, Shift F12 is bound to dmp-complete-lisp for Lisp dynamic symbol abbreviations. I have also redefined the command find-file from Control-x Control-f to the shorter Control-f or Control-d because it is used so much.

The downside of Emacs is that it is inevitably weighed down by its many features and can be quite daunting to learn. As a result I would only recommend this program to fellow nerds. The GNU/Linux system which includes such programs as: bash ls mv cp grep find gcc make tar gzip m4 sed, etc. I use Ubuntu GNU/Linux For generating my Website I use m4 and Emacs’ batch mode to generate pages with a wide variety of fonts and colours and hierarchical menus.

		The Mozilla Firefox Web Browser gives me freedom from pop-up windows that plagues the Internet Explorer Web Browser.
The GNU m4 preprocessor which I use for designing all of my Websites. Of its many features, the ones that I use are file inclusion, macros, conditional constructs and shell commands. An example of its use is the navigation aids at the top and bottom of every page in this Website. I have written an article that shows how I use m4 in this Website .

IrfanView is a Windows graphics program. It has a lot of useful features such as cropping, re-sizing, format conversion, batch conversion, gamma correction, image effects, etc. What’s better is that this program works under GNU/Linux using the program Wine.

Goldwave is a Windows sound sample editor program. This program also works under GNU/Linux using the program Wine. Warning: this program is not free but at least it is cheap.

Exact Audio Copy (E.A.C.) and Foobar2000 are a pair of applications that serve as a superior replacement for Windows Media Player for the purposes of (respectively) ripping and playing music files. Foobar2000 is superior to Windows Media Player because you can change the artist name and album name of multiple music files at the same time, whereas with Windows Media Player you need to change them one at a time. Also the random play feature of Foobar2000 also is more random than Windows Media Player’s random play feature. E.A.C. is superior to Windows Media Player because it rips tracks with fewer errors. I have a 1 TB Hard Drive for the purpose of storing my entire CD collection (655 GB *.flac files) so that tracks can be played at random with no repeats for over 5 weeks of continuous playing. This gives better performance than most radio stations and anyhow is better than any radio station because it only plays songs that I like and have chosen to be in the play-list. For those of you who are interested in my stereo, here are my specs: WireWorld U.S.B. cable connecting the computer to the DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter). Naim DAC-V1 DAC and Headphone Amplifier . See the following review about the Naim DAC-V1. Sennheiser HD 800 Headphones . See the following review . This is the best product that Sennheiser make and it is so good that, in conjunction with the Naim DAC and Headphone Amplifier, it makes C.D.’s sound like crap. I need to upgrade my C.D. collection to 24 bit 96 kHz sampling rate files or even better: 24 bit 192 kHz sampling rate files.