Pay no attention to the Marn behind the curtain

Hi. I'm Thomas Thurman, though many people know me as Marnanel. I'm originally from Hitchin in England but am now often found around Pennsylvania with my family. I'm a programmer and a poet. I like chocolate.

Here are some places you might know me from:

• I help maintain Metacity, the GNOME window manager, mostly doing patch review and bug fixing, but also compositing and theme work. (Most people who have used my code are not aware that it's there.) I believe that software freedom is a very important principle in the modern world. I try to help out on forums and IRC with people's GNOME problems. I have yet to make it to a GNOME conference, but I will one day. I'm hoping to get more deeply involved in the GNOME project as a whole in the future. More about this...
• LiveJournal users may know me from Joule, a tool I wrote many years ago to track changes in a journal's readership (there are currently somewhere between six and eight thousand users depending on how you count it). You can find out more at the LJ community. More about this...
• Certainly the most widely-publicised thing I ever wrote was a short essay on playing with TinyURL which was cited by Wired, New Scientist, and the Jerusalem Post. If I knew what I did right that time I would make blog posts like that more often. :)
• I cowrote a Firefox plugin which had a mention in an O'Reilly book a while ago. It doesn't currently work because Firefox has evolved away from it, though that might change back soon. More about this...
• I used to be a lot more involved in genealogical and heraldic studies than I am at present, though I try to keep my hand in (you might like to visit thurman.org.uk, especially if you'd like to see my grandfather's coat of arms). I was president of CUH&GS several years ago, which was rather an adventure of a year, and I used to belong to the SoG while I lived in London. I enjoy research, so perhaps I should get back into this part of my life some more. More about this...
• I'm a ringer. You might have run into me at a tower crawl somewhere. More about this...
• Many years ago I coded a couple of adventure games, Avalot and Avaricius, with major input from my brother on the graphical side of things. The games mostly sank, although occasionally you find people reviewing them. More about this...
• I speak very basic Welsh, and hang around various Welsh software localisation places online. I want to become a lot more fluent. More about this...