Welcome to the
Heart of Gold

Hi there. You've reached the humble webspace of Tril, aka Suzanne Britton, a 30-something writer and computer geek living in Ottawa, Canada.

This start page is designed to introduce you to who I am and what I do at a fairly leisurely pace. If you're not particularly interested in learning All About Me, you may want to skip straight to the content.

Who I Am

I'm an idealist, a mystic, a skeptic, an introvert, an off-the-wall Christian, a daydreamer, a writer, a geek, and an all-around strange person. My sun sign is Scorpio and my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP. I've been told I have wolf energy. If so, I'm a lone wolf, but I'm trying to become more of a pack wolf.

[Triple Yin-Yang] I'm rather shy. When you first meet me in real life, I may well come across as standoffish. You may even suspect that I don't like you. (Note: I probably do!) Don't worry. Given enough time, I do open up somewhat.

The emblem to the right represents one rather significant aspect of my life.

The "geek" part deserves elaboration. I've had a passion for computers since I was quite young. I started out doing BASIC and 6809 assembly on a CoCo 2, and ended up a Linux nut. The ever-evolving entity known as "miranda" is currently a heavily tweaked Slackware 10.2 installation, running on a dual-core Pentium D. You'll find out more about some of my programming exploits below. For now, here's a screenshot of my excessively-themed desktop.

I write fiction as a hobby, which you'll also learn more about below.

I'm a member of the National Puzzlers' League. The members of the NPL enjoy wordplay of a unique sort, and have been doing so since 1883.

I'm a passionate, sometimes fanatic birder, and a member of the Ottawa Field-Naturalists Club.

I work as a programmer/analyst, preferably in a Unix environment. You can see my resume if you like.

I've been swept off my feet by a Canuck, Michael Britton. We were married on May 29th, 1999. Michael's CorelDraw prowess is responsible for many of the nifty graphics and banners present on this site.

I am a Christian mystic who finds great joy in God. In the future, I may share more about this.

My blog is at soul-diaspora.livejournal.com. It's updated more often than this homepage, although some of the content is friends-only.

E-mail is welcome.

Creations

My foremost creation is Worlds Apart, an interactive science fiction novel which won "Best Story" in the 1999 XYZZY awards. This is where my twin loves, writing and programming, come together.

I have long been fascinated by Conway's Game of Life, a form of artificial life developed by the mathematician John Conway. Complex structures and recurring patterns arise from the application of a few simple rules. So I developed GtkLife, a free and full-featured implementation for Unix.

I'm an amateur nature photographer. My gallery (including a number of 1680x1050 wallpapers) is hosted locally at http://ironphoenix.org/gallery/. Most of my photos are also posted on LiveJournal along with commentary.

A few years ago I began the Scrabble Challenge, and it has since garnered a devoted following of online logophiles. This is a "duplicate Scrabble" game, in which players share one rack of tiles and vie for the highest-scoring play each turn. If you like wordplay give it a try!

On the subject of Wordplay, that's the name of a new game I've released for *nix.

I've created a tribute to my Unix window manager of choice, Fvwm. In addition, this page shares the gritty details of my Fvwm setup, for those who want to borrow from it.

I made a Java Turing Machine simulator years ago that has proved popular with the CompSci crowd.

And for those into chaos theory, there's the Bifurcation Demo.

And that's about it. Thanks for visiting!