About Me
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Some links to my profiles
A few words about me
Hi, as you may have guessed, my name is Thomas Guymer and as you probably have also guessed by now my friends just call me Guymer. I have a First Class BSc (Hons) degree in Physics from the University of Durham (I attended Hatfield College) and currently reside in the south of England. Whilst growing up in the north of England I got hooked on climbing and just generally being outdoors, consequently it is something which I try to do as often as I can. However, whilst at University, and now as I’m working, there is not much time for randomly wandering off for a walk whenever I want. To this end I try to spend as much time as I can traveling or climbing during my few holidays.
I first got into photography when I was a kid and I used to enjoy taking pictures with my Dad on his old SLRs (he has a AE-1 and a T90). I believe that there is something calming and peaceful about taking photos, and it’s something which I thoroughly relish. This site contains some photos (all of which I have taken) for you to have a look at. I do not profess to take good photos, just to have been lucky enough to be present to take photos of good things.
I first got into Linux when one of my friends had a dual-booting PC which had openSUSE on it. At the time I was studying for my degree and the use of Linux looked convenient for my programming module. I played around with a Slax Live CD for about half an hour and then decided “puft - just do it” so I downloaded openSUSE 10 and made my laptop dual-booting. I used a dual-booting machine from then on as I did a lot of PHP coding for this website and FORTRAN coding for my course. It is from these beginnings that I have written the tutorials you find on this site and my love affair with Kate started.
Over the years my daily tools have shifted in keeping with my goals. I now use Atom instead of Kate and Python instead of PHP. My servers run FreeBSD instead of openSUSE and my desktops run Fedora instead of openSUSE. I continue to use FORTRAN for my mathematic and/or scientific programming - it is just augmented now with OpenMP and MPI.
An important fact
Courtesy of the genius which is xkcd. If you actually fully understand that correlation does not imply causality then you are in a minority. This is such an important idea and a scarily small number of people actually abide by it. To find out more you could do much worse than visit Spurious Correlations by Tyler Vigen.
My favourite quotes
To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
The reason for nature’s greatness is that it has forgotten that it was once chaos, but this latter thought can recur whenever need be.
Pain is only weakness leaving the body.
It’s a round trip: getting to the summit is optional; getting down is mandatory.
It does not matter how slow you go, as long as you don’t stop.