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[ewx]

Questions from ptc24:

1) So what's the story behind you being a duck?

It goes back to a bunch of AFPers on an irc channel discovering a web implementation of Megahal. We started playing with it and being amused the results (since what one person typed influenced the responses seen by others). At some point I realized that people were going to start typing their names into it, and so I entered "Adrian is a monkey" - at precisely the right moment, it turned out.

Anyway the details get a bit hazy here but it wasn't long before, following suitable provocation, Megahal concluded that "LNR is a babe. RJK is a duck". And it's been that way ever since l-)

2) You have the option to pass a note to your former self (at any age), ten words maximum. Would you do it, and what would the message say?

I'd be half-tempted to tell my self of early 2001 "apply to nCipher, not Zeus", given the way things turned out. OTOH I did enjoy my time at Zeus so I think I'd leave that one as they are. And really any bit of advice could at best make a random change that might or might not improve matters overall - in the end, I think it'd be best to leave well alone.

3) Supposing you were living in a country with a rigid caste/class system that restricted you to working class occupations. What would you do for a living?

I think I'd go for being a shop assistant in a bookshop (and read revolutionary texts in my lunchbreak, assuming they hadn't all been suppressed).

4) Has a work of fiction (not necessarily a book, maybe a film or even a painting or a song, so long as it's something 'made up') ever signifcantly changed your worldview, or the way you live your life?

I've sometimes thought that Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance influenced my approach to problem-solving, but it's so longer since I read it that I no longer quite trust my memory. Once More With Feeling (Coren/Skelton, not the Buffy episode) I read at an interesting time but I'm not sure how things are going to play out there so "maybe that one, ask again in a year".

5) You're in one of those films where everyone's really a computer simulation/a ghost/being replaced by robot replicas/secretly mind contolled by aliens/etc.. Would you be one of the first to notice, or one of the last to believe it (assuming you're not one of the early victims).

It depends how good the simalcra were obviously but I think I'd have a good chance of noticing that something funny was going on reasonably early. That could just be a personal conceit though. Whether I'd notice I was in a film, though...

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Whether I'd notice I was in a film, though...

The film crew might give it away.