User:Elektron

Elektron was originally part of a (now defunct) e-mail address which I chose too quickly — I had to make one up which could collect spam (ah, the days of websites which would publish your email address), and the name stuck. It's not really related to the Greek word ήλεκτρον.

I was born in Toronto, one of the few places with the honour of having other cities named after it. I've lived in Hong Kong and Cambridge. While this may make me “very international”, what I really want to do is to settle down somewhere nice. I'm still looking for that somewhere nice.

I'm a fan of efficient government and public services — I don't believe in sales tax/VAT, toll roads (and bridges/tunnels), investment tax, and pay-per-view systems like WiFi and public toilets. I especially hate the privatisation of public services — public transport companies should be answerable to the people (just look at The Tube, or JR). And death tax is just wrong.

Some of the worst things that have come out of the software industry are "escape_string" functions, the one-URL-is-one-file paradigm, the file-extension-is-metadata paradigm, and the let's-make-it-safe-for-badly-written-code features (encoded null characters are valid in URLs). You can find all of these on your average PHP-driven website.

I've spent far too much time on Wikipedia at various points in my life, resulting in this.