New Employeer Self Introduction

Neat freak nerd who likes everything to be in its place and know what is happening when and where, and why. ;-)

Mini work history

Started off in ERP+MRP space, exposed to loads of *nicies - worked around Europe a lot - running joke of noticing manufacturing company names and saying "I've done work for them".

• Learned Perl - (hence LinkedIn vanity name perlgirl)
• Security, McAfee & BBC
• Sysadmin automation, build systems and monitoring
• Google SRE and distributed systems
• Cloud platforms and OpenStack
• Like mentoring and training people
• Recently became Bash nerd
• Can provide a nicolaw.sh so you can run me on your command line if you wish

Interests

• Cats
• Winnie the Pooh
• Mechanical keyboards
• 1980's synth-pop
• Dire Straits and Missy Higgins nerd
• Movie quote nerd
• Sucker for a bit of Aaron Sorkin
• Independent, foreign, dark and time-travel movies
• Data pr0n (graphs and data analysis)
• Data hoarding (150TB+ home servers)
• I usually have an overshare story relating to pretty much topic of conversation in the office
• Critical Role fan (Critter) - launched collection of dice to top my collection of keyboards

Superlatives

• Desiderata
• David Hockney
• Brazil (movie)
• Terry Gilliam, Mike Leigh, Ron Fricke, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Guy Ritchie and Sean Baker
• Dark & Stormy made with Matso's Giner Beer (from Matso's brewery in Broome, Western Australia) and Kraken Dark Rum
• Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (3.3.5a) & TrinityCore

Daddy or Chips

• Vim
• Atari ST
• Debian (but I use various distros, and BSD, Windows and macOS)
• Android phone / iOS tablet

Discord Special Interest Introduction

I am a cat lover and have an interest in independent and arthouse films. Mike Leigh and Ron Fricke are particular favourites of mine, but I'm also partial to a good bit of Guy Ritchie, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson and Sean Baker. My musical tastes are just as middle of the road in that there's not a single Dire Straits album or song that I don't adore.

I spend a lot of time distracting myself by repeatedly re-watching TV series again and again as a means to distract and occupy my mind, which would otherwise be going around in circles worrying about some idioticly mundane detail of something or other. Mmm, nothing like a good bit of pleonasm.

I find words, language, accents and human communication fascinating. (See https://nicolaw.uk/LovelyWords). I like the words esoteric, resplendent, copasetic, garrulous, autodidact, idopathic and loquacious.

I love to understand how things work, including people, in so far as what motivates people and what has shaped them and society over time. Human history is fascinating.

Here's two random chewns that I play that I find soothing when life feels too much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UmBLBwDdtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCHRW8G9yY

Oh, and I'm a Critical Role Critter, but I'm WAY behind on season 3 Bells Hells, so no spoilers.

Delighted to meet you all!