< Me, myself and I >

So you'd like to know something about the weird phreak who's making this site? Ok, let's get done with the introductions. Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Nana Långstedt.

If your character encoding settings let you view the name correctly, you're probably wondering what that weird a with a circle on top of it is. It's Å, a Swedish O, and it's usually pronounced as an O anyway. So why do the Swedes need a weird new character instead of an ordinary O? The Swedes don't pronounce the ordinary O as an O, so they need a separate character for something that should be pronounced as an O. I know, Swedes are funny.

If you're not a Swede, just call me Nana. And yes, that's a girl's name, so I'm a female Linux geek. See, geeky girls do exist!

< Me Finn, me speak funny >

Maybe, after reading some of my ramblings, you're wondering if I'm high, drunk or dyslexic. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The reason my English is a bit weird is that it's not my native language. I'm from Finland, and Finnish is my native language, so I guess you can forgive me the speeling and gramer errers and random oddities in my English text. Especially all those prepositions and differences between British and American English make me extremely confused.

Anyway, I don't worry about prepositions anymore. I just use a random number generator for placing them into my text. What an excellent way to cure my utter confusion.

Don't tell me you know nothing about Finland. You should know at least one of these things:

• Mika Häkkinen, Mika Salo, and Kimi Räikkönen (Yay! More A's with weird stuff on top of them!)
• Nokia
• Sibelius, Nightwish, and Lordi
• Linus Torvalds and Linux
• Nana Långstedt! ;-)

< Occupation >

Most likely no one's interested in what I do for a living, but I'll tell you anyway. I'm studying at Turku University of Applied Sciences to become a Bachelor of Engineering. I'm a qualified lab technician and I studied biochemistry at the University of Turku, but I figured I should just give up, follow my geeky calling and become an IT engineer.

Yes, I know I didn't answer the question yet. Studying isn't the same thing as getting a living. Well, to get a living, I work as a part-time cleaner, and as a part-time receptionist at a chiropractic. Though, in addition to being a receptionist, the job at the chiropractic includes a wide variety of things, such as doing laundry, serving as a computer help desk, making heat treatments and helping with acupuncture. Don't worry about the combination of me and acupuncture needles; I haven't killed a patient yet.

I'm married to a guy who's studying Computer Science. Yes, we're both geeks.

< Hobbies >

My hobbies include (surprise surprise) fiddling with Linux. I've been using Linux since 1998, and used it exclusively for quite a few years. These days I'm back at the Windows bandwagon, mostly because I'll need it in my future nifty job as an IT engineer anyway. However, I'd like to point out I'm not a Grey-Haired Linux Guru. I'm still more like an ordinary desktop user... with some exceptions of course. Main of them is my interest in (X)HTML and CSS and web design in general.

In addition to classical geekery, I'm interested in psychology and sociology, science (especially chemistry, astronomy and physics), as well as photography. I also enjoy watching this old retro-futuristic scifi series made back in the 20th century, featuring pointy-eared people and an idealistic starship captain. My newest interest is learning to become a Grey-Haired Java Guru. Or C Guru. Or C++... or... well, you get the pattern.