I’m unlikely to get a graduation ceremony like last time (on account of social distancing and whatnot), but I get a certificate to acknowledge my most-recent qualification.
Tag: published on gemini
Gratitude
In these challenging times, and especially because my work and social circles have me communicate regularly with people in many different countries and with many different backgrounds, I’m especially grateful for the following:
- My partner, her husband, and I each have jobs that we can do remotely and so we’re not out-of-work during the crisis.
- Our employers are understanding of our need to reduce and adjust our hours to fit around our new lifestyle now that schools and nurseries are (broadly) closed.
- Our kids are healthy and not at significant risk of serious illness.
- We’ve got the means, time, and experience to provide an adequate homeschooling environment for them in the immediate term.
- (Even though we’d hoped to have moved house by now and haven’t, perhaps at least in part because of COVID-19,) we have a place to live that mostly meets our needs.
- We have easy access to a number of supermarkets with different demographics, and even where we’ve been impacted by them we’ve always been able to work-around the where panic-buying-induced shortages have reasonably quickly.
- We’re well-off enough that we were able to buy or order everything we’d need to prepare for lockdown without financial risk.
- Having three adults gives us more hands on deck than most people get for childcare, self-care, etc. (we’re “parenting on easy mode”).
- We live in a country in which the government (eventually) imposed the requisite amount of lockdown necessary to limit the spread of the virus.
- We’ve “only” got the catastrophes of COVID-19 and Brexit to deal with, which is a bearable amount of crisis, unlike my colleague in Zagreb for example.
Whenever you find the current crisis getting you down, stop and think about the things that aren’t-so-bad or are even good. Stopping and expressing your gratitude for them in whatever form works for you is good for your happiness and mental health.
Subscribing to The Far Side (by RSS!)
Update 23 November 2022: This isn’t how I consume The Far Side in my RSS reader any more. There’s an updated guide.
Prior to his retirement in 1995 I managed to amass a collection of almost all of Gary Larson’s The Far Side books as well as a couple of calendars and other thingamabobs. After
24 years of silence I didn’t expect to hear anything more from him and so I was as surprised as most of the Internet was when he re-emerged last year with a brand new on his
first ever website. Woah.
Larson’s hinted that there might be new and original content there someday, but for the time being I’m just loving that I can read The Far Side comments (legitimately) via the Web for the first time! The site’s currently publishing a “Daily Dose” of classic strips, which is awesome. But… I don’t want to have to go to a website to get comics every day. Nor do I want to have to remember which days I’ve caught-up with, yet. That’s a job for computers, right? And it’s a solved problem: RSS (which has been around for almost as long as Larson hasn’t) and similar technologies allow a website to publicise that it’s got updates available in a way that people can “subscribe” to, so I should just use that, right?
Except… the new The Far Side website doesn’t have an RSS feed. Boo! Luckily, I’m not above automating the creation of feeds for websites that I wish had them, even (or perhaps especially) where that involves a little reverse-engineering of online comics. So with a little thanks to my RSS middleware RSSey… I can now read daily The Far Side comics in the way that’s most-convenient to me: right alongside my other subscriptions in my feed reader.
I’m afraid I’m not going to publicly1-share a ready-to-go feed URL for this one, unlike my BBC News Without The Sport feed, because a necessary side-effect of the way it works is that the ads are removed. And if I were to republish a feed containing The Far Side website cartoons but with the ads stripped I’d be guilty of, like, all the ethical and legal faults that Larson was trying to mitigate by putting his new website up in the first place! I love The Far Side and I certainly don’t want to violate its copyright!
But – at least until Larson’s web developer puts up a proper feed (with or without ads) – for those of us who like our comics delivered fresh to us every morning, here’s the source code (as an RSSey feed definition) you could use to run your own personal-use-only “give me The Far Side Daily Dose as an RSS feed” middleware.
Thanks for deciding to join us on the Internet, Gary. I hear it’s going to be a big thing, someday!
Footnotes
1 Friends are welcome to contact me off-blog for an address if they like, if they promise to be nice and ethical about it.
Before You Turn On Two-Factor Authentication
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Many online accounts allow you to supplement your password with a second form of identification, which can prevent some prevalent attacks. The second factors you can use to identify yourself include authenticator apps on your phone, which generate codes that change every 30 seconds, and security keys, small pieces of hardware similar in size and shape to USB drives. Since innovations that can actually improve the security of your online accounts are rare, there has been a great deal of well-deserved enthusiasm for two-factor authentication (as well as for password managers, which make it easy to use a different random password for every one of your online accounts.) These are technologies more people should be using.
However, in trying to persuade users to adopt second factors, advocates sometimes forget to disclose that all security measures have trade-offs . As second factors reduce the risk of some attacks, they also introduce new risks. One risk is that you could be locked out of your account when you lose your second factor, which may be when you need it the most. Another is that if you expect second factors to protect you from those attacks that they can not prevent, you may become more vulnerable to the those attacks.
Before you require a second factor to login to your accounts, you should understand the risks, have a recovery plan for when you lose your second factor(s), and know the tricks attackers may use to defeat two-factor authentication.
…
A well-examined exploration of some of the risks of employing two-factor authentication in your everyday life. I maintain that it’s still highly-worthwhile and everybody should do so, but it’s important that you know what you need to do in the event that you can’t access your two-factor device (and, ideally, have a backup solution in place): personally, I prefer TOTP (i.e. app-based) 2FA and I share my generation keys between my mobile device, my password safe (I’ll write a blog post about why this is controversial but why I think it’s a good idea anyway!), and in a console application I wrote (because selfdogfooding etc.).
Update: Years later, I’ve finally written a blog post about why keeping 2FA generation keys in your password safe is controversial, and why I do it anyway.
Carry Fire
I’ve just listened to Robert Plant’s new album, Carry Fire. It’s pretty good.
A long while after my dad’s death five years ago, I’d meant to write a blog post about the experience of grief in a digital age. As I’ve clearly become increasingly terrible at ever getting draft posts complete, the short of it was this: my dad’s mobile phone was never recovered and soon after its battery went flat any calls to his number would go straight to voicemail. He’d recently switched to a pay-as-you-go phone for his personal mobile, and so the number (and its voicemail) outlived him for many months. I know I’m not the only one that, in those months, called it a few times, just to hear his voice in the outgoing message. I’m fully aware that there are recordings of his voice elsewhere, but I guess there was something ritualistic about “trying to call him”, just as I would have before his accident.
The blog post would have started with this anecdote, perhaps spun out a little better, and then gone on to muse about how we “live on” in our abandoned Inboxes, social media accounts, and other digital footprints in a way we never did before, and what that might mean for the idea of grief in the modern world. (Getting too caught up in thinking about exactly what it does mean is probably why I never finished writing that particular article.) I remember that it took me a year or two until I was able to delete my dad from my phone/email address book, because it like prematurely letting go to do so. See what I mean? New aspects of grief for a new era.
Another thing that I used to get, early on, was that moment of forgetting. I’d read something and I’d think “Gotta tell my dad about that!” And then only a second later remember why I couldn’t! I think that’s a pretty common experience of bereavement: certainly for me at least – I remember distinctly experiencing the same thing after my gran’s death, about 11 years ago. I’m pretty sure it’s been almost a year since I last had such a forgetting moment for my father… until today! Half way into the opening track of Carry Fire, a mellow folk-rocky-sounding piece called The May Queen (clearly a nod to Stairway there), I found myself thinking “my dad’d love this…” and took almost a quarter-second before my brain kicked in and added “…damn; shame he missed out on it, then.”
If you came here for a music review, you’re not going to get one. But if you like some Robert Plant and haven’t heard Carry Fire yet, you might like to. It’s like he set out to make a prog rock album but accidentally smoked too much pot and then tripped over his sitar. And if you knew my dad well enough to agree (or disagree) that he would have dug it, let me know.
Mx
The most recent column in Savage Love had a theme featuring letters on the subject of gender-neutrality and genderfluidity. You’ve probably come across the term “genderqueer” conceptually even if you’re not aware of people within your own life to whom the title might be applied: people who might consider themselves to be of no gender, or of multiple genders, or of variable gender, of a non-binary gender, or trans (gender’s a complex subject, yo!).
For about the last four or five years, I’ve been able to gradually managed to change my honorific title (where one is required) in many places from the traditional and assumed “Mr.” to the gender-neutral “Mx.” Initially, it was only possible to do this where the option was provided to enter a title of one’s choosing – you know: where there’s tickboxes and an “Other:” option – but increasingly, I’ve seen it presented as one of the default options, alongside Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., and the like. As a title, Mx. is gaining traction.
I’m not genderqueer, mind. I’m cisgender and male: a well-understood and popular gender that’s even got a convenient and widely-used word for it: “man”. My use of “Mx.” in a variety of places is based not upon what I consider my gender to be but upon the fact that my gender shouldn’t matter. HMRC, pictured above, is a great example: they only communicate with me by post and by email (so there’s no identification advantage in implying a gender as which I’m likely to be presenting), and what gender I am damn well shouldn’t have any impact on how much tax I pay or how I pay it anyway: it’s redundant information! So why demand I provide a title at all?
I don’t object to being “Mr.”, of course. Just the other day, while placing an order for some Christmas supplies, a butcher in Oxford’s covered market referred to me as “Mr. Q”. Which is absolutely fine, because that’s the title (and gender) by which he’ll identify me when I turn up the week after next to pick up some meat.
I’d prefer not to use an honorific title at all: I fail to see what it adds to my name or my identity to put “Mr.” in it! But where it’s (a) for some-reason required (often because programmers have a blind spot for things like names and titles), and (b) my gender shouldn’t matter, don’t be surprised if I put “Mx.” in your form.
And if after all of that you don’t offer me that option, know that I’m going to pick something stupid just to mess with your data. That’s Wing Commander Dan Q’s promise.
Full Stop
Update: the funeral will take place at 4pm on Friday 2nd March, at Preston Crematorium.
On Sunday, my dad died.
And honestly, I’m not sure what else to say. There’s nothing else left to say. It felt like my tweet – like all tweets – said too little, too. But I didn’t want to keep anybody in the dark about this tragic news, so… well…
As I mentioned in December, my dad had planned a sponsored expedition to the North Pole, this April, in order to raise money for TransAid, a charity about whose work he was passionate. As part of his training, he was up on High Street, a fell in the Lake District, with his friend John. There, he lost his footing and slipped, falling over a 200 foot precipice. He was discovered to be dead when the air ambulance arrived; almost certainly killed pretty much instantaneously by the fall.
Since then, I’ve been in Preston, where my sisters, our mother, my dad’s partner, and our friends have been trying to come to terms with this tragic loss, and to make arrangements for his funeral. We’re keeping busy, which is probably for the best, right now. I’d like to say thank you to everybody who’s sent cards, emails, or text messages: your thoughts and sympathies are really appreciated, and I apologise that there simply hasn’t been time to reply to you all individually.
My dad died doing what he loved: exploring the outdoors, walking, climbing, and pushing his limits, in aid of a worthy cause that meant a lot to him. He was in incredible physical fitness, and I’d always suspected that 15 years from now, with him in his 70s and I in my 40s, he’d still have been able to outpace me on a scramble up Helvellyn’s Striding Ridge.
I’m sad that that’s a theory that I’ll never be able to put to the test. I’m sad that my dad never lived long enough to see if he’d have any grandchildren. I’m sad that the world is so cruel as to deny us all those conversations left unfinished and those mountains left unconquered. I’m even sad that I’ll never again get an out-of-the-blue call from him on some Saturday afternoon because he can’t work out how to use his printer, or fix his Internet connection.
And I still don’t know what to say. So for now, at least, that’s all.
Update: Added photo and funeral info.
I went to an REM concert
Things are crazy busy again. No time to blog properly, so here’s a picture that I scribbled on.
Incidentally, I was actually at the concert where this photo was taken, back in 2005. But that’s not actually me in the corner. I was just inspired to make the joke by this comic.
Roadworthy
This afternoon, I passed my driving test. This was my second attempt, and I pretty much kicked arse, scoring 2 minor faults (one for undue hesitiation as I pulled out from a roadworks stop on the way up Penglais Hill, and the second for insufficient use of mirrors at some point while moving out of the roundabout near Morrisons). So there we have it: I’m legally allowed on the roads.
All of the best drivers pass on their second attempts. Or so my dad tells me. Why yes, he did pass on his second attempt: why do you ask?
I have so many other things I’m overdue to blog about, but that’ll do, for now. Time for a beer.
The Break-Up
Yesterday, Claire and I broke up.
We’ve had several rough months, and several even rougher weeks, and this seemed to be the best solution to a variety of difficulties we’ve faced recently. It’s hard to answer the question as to whether the split could be described as mutual, but it can certainly be described as amicable, if that’s enough. If not, then perhaps it might help to understand that we’re both, little doubt, unhappy, but that it’s better to end things now in a friendly way than, say, in six months time in an unfriendly way.
I’m sure that neither of us want to go in depth into the issues behind this break-up in the public forum, but I’m sure that those of you who are our friends are more than welcome to ask privately, “what happened?” I apologise to everybody for whom this comes as a shock (i.e. most of you, from what I gather).
I’ve no doubt that Claire and I will continue to be close friends and will kick arse in all the fabulous ways that you’re used to, whether in one another’s company or apart. And I expect I speak for both of us when I say that there’s a slap on the wrist waiting for anybody we catch “taking sides”: there are no sides to be taken.
Virgil wrote that omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – but he was wrong. Despite our love for one another, if Claire and I had carried on the way we were, people would have ended up hurt. I’m feeling drained and miserable, but it’ll pass, and all will be well again. For a quarter of my life thus far I’ve been Claire’s, and she’s been mine, and through one another we’ve done so much. For the last seven and a half years I’ve been thankful for the great richness of experience that my relationship with Claire has brought. There will always be a special place in my heart for her.
Thanks for reading. I think I shall go and sit quietly for a while, now.
Edit @ 21:20 01-Nov-2009: Claire has a few things to say, too.
Your Experience May Differ
To: Daniel Hill <dlh9@….>
From: Dan Q <dan@….>
Subject: Aberystwyth University Is Awesome! Warning: Your Experience May Differ.
From: Dan Q <dan@….>
Subject: Aberystwyth University Is Awesome! Warning: Your Experience May Differ.
Dear Daniel,
There’s an age-old tradition amongst Aberystwyth graduates, and in particular amongst Computer Science graduates. But to truly understand it, you first need to understand a little bit about Aberystwyth University. Also, to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion (you’ll “get” that joke by your second year, if you don’t already).
As you know, your username is “dlh9”. There’s a reason for that: The letters are your initials. “But I don’t have a middle name,” I hear you cry (or, at least, not one that the University know about), “Where’s the ‘L’ come from?” Well, it turns out that Information Services, who look after all of the computer networks, have a System [TM]. And their System [TM] is that staff get usernames like “abc”, undergrads get “abc1”, postgrads get “abc12”.
(this has lead to some awesome usernames: for example, “bed” used to be the username of somebody from Residential Services, and “sad” was once the username of one of the counsellors at the Students’ Union)
Anyway, I digress. I was talking about usernames. The digit in your username is the year you started your course. So, because you’re starting this year, yours is “9” (see, ‘cos it’s 2009 – get it?). You’re not allowed to spend more than nine years getting your degree, so that’s a pretty good primary key (you probably know what one of those is, but if not, you will before the academic year is out). Postgraduates get two digits because they often hang around for years and years. I don’t know what would happen if somebody spent a century getting their PhD, but I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be pretty.
And so there’s been a long-standing tradition amongst Aber grads, and particularly Comp. Sci. Aber grads, and especially particularly Comp. Sci. Aber grads-who-graduated-and-got-jobs-in-Aberystwyth and never got around to leaving… that when their username comes up for “renewal” – when a decade passes after they first started their course – they finger (you’ll learn what that means soon enough, too) the Aber computer systems and check if their username has been re-assigned. It’s a great way to make yourself feel old, as if the annual influx of younger-every-year Freshers didn’t do that perfectly well already.
Over the years, I’ve seen many friends play this little game. Some of them won, but most of them lost – it turns out that the odds aren’t really on your side: there are 17,576 conceivable username combinations each year – from aaa9 to zzz9 – and only 3,000 new students, so odds are less than 50% whether or not you ignore the statistical biases that mean that things like “qxz9” (Quentin X. Zachary?) are basically never going to turn up.
So imagine my surprise when I, for the first time, get to play the game, today… and I not only win, but I get a double-win, because the person to whom my old username has been recycled is an undergraduate in my old department!
Yes: I was the last owner of “dlh9”. I was “dlh9” from 1999, when I started, to 2004, when I graduated, an alumni of the Computer Science Department at what was then the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (it changed it’s name to Aberystwyth University shortly afterwards – this, combined with the fact that I have since changed my name by deed poll, means that I am the proud owner of a degree certificate that contains neither my name nor the name of an existing university!). At the time, my name was Daniel Huntley – I didn’t have a middle name, either – and I spent five years getting a four-year degree in Software Engineering before I started working for a software company here in this very town. I haven’t yet got around to leaving.
It still feels strange to write an e-mail to your e-mail address – my old e-mail address. It feels like I’m writing an e-mail to myself. I wonder what I’d have made of it if I’d have received this e-mail when I first arrived at University. It’s not so hard to imagine: the person I am now would be unrecognisable to the person I was back then, just like I am a complete stranger to you, but writing to you nonetheless. But even if you discard this e-mail and never think of it again, you’ll have done me a wonderful service by allowing me the chance to participate in a fascinating thought experiment that has granted me a great and deep nostalgia for the time I spent at that University.
(by the way; I apologise if your e-mail address is still getting the spam it used to get when it belonged to me)
Like me, Aber’s changed over the last ten years. The University’s changed, and the Computer Science Department has changed too. But I’m sure that you’ll find the place as beautiful and as satisfying as it has always been: this remarkable town on the West coast of Wales, where the mountains meet the sea, full of strange and quirky characters, a million miles from anywhere, and truly unique. I find myself longing for you to have *my* experience of Aberystwyth; to do all the great things I did, to meet all the great people I did – but you won’t. You won’t have the same lovers; you won’t discover the same music; you won’t join the same clubs; you won’t have the same beautiful sunsets while you roast burgers on disposable barbeques and the rising tide laps at your ankles; you won’t have the same hangovers; you won’t scrape through the same exams; you won’t steal the same traffic cones; you won’t climb the same mountains. A different story told differently.
You won’t have any of the things that made my time here in Aberystwyth so wonderful for the last ten years, but don’t dispair, because you’ll have something far better – you’ll have all of your own marvellous experiences. Mine are mine in nostalgia alone, but yours are yet to come. And I hope you have an ass-kickingly good time, because that’s what every Aber Comp. Sci undergrad deserves when they come to this magical corner of the world.
When you get as far as your lectures, tell Richard Shipman I said “Hi”. That’ll put you in his good books, I’m sure. ;-)
And if you see me around town, give me a wave and I’ll buy you a pint. If you got nothing else from reading this old man’s drivel, you just earned yourself a free pint. When I was a student, I’d have called that a win-win. Your experience may differ.
Good luck, and best wishes;
—
Dan Q
A Great Driver, In Theory
Took and passed my driving theory test this lunchtime. 50/50 (pass mark 44) on the multiple choice bit, and 66/75 (pass mark, again, 44) on the silly little hazard perception video, which’ll do.
Not one question about stopping distances, meaning that I’ve committed to memory that most useless of information (I mean, am I really going to spot a child running into the road and start counting the car-lengths between me and him to work out if I need to start braking yet?) for no reason whatsoever. It feels like they’re all stuck in my head, now, so I may have to knock up a quick computer quiz to ask me those “missing” questions so I can release them again.
So yeah; there we are. Suppose I ought to have a practical test sometime.
Sleepless? Priceless!
- Time for this iteration of a software project: 4 months
- Time left after the client changed their mind about the “must have” requirements: 2 months
- Amount of sleep within the last 40+ hours: 4 hours
- Number of JOIN clauses in an eleventh-hour SQL statement that suddenly fixes everything: 12 (LEFTies, RIGHTies, INNERs… and also a UNION)
- Time internal deadline missed by: 55 minutes… which isn’t actually that bad, considering everything that went wrong in the 55 minutes before them
- Money earned: nil
- Feeling after delivery complete: priceless*.
* also: knackered – guess I’d better get some sleep!
A “Never Mind The Buzzcocks” Moment
Remember Let Loose? They reached #2 in the singles chart back in 1994 with Crazy For You? (you’ll remember it when you hear the chorus, I promise) Turns out that since disappearing off the face of the Earth, the guitarist has been running a fabulous little bed-and-breakfast in a tiny village in Essex.
He didn’t look too hurt when my boss and I, sat on his couch, asked about the silver and gold CDs he had framed and mounted in his living room, and, when he revealed his identity and, neither of us could remember who Let Loose were or what they’d ever done. And I think he’d forgive us for not recognizing him: I probably wouldn’t have guessed it was him on the Identity Parade round of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, even having seen the music video.
I quite liked Crazy For You. I had it on some compilation CD at some point. I’d somehow completely forgotten about it’s existance until I looked it up again on YouTube. Thank you, YouTube!
Q
A couple of deeds poll later, and Claire and I are half-way to having changed our surnames. Our new surname: Q. I hereby declare this blog post to be the official FAQ of the Dan/Claire name change. So there, Ms Q.
1. You’ve changed your names?
Yes, we’ve changed our names. I’m now “Dan Q”, and she’s “Claire Elizabeth Q”. We’ve signed deeds poll and it turns out that’s all you need to do.
2. How do you spell your new name?
Q. The letter Q. Just Q. That’s it.
3. Like Q from Star Trek or Q from James Bond?
No, like Q, the set of all rational numbers.
4. Why did you change your names?
For some time now we’d discussed changing our names so that we had the same surname. We’ve always liked the idea that when you become a family of your own, distinct from your parents, you should be entitled to choose a new surname for yourselves.
5. So this is like you “tying the knot”, then?
Not really. But if you were waiting for us to get married someday, this is the closest thing you’ll probably ever get to it (unless we have a party sometime to commemorate being together), so if it helps you to think of it like that, yes.
6. Why did you pick the letter “Q” as a surname?
It’s a cool letter. It’s uncommon, quirky, and is always followed by a U. Except now. Other letters considered and rejected for the role include A, B, C, P, T, X, Z, and Y.
7. Why did you pick a surname that neither of you already had?
Fair’s fair. Plus, we wanted something that’s pretty much unique. Apart from an 80s singer whose stage name is Stacey Q, we don’t know of anybody who has our surname.
8. WTF?
No. Q.
9. You know how much work this is going to take, right?
Tell me about it. It took me ages just to work out how to change my name in GMail. Now I’ve got to get certificates and sort out my bank, my other bank, my credit card, the DVLA, the passport agency, the electoral roll, the utility and service companies…
Yeah, we know it’ll be a lot of work.
10. Database administrators will hate you, you know.
We’ll hate them too, if their regexen don’t support single-character surnames. By the end of the year, I predict that we’ll be in at least three or four databases as Q-space-space-space. Not to mention a few places as Que or Queue. Fuck ’em.
11. How did your families take the name change?
Predictably to good. My mum laughed. My dad laughed, eventually. Her dad immediately assumed we were trying to commit some kind of bank fraud, and then laughed. The eldest of my two sisters sent me a text message reading simply “Disowned!” So, pretty well. And some of them actually had some useful practical advice about stuff.
12. Are you changing your signatures, too?
Yes, but we’re not putting them online, for obvious reasons.
13. Does this mean we’re allowed to say ‘DanQ’ in a silly voice instead of thank you now?
If you insist. You were allowed to say it before, of course, too. But it wasn’t funny then.
If there are any questions I’ve not covered, let me know!
The questions below were asked after this blog post was originally published.
14. Why not X?
It’s been done before. To death. Malcolm X and many of his supporters, for example. Plus it’s a little predictable. Q is a far cooler surname than X.
15. Did you, in your decision process, consider the effect this surname might have on your children?
Yes. In the event that we have children, they are likely to – being children – hate or be embarrassed their parents for one thing or another no matter what we do. This way, we’re giving the hypothetical sprogs either (a) something they can genuinely dislike us for or (b) something cool and unusual that they’ll be proud of. It all depends on their outlook, and I’m sure that there would be times in their lives that they would love, and times that they would loathe, their unusual surname.
If they are particularly bothered by it, they will be able to change it when they’re 16, whether or not we approve (although in all likelihood, we won’t care either way).
16. You do realise you’ve called yourselves after an abbreviation, don’t you? [“Q” = “question” in many FAQs]
I do now.
17. And if you adopt/have a child, please can you call it something like Francis Adam? / Have you thought of changing your first name to ‘Snooker’ or maybe ‘Fuh’ / etc.
Thankfully, we haven’t yet brainstormed all of the possible funny names that could precede “Q”. Keep them coming, but don’t expect them all to appear in the Q FAQ.
18. How is it pronounced? Is it “queue” or “qwuh” or what?
It’s pronounced like “queue” (and, I suppose, “cue”): the name of the letter Q.
19. Can you legally have a number or a punctuation mark as part of your name?
The short answer: No.
The longer answer: Within the UK, there are certain restrictions on naming (at least, if you’re a UK resident). Firstly, you must have at least two names. Secondly, your surname must consist only of letters and (sometimes) simple punctuation like apostrophes (O’Reilly) and hyphens (for multi-barrelled surnames). And it’s not allowed to be blasphemous. Your first name must not imply that you have a title (e.g. Sir, Duke, Lord, King, etc.). Pope might be allowed, but I’m not sure.
It’s a pity, or I’d have probably been Huntl3y long before now. The 3 is silent.
20. Try and be interesting without adopting pointless name changes.
It’s not phrased as a question, anonymous coward, but I’ll address this one anyway:
To state that our name change is pointless or is an attempt to draw attention is to misunderstand our reasons. The choice of name certainly is attention-seeking (let’s face it, it’s a damn cool name!), but the fact that we have changed it is not.
I’d love to hear why you think this, though, if only you’d care to tell us who you are.
Further Reading
- Writing to all the companies I deal with, informing them of my name change.
- An unusual letter from the Passport Service, accompanying my new passport.
- The first of my feedback after QParty, the party we had to commemorate the name change.
- The first of my QMoon Postcards, the honeymoon Claire and I went on after the party.
- Why I chose to retain my surname even after Claire and I broke up and Claire took another one.
- How my name got me banned from Facebook.
- How my stupid name eventually paid for itself.
- Fights I’ve had with Confused.com.
- That time British Gas exposed how they store my name in (spite of) their database.
- Some other Q-related stuff on my blog.