![[Valid XHTML 1.0]](../Bildoj/valid-xhtml10.png){kind=small}
![[Enhanced for Any Browser]](anystone.jpg){kind=small}
![[Blue Ribbon Anti-Censorship Campaign]](http://br.eff.org/brstrip.gif)
I find it very disturbing that President Bush wants to keep people in prison in Guantanamo without any legal process, thereby violating their human rights.
Here are a couple of pictures of me. One shows me holding a live alligator's head away from me with both hands in 1998 in Florida. In the other one, I've just arrived on the tiny Gulangyu Island in 2007, with the city of Xiamen in the background. You can click on the faces to get the full pictures.
![[Picture of Allie and me]](../Bildoj/gator.jpg)
![[Gulangyu, here I come!]](../Bildoj/gulangyu2007.jpg)
Here is my Geek code, which tells you quite a few personal things about me.
I have ankylosing spondylitis, which is a (usually) mild form of arthritis. There's a lot of information and support available on-line for people with arthritis as well as a host of other troublesome physical conditions.
I haven't got much talent for graphical design, so my pages are rather Spartan. Anyway, I try to make them compatible with any browser and accessible to anyone, including those who need to use a speech synthesizer.
I hate unsolicited bulk e-mail, a.k.a spam, but I must confess it sometimes has a funny side. For a more serious discussion, look here. I largely agree with their views.
According to another spammer, I am a Known Porn Surfing Scammer. Well, rather that than a spammer.
Here's something truly useless on which I spend a couple of minutes every day: my virtual camel on a Hungarian site.
I believe in freedom of religion. That's one of the main reasons why I disagree with the "Church" of Scientology. They use questionable methods to stop others from practicing the same religion outside their organization.
I also support the Blue Ribbon Anti-Censorship Campaign.
I use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a freely available program for digitally protecting your communications against tampering and eavesdropping. It was created and given freely away by Philip R. Zimmermann, who had a lawsuit hanging against him for a long time because he dared to help provide true privacy to individuals. Uncle Sam didn't like that. Fortunately, the charges were dropped.
I love to learn foreign languages. Hungarian (Magyar) used to be my favourite one for a long time, but recently I've been more actively learning other languages. In 1998 I started to learn Dutch as well, just for fun. I also love Greek music, particularly Haris Alexiou, and of course I want to know what the lyrics mean... So far, I've learned enough to understand parts of some songs. Later on, a similar thing happened to me with Turkish. One of my favourite Science Fiction authors is Stanislaw Lem, and I wanted to read his books in Polish. That's actually very easy to do; it's quite boring, though, if you don't understand a word, and so I decided to learn some Polish. Knowing several Poles also affected my decision. Later on, I started to feel increasingly curious about Esperanto, and found out it's an extremely easy language to learn, just as advertised.
Languages I speak or at least understand to some degree, in the order I started to learn them: Finnish, English, Swedish, German, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Esperanto, Turkish, fragments of some others. Finnish is my mother tongue, and I feel reasonably comfortable with English, Polish and Esperanto, especially in writing.
In my spare time, I compose palindromes in several languages, mostly in Finnish, though. They are words, phrases or even longer passages of text that read the same forwards and backwards, ignoring spaces, punctuation and capitalization. Here's a little collection of my palindromes with translations. I'll be thankful for anyone pointing out any errors.
I prefer PGP encrypted mail. Here are my keys.