About me

Posted by Thomas Løcke on

Important things first. My favorite quote:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin, 1775. Clever guy. He speaks the truth, at least in that one case.

I value freedom. I despise big corporations and government. Power corrupts and when power is monopolized by either political, religious or corporate systems, it leads to widespread abuse of people and their basic rights. I’m a firm believer in letting people take responsibility for their own lives. I don’t want to live in a walled garden, however pretty the garden might be.

I’m a businessman. I fail at being told what to do, unless the people doing the telling have data to back up their claims and a proven track-record. I believe the greatest goal of running a business is to be able to facilitate a good life for my family and my employees. I don’t believe money should be the end goal of any business. If money is the sole goal and purpose of a company, what then separates it from any other predator in the wild? A better life for people should always be the goal.

I dislike closed source software and how it prevents me and others from tinkering, learning and improving. I hate proprietary data formats, and I completely fail at understanding why so many people care so little about these things. Humanity’s ability to free itself from the restraints and control of government and big business is closely tied to the free flow of information and knowledge. Allowing government and big business to control and own our data is the first step towards 1984. We should never give up our freedom for a smidgen of supposed “safety”. It is a slippery slope.

Politicians annoy me. I can’t remember when I’ve last experienced a politician I felt had a clue. More or less all of them are willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power, no matter how stupid it might be. They pump out new laws faster than ants procreate, giving rise to a large and very pointless class of lawyers, accountants and real estate agents. It’s a self-feeding machine that just grows and grows, seemingly forever.

A good soup is like a little piece of heaven right there on the table in front of you. Soup is awesome, if well-made.

I nurture a quiet hope that humanity one day will encounter life in space. The global implications of such an event are staggering. I also hope we’ll one day create an actual AI, and I surely hope it’ll happen in my lifetime. I wouldn’t mind some interesting man-machine interfaces either.

Superhero movies are good, even when they are bad. Superhero movies are awesome when they are good. Pink Floyd is one of the greatest bands ever and the comics written and drawn by Frank Miller are veritable masterpieces. I’m a superbad guitar player, but I do try. Borderlands is a great computer game, and Everquest was a landmark experience for me back when it launched. Linux is a powerhouse of a kernel, and Slackware is a great operating system, at least if you’re a tinkerer. Ada is an awesome programming language. PHP is not. I know, I wasted 10 years using it. The fact that this blogging platform is powered by PHP scares me. A little.

I love snacks and bullet points.

  • Camping with my wife is the best. Just the two of us, our motorcycles and a tent. In the great wild. Life doesn’t get any better than that.
  • Nerd. Geek. Born in 1972. Did VIC20 programming in 1982. Later C64 and Amiga. Today I’m a Slackware Linux man, heart and soul.
  • Businessman of ~25 years experience. Tried a lot of things, been down many roads. Fairly battlehardened. Co-owner and CTO of Responsum K/S, and co-owner/codemonkey at the AdaHeads K/S outfit.
  • Loves Ada programming. Best programming language ever.
  • Trying to learn Haskell programming. Awesome/weird/scary language. I’m not yet sure I’m clever enough to handle it.
  • Got a pretty big collection of comics. Batman for the win!
  • Games. Love ‘em. The Arkham Horror boardgame is a masterpiece! Dungeons and Dragons – I’d play it, if I had the time. Played it like a madman in my youth. Looking forward to the day when the OnLive cloud gaming service launches in Denmark.
  • French fries = one of mankinds greatest achievements.
  • Software patents needs to die. Seriously.
  • Member of the Ada in Denmark organization.
  • Member of the FSFE.
  • Big fan of the Git VCS.
  • Short, nearsighted, out of shape. How on earth I landed my wife, I’ll never understand. We’ve been married since 1992, and she’s the light of my life.
  • Got a really sucky “business card” website at 12boo.net

I despise too many bullet points in a row, and the list above just made me throw up in my mouth. A little.

I’m fairly active at Google+, so feel free to pop in and say hi!