WTF

Poet by delusion, coder by compulsion, writer by ego, sketcher by accident, and a stargazer as if the universe owes me answers. Still waiting on one. Anyway—je me présente: the mé féin of multitudes, many unfinished, often half-baked. (If you're inclined, my social media links are in the footer.)

Here you will find:

I have been writing poetry since childhood, and I hope that my craft has improved over the years. I'll let you be the judge of that. I publish here a selection of my poetry for the world to see.

I never saw myself as an artist, but thanks to the art project run by Spinal Injuries Ireland, I have been learning and practicing, and have built my confidence to the point where my next book, Remy Had a Little Lamb, will be entirely self-illustrated by yours truly.

Some of it is (I hope) constructive commentary. Some of it is that I just can't help myself but for to call out the absurdity of changing our clocks twice a year for no good reason. Most of it is technology focussed, my other great love.

As a programmer and tinkerer, I used to keep a notebook of little tidbits, from a simple as How do I do X thing in the Terminal. One day I decided, instead of keeping it in my private little notes file, it would take so little effort to just write it in markdown and drop it in here for public access, that, who knows, some days something in there might turn up in a Google search and be of use to someone.

I have written a few plays, if you don't see them listed here yet, you soon will. Same for some short stories.

For the archaeologically inclined, here's where the old sites sit now:

Q: Sometimes you use footnotes, other times you link directly in the text of the article. What gives?

A: There is a logic in it. If the link is to a resource that directly relates to the topic, e.g. in an article on generative AI a link to Claude's AI model, I will link it inline as it is directly related to the topic at hand, and is something I expect the reader may want to immediately access.

I use footnotes when

• it is explaining some piece of jargon that some but perhaps not all readers may be familiar with, e.g. RAID, NAS, etc.
• it is not directly related to the topic, but is a citation that backs up or justifies a point I am making, e.g. a link to an article or journal on a piece of research that validates my point.

I do! But my preference for a fixed-width font in the presentation of this site renders them no wider than hyphens. Update: Recent move to Iosevka fixes this!

I haven't.

Modern Irish treats the séimhiú by adding an 'h' after a consonant to be softened. It is difficult to read, for both Irish people and tourists alike - in fact, it makes written Irish an incomprehensible mess.

But this is only a very recent convention - it was "decreed" about 50 years ago, in a lazy compromise to use English typewriters in publishing, as if other languages couldn't figure out how to add their accents to typewriters.

Traditional Irish places a dot over a consonant that should be silenced or softened. It's one of the easiest accents to understand.

So my name may be Tadhg in modern Irish spelling, but in my creative pursuits I prefer to use the traditional Taḋg.

And I am on a one-man crusade to rid Irish of the ugly, unnecessary séimhiú ('h'). It uglifies and obfuscates an otherwise beautiful language.

I don't. I follow Oxford spelling (OED) which favours -ize endings. It was the standard used in most British newspapers until the 2000s when, perhaps in reaction to the rise of the internet, they all reverted to Cambridge spelling, which is now more common in non-technical prose in the UK. Personally I think the Brits are just trying to use it as a marker to say "we're not American" (yes, you're very special).

Oxford Spelling is used in technical writing and scientific papers, which is appropraiate for this blog. And besides, I feel no such obligation to follow the conventions of our neighbour, since I speak Hiberno-English.