This site is run by me, Tom Barnes-Lawrence, AKA Tomble. To avoid possible confusion, I put up this page, as I found out a few months back that there is at least one other person in the world calling himself Tomble. If you thought you knew whose site this was and are suddenly uncertain, that page would obviously be a good thing to read...

Hmm, me. What would you want to know? Hmm indeed! OK, I'm a twenty-something English Linux nerd. Currently unemployed, and looking to find a skill I have that I could make a living from (and would actually be willing to- I realised at university that for the most part, working in computing was something I really didn't want to do).

I like doing creative stuff, like programming, playing bass guitar (I hope to take up a further instrument when I can afford to), drawing, cooking (pretty basic things, but I still enjoy it), bonsai, etc etc. Some of my creations (like my software) you can find on this site. Others (like my food) obviously you can't (pasta doesn't fit through the wires well enough to get onto the internet).

I have been known to frequent various other sites, other than my own. For example:

• Slashdot
• The Linux Game Tome
• E2
• Freshmeat.net

And various others in which I'm not very high profile (not that I'm any sort of high profile user at Slashdot) . You may have encountered me on the odd mailing list too. Hello!

There's also the old site, which as I've explained, I can no longer update. There's nothing of interest there, and I'd quite like to take it down, frankly.

As I don't fancy getting much more spam than I already get, I'm not putting a direct link to my email address; those just play into the hands of address harvesting programs (in fact, I think many of them collect anything that even looks like an email address, even if it isn't a proper link.

Instead, you get to work it out from oh-so-simple clues - just enough to prevent automated address collection. My main email address is with the email provider company Usermail. Accordingly, the domain of my email account is "usermail.com" - what a suprise. The username of my account is the same as my usual nickname, Tomble.

See? That wasn't difficult, was it? Oh, I suppose that's too technical for some. That'd be a problem...

The thing is,
once I write it straight down on
my site, it can
be
leeched off it by the programs
every spammer
@*$#?%
uses to get addresses for
spamming, so I would get
even more than I get
right now.
mind you, I must
admit that
i don't actually get hundreds of spams
like some people do
... but perhaps that's because of my tin-foil hat!!
christ, how much more
onerous can you lot make this for
me? If you still can't work it out now, TOUGH.

I also used to have the email account "the_real_tomble@hotmail.com", but chose to get my current email account as Hotmail suck, they delete your email after a while if your inbox gets too full, but you can't effectively move your email off their servers (except by doing things like forwarding the emails to another account) to make space, meaning that unless you muck about a lot, you have to lose your old emails. On top of that, near the end, my hotmail account was getting swamped by numerous spams every day, which got pretty overwhelming when I only logged into it every week or so (after I'd got the new account). But eventually I was annoyed to find when I logged in, that I'd taken too long since the previous time. They closed my account and deleted the whole contents of my inbox, telling me that I could get the account back if I registered again. Hey, I love repeatedly registering to these things! Get stuffed, Microsoft. (NOTE: this little rant soon to go to the Rantage section)

So, I don't know if anybody else would be able to reregister my hotmail account or not, but either way, if you have the hotmail address in your address books, change it!!!. If I ever choose to revive the old hotmail account, I'll make note of it here.

Also note that I didn't have "tomble@hotmail.com", that was already taken. So if you have that in your address books, it'd be somebody else's instead, and is probably still valid for them.

Now, for the sake of spam harvesters, here's some more email addresses that you wouldn't want to use. And whilst we're on the topic of spam and email addresses, I should point out some facts about tracing spammers that many people are depressingly ignorant of (now moved into the Rantage section).