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Facebook
has a page for me.
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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.
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Andreas Kacofegitis was my ex-flatmate when I used to live in 29 Tika Street, Riccarton, Christchurch.
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Timothy
Moss is my ex-neighbour from when I used to live at 511
Manchester Street in Christchurch.
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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.
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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.
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Tim Sturge is
another of my classmates from 1992-1994 while I was at university
studying mathematics.
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Frank Pearson (who died in
2003 at the early age of 63) was my uncle (father’s older
brother) in San Francisco.
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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.
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Albert Einstein
who 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.
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Isaac Newton
who 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.
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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 populariesed Black music:
‘‘ Allan [Freed] freed the waves as much as Lincoln freed the slaves.
’’
Quotes attributed to him 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 tall as when
he stoops down to help a child ’’.
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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.
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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.
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Mahatma
Gandhi was a charismatic leader of India
whose views on passive resistance influenced such luminaries
as Nelson Mandela.
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Charles Darwin
who excelled in his arguments for the theory of evolution via natural
selection and sexual selection.
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Richard
Dawkins who in his book The Selfish
Gene 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.
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Linus
Torvalds for inventing the Linux operating
system.
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Barak
Obama was the 44th President of the
United States of America.
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Bill
Clinton was the 42nd President of the
United States of America.
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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
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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James
Gosling for creating
the Java
programming language,
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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).
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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.
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Tim
Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide
Web.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kim Stolz from
America’s Next Top Model. Why
is that the most attractive women are lesbians? (This is just my
opinion of course!) You can find pictures of her using
Google Image Search.
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