Who is the Webmaster?

The webmaster of this site is Keyan Farlander (obviously an allonym), also known to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Earth Edition (H2G2) community as Researcher Farlander (206300).

Where did Farlander come from?

Farlander was born on the 11th of March (please note: Farlander shares H2G2 founder Douglas Adams' birthday) in some obscure corner of the Earth.

Is Farlander a geek? Or what?

It was Farlander's dream throughout grade and high school to follow Carl Sagan's footsteps, and go to Cornell University in pursuit of a degree and career in astronomy; however, by an ironic twist of fate, Farlander instead went on to study Microbiology in the country's most respected university, and graduated at the top of the class in October 2001 with a First Class Degree in Science (majoring in Microbiology), a CGPA of 3.88 and a Gold Medal in Biology.

Farlander is currently, for no comprehensible reason, pursuing a Masters degree in Medical Science, researching an improbable bug called Legionella whose pestilence is encouraged by the rise of technology.

As of April 2004, Farlander is also playing the trombone in a local amateur brass quintet called Five Piece Brass. Okay, so maybe the name isn't exactly an exercise in creativity. But the repertoire is really, really cool.

What is Farlander like?

Farlander has absurdly brown eyes (hidden behind immensely thick glasses) and dark hair, is sensibly trim and stands at an embarrassing 5'51/2". Farlander is also ambidextrous, although Farlander prefers the right hand while writing. (however, Farlander excels at left-handed pen-spinning)

It is a well-known fact among Farlander's close friends that under no circumstances is Farlander to be allowed near hot chocolate as it takes only one mug of this seemingly innocuous beverage to transform Farlander from a half-way normal scientist to a hysterically laughing lunatic who insists on wrapping people's possessions in newspaper and tape, and labelling them 'prawn paste'.

Farlander is very much science-minded, having grown up on a diet of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, and takes no greater pleasure than in debunking pseudoscience (see Writers' Block). A firm evolutionist, Farlander has very little patience with people who refuse to embrace science and the theory of evolution (especially those who will not accept the fact they are descended from microorganisms).

Farlander's deplorable traits

Farlander suffers from a combination of severe hypergraphia and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (think Adrian Monk), which results in the following behaviour:

• Farlander cannot, absolutely cannot, stand food of any sort on top of Farlander's rice (be it vegetables or meat). If this happens, Farlander will obsessively remove it to the side of the dish, and spend the next ten minutes meticulously picking every single grain of rice from it.
• While we're at it, Farlander loathes a certain pungent (ok, foul) green vegetable that is commonly used to garnish local dishes, and will insist on picking out every last molecule of the damned vegetable from Farlander's food.
• Farlander goes mad if Farlander comes across bookshelves whose books are unordered, jumbled, and not arranged according to genre, author, binding, height and title. Yes, in that order.
• Farlander must engage in tooth-brushing immediately after eating anything. Farlander does not discriminate between breakfast, lunch and dinner, and snacks.
• Once Farlander has started work on an article, graphic or project of any sort, Farlander is unable to stop until the job is done, or Farlander's fingers cramp up, whichever comes first. This means bypassing mealtime alltogether, and sometimes even requires the insertion of an IV drip or feeding tube. Just kidding.
• Farlander gets crippling anxiety attacks if Farlander is unable to check something at least five or six times (eg. whether the concert tickets are really safely in Farlander's coat pocket). This has caused some people around Farlander to go mad from frustration.
• Farlander loves perpendicular lines. Strange angles drive Farlander insane.
• Borders thicker than 1 pixel in width make Farlander foam at the mouth.
• Farlander not only obsessively - and automatically - corrects bad spelling and grammar Farlander encounters in the outside world (thus acquiring the title Spelling Nazi); Farlander also automatically corrects Farlander's own verbal mistakes.
• Farlander hates going shopping for biscuits and cookies at large supermarkets, as the 200+ different brands and cookie types causes Farlander to despair and hyperventilate. Farlander would prefer it if someone else other than Farlander were to carry out this abominable shopping task.
• Farlander is obviously obsessively typing this, for no identifiable purpose or benefit to anyone.

Does Farlander have a life?

You mean when not socialising with microbes?

Farlander spends daylight hours with other geeks at the Molecular Diagnostics Research Laboratory, guzzling Arabica coffee in disgusting quantities and talking genetics rot.

At night, Farlander can be found playing piano for the college choir (where Farlander currently maintains the reputation of being the university's scoreless accompanist), trombone for the university band, French Horn for the university orchestra, and trombone (again!) with the local Five Piece Brass quintet. That is, of course, when Farlander is not stuck in front of the computer playing Hitman or diddling around with Macromedia Flash.

Farlander also spends an obscene amount of time at the H2G2 website, and reading anything that is not too high up on the bookshelf. What with the unnatural appetite for processed tree carcasses and free-flowing electrons, it is surprising that Farlander is not yet blind.

What are Farlander's interests?

Farlander's passion lies primarily in science fiction, fantasy and science. Farlander indiscriminately reads any work of SF available, from Golden Age science fiction to pulp sci-fi to hardcore SF, although chief favourites are Isaac Asimov, AC Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Philip K Dick. Although not well-versed in fantasy, Farlander greatly enjoys JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, Raymond Feist and Michael Moorcock (the last two often taken from the shelves of friends). Star Wars comic books also rub shoulders with Vertigo titles such as The Books of Magic, Lucifer and Sandman on Farlander's bookshelf. However, lest you think Farlander spends too much time floating around in hyperspace, Farlander is also an avid reader of the science non-fiction works of Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan and John Gribbin. A weekly dose of non-science literature - chiefly PG Wodehouse and World War II accounts - is also on the menu.

Being a self-confessed geek, Farlander spends an obscene amount of time putting together models of airplanes and starships, and an even more ridiculous amount of time soaking up radiation in front of the computer, building websites with nifty new multimedia software (the current program of choice being Macromedia Flash), programming music, playing insanely destruction-oriented computer games - and generally puttering about H2G2.

When Farlander's nose is not buried in books or computer screens, it is generally stuck into sheet music. Farlander plays the piano - admittedly very violently - and guitar, as well as the trombone and (recently) French horn (as befitting Farlander's immense ego. What, you didn't know that trombonists had bloated egos?). When not attempting to reproduce sonic booms, Farlander can be found listening to classical music (usually Mozart), John "Star Wars" Williams, 1930s swing music and British names - chiefly Blur, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Pet Shop Boys and Noel Coward.

Farlander loves mythology and folklore, and takes perverse pleasure in taking embarrassingly candid shots of people with an Olympus C-70 Digital Camera. Farlander is also a big fan of John Cusack's (don't ask), and dreams of someday going to Cambridge University to meet Professor Stephen William Hawking - if not to study!

Farlander also enjoys racquetball, swimming, and the occasional bout of meaningless kickboxing. However, following a ghastly mountain-climbing expedition accident, Farlander is now only able to run short distances.

Why Build A Website?

The answer is - Farlander isn't really sure.

Farlander has always been a computer person, ever since being introduced to an Apple Macintosh computer at age seven. Farlander has been through the MS-DOS-51/4" floppies age (and has actually written a couple of text-based games as well), the early Microsoft Windows-31/2" floppy age, the age of Pentium computers and CD-ROMs.... and finally, the Internet age.

Farlander's love affair with the Internet started sometime in early January 1998, where, after two years of saying no, Farlander finally gave in and Got Connected. Farlander does not remember finding out about how to make one's own websites, but did at any rate - and built the very first site at Lycos. It's highly unlikely to be still standing, and it's just as well, because it's the most disgraceful thing Farlander ever built, having absolutely no idea at the time what HTML was, that you could put your own pictures on your website, and no inkling whatsoever about the power of Cyberspace. But not for long.

A few months later Farlander found a book called 'HTML for Dummies', determined to unlocked the mysteries of this strange thing called HyperText Markup Language. And learned it in a week. And within the same week, built a second website at Geocities (back when it was a real Cyberspace neighbourhood, and not what it is now that Geocities and Yahoo have merged). It was called Permanent Writers' Block, was dedicated to Farlander's collection of fiction stories - and, by some miracle, still exists today.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Yeah, but what's Farlander really like? Is Farlander, like, normal?

That would, of course, depend on your definition of the word 'normal'. Quit judging people by your own standards, you pathetic little worm.