To add to what I said last year, this post is actually the eleventh time I’ve celebrated my continued survival for another year.1 Yep, it’s January 30th, the anniversary of the last Beatles gig, Hitler’s investiture as Chancellor of Germany, the naming of San Francisco, the involuntary decapitation of Charles the First, and… me being born.
Choose for yourself which is the most auspicious.
Apparently the number of my years this year was sacred to the Norse; it shows up a lot in their mythology, and the Hardrada clan crest had this many ravens and arrows on it. Which is pretty cool. The Langridge crest only has six black rectangles on it, although I only know this from deeply suspect internet genealogy sites, all of whom seem to be working off the same deeply suspect database designed to sell PDFs to hopeful Americans. Still, the family motto is medio tutissimus ibis, which means “you will go most safely in a middle course”. Since the middle course is the main meal, rather than starter or dessert, I’m happy with that. I’ve safely consumed a large number of dinners; it’s nice to know that I’m endorsed in doing so in Latin.
This year’s number is also a pretty common gun calibre2, which is ironic considering that today will also see the release of the next episode of Bad Voltage, a podcast containing more than your daily recommended dose of me, Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Bryan Lunduke, and which in this episode has a discussion about guns and whether they are a good idea. As a full-time professional resident of England, I think this: they are not a good idea. My co-presenters disagree, wrongly.
Still, it’s been an interesting year, this one. Left Canonical, gone into business for myself as Kryogenix Consulting3 and thus far been reasonably successful, and I’ve just bought a new computer and am waiting impatiently for it to be delivered, about ten days from now. I think that’s an adequate birthday present to myself, yes it is, especially since I also threw in a monstrous 29” 2560x1440 monitor. Ho, yus! I shall have more resolution than five New Year’s parties.
One for the maths junkies: take the sum of the squares of the first three primes. That’s how old I am in years.4
Things seem to be hotting up here in 2014. I might even be moving house soon (what?!?). It’s still a fun time to be alive. Happy birthday to me.
- I did em-a…/a-/em there. Should the em be inside the a? I am never sure ↩
- not Dirty Harry’s one, though. I am not that old. Yet. ↩
- Retain my services! For consultancy and custom development on Ubuntu and the web and mobile web. See kryogenix.org ↩
- remember: 1 is not prime. This is by definition, in order that the decomposition of a number into prime factors is unique. Otherwise the prime decomposition of, say, 21 might be 7×3 or 7×3×1 or 7×3×1×1 and imagine what that would do to the RSA algorithm, eh? ↩
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