To start of the 30 days of me blogging challenge here is the day 01 post containing 15 (hopefully) interesting facts about me as well as a recent picture (or three since I’m bit of a camwhore).

1. I’m somewhat of a workaholic. Actually, that would be an understatement, I’m regularly doing 60 to 80 hour weeks and spending far too much time on a computer.

2. My family unit consists of myself, mum, dad and a younger brother. Dad is from the UK, don’t have much to do with that side of the family, and mum is from NZ. Tend to see mum’s parents semi-frequently, but outside of that I don’t associate with my extended family.

Like my dad always says, “Family stops at front door”. ;-) I just tend not to see a need to associate with them when I share no interests, just because they’re family.

3. I run a Wellington-based IT startup company called Amberdms, focusing on open source software and solutions. This means I get no sleep, work insane hours and am constantly hurrying around doing ten things at once.

4. I’m single. I’ve dated a bit and had a few flings, but never really formed a proper relationship with anyone. I recently started dating again to (somewhat) disastrous and/or amusing results depending on your point of view ;-)

5. According to my twitter followers, I’m known to be obsessed with cougars. In reality, I tend to subconsciously fancy older women, simply on the basis that we tend to interact and relate better.

My dating age range tends to be 18-30, lately I’ve been exploring the upper levels of that range and met some awesome ladies, although I think the age gap is a problem for some – I fear I may be cursed to be single until I’m in my 30s :-/

6. I’m younger than I look or behave – many people believe that I am around 25 but that’s a little off…

7. There are frequent debates about my sanity. In my defence, I’ve never been *proven* to be insane. I’d also like to point out that genius often borders on madness ;-) I might also mention I have a slight ego here…

8. I got into computers properly around intermediate school and was hooked on Linux within my first year of college (high-school for you American/international readers), starting off with Mandrake 6 and later moving to Red Hat 8 and onwards.

For a couple years I had my own Linux distribution (Jedo Linux) as a fun side project, which also taught me far too much about packaging, compiling and how a Linux operating system fits together.

9. I’m a born and bred Wellingtonian, although have been to a number of places in NZ and AU, mostly for business or conferences. Don’t have any particular plans to travel in the near future, I like it here and business somewhat ties me to Wellington.

10.  I’m a bitter, godless, atheist, I have very little time for religion – which will get me in trouble sometimes since I tend to open my mouth too much.

I think part of the problem is I can’t see any way someone could believe in religion and it really surprises me when I discover that someone I know has beliefs.

Having said that, I don’t really mind people who are religious for the right reasons (eg: caring about others, being good to people and having their own beliefs) rather than some religious believers who use it to try and silence or suppress things they dislike or try enforcing their beliefs via legislation or constant campaigning.

I’ve met some pretty amazing and caring people and cute couples who find that religion helps them, but I’m not sure it’s something I can ever understand.

11. Of course being a bitter godless atheist doesn’t mean I don’t have morals/ethics/beliefs – I’ve been lacto-octo vegetarian since 2008 and slowly moving towards veganism. This was slowly brought on by considering the fact that I’d never hurt a pet, yet was eating animals of equilivent intelligence, so I made the jump in 2008 and haven’t looked back.

I’m a pretty lazy cook, so I’m not exactly the most healthy vegetarian as you’ll quickly realise reading some of my posts/tweets. ;-)

I try to avoid being the whole “fanatical vegetarian” but I do have some pretty strong opinions about it and sometimes get into “vigorous debates” over the issue.

12. I flat with my friend Tom. Being a meat eater and opinionated, we tend to have interesting debates and philosophical discussions about just about everything anywhere.

13. I’m a strong believer in open source, my laptop runs Fedora Linux and running an almost entirely open source stack (there are a couple proprietary applications for work). Linux and open source has been a huge part of my life, both in getting me a job, but also as a way of making heaps of smart, fantastic friends and developing strong morals/beliefs about freedom, information, government and more. It’s probably one of the largest influences in my life.

14. At times I suffer from being somewhat egotistical and overly demanding with requests – something I’m trying to avoid.

15. I’m an infoholic – addicted to email, twitter and RSS feeds. I read almost every single message I ever get, which can take a bit too much time sometimes.