IMPORTANT: Some people may be *falsely* claiming my website, and my pictures, are their website and pictures. If you speak to me online, I will be using one of the following names: xmoogle, or marianne (although an imposter might try to use one of those names, too). If you are at all suspicious, then use my msn, yahoo, or aol messanger details, as seen on my contact page, and ask me on messenger if the person you're speaking to is really me or not.
The picture on the left is me at 19, the right is me at 21, I really need newer pics! Click to view them larger.
My name's Marianne, I'm 23, English, 6 foot 2 (188cm) tall, I'm a science and computer geek, been programming since I was 8 years old... I use Unixes instead of Windows, my desktop runs on Debian GNU/Linux sid quite happily, I have used FreeBSD on my desktop for quite some time too and I'd probably use it or OpenBSD (which ran on my PDA for a while) for servers. I have a spiritual side which I tend to describe as "paganish", I'm often thinking about philosophical type things, I really love music, having a very eclectic taste ranging from 1920s music onwards, I also create music occasionally... I have a laser hobby, having lasers that can light cigarettes or look like a giant lightsaber in the sky at night is fun! I run a chatroom for other laser geeks too, and I love learning new things, I'm always teaching myself stuff. I'm INFP on a Meyer-Briggs personality test, although bordering on INTP, I have mild Asperger's syndrome, a high functioning form of autism, which I don't view entirely as a disability - it has it's positive side as well, I'm pretty sure it's contributed to having an IQ of 136 and my love of learning in general, I'm short sighted in my left eye and partially deaf in my left ear (my left side gets all the bad luck!), I don't seem to have the empathy problems that some people with autism have and am often described as very caring, though from what I've seen most high functioning autistic girls don't have the empathy problem so I'm not really unusual in that respect. I have a phobia of cathode ray tubes after being almost electrocuted when I was 11 or 12, and a phobia of wasps simply because they are evil little things.
I have... political views that probably border on communist but in a very democratic and freedom orientated way - I would like to see governments tax richer citizens a bit more, and use the money for the public good, I'd like to see the government do more to help disabled people (like me) go into work in a field they could handle and be self sufficient without demanding they do what they're not capable of, I'd also like a few more restrictions on business, and perhaps tax incentives for businesses to do things that benefit the public as a whole, I think publically owned industries *can* be a good thing if done right, can keep the cost of living down, and I think we should have more rights, recent world events have seemed to give governments the excuse to restrict our rights and I don't think that's at all a good thing. Terrorism still happens while the rest of us have to worry about being spied on and treated as potential criminals by default.
Mentioning being treated as potential criminals by default, I strongly oppose the way the corporate side of the music and film industries have been behaving lately. The RIAA continues to sue everyone in sight, often even in cases where the lawyers know that in truth the defendants are innocent, trying to bully witnesses into lieing, the companies get far more money than the actual musicians for music the musicians made, and we have "Digital Rights Management" and other crap pushed on us. If I buy a CD, it had better be an actual Red Book standard CD, I will not buy those "Copy Protected" discs. All my music is ripped to Ogg Vorbis (something similar to mp3s) from the CDs I buy, this protects the original discs from scratches as they're hardly used and extends their lifetime, it's also a lot more convenient to use than changing discs for every different album I want to listen to. However, copy protected discs (which aren't even technically a CD as they deviate from the standard) are designed to prevent exactly this, in case those mp3 or vorbis files are shared, even though independant studies have proved that file sharing *increases* CD sales - most people who download "pirated" music do so to try out an artist or album before they buy, and are able to discover new artists who they may never have even heard of before.
I'm also disgusted with the way Internet Radio is being treated by these same companies in the U.S. - despite the fact that these internet radio stations *also* introduce people to new music, the company authorised to collect payments on behalf of musicians wants to increase the licensing fees to a level that would put most stations out of business, would be retroactive and come into millions of dollars for some stations, and even collects "on behalf" of musicians who aren't signed up with them (and need to pay them a fee to join and collect their royalties). These charges would be vastly higher than what normal radio stations pay. The musicians get valuable exposure from internet radio, they (at least most) don't want this. The stations themselves often are only broadcasting for the love of (often non-mainstream) music, and they don't want this either. Only the greedy money grabbing executives, and those musicians they've conned into thinking they're working in their best interests, want this.
There's also some more stuff to say about me, which needs it's own page. Follow this link to read it.
marianne's space (xmoogle.org) and all of its contents (unless otherwise stated) are ©2007 by Marianne Ibbotson. Nothing from this website may be published on other websites or reproduced in other media without my explicit permission, again, unless otherwise stated or allowed by the licenses of individual files.