simon - it's been a very long time since we've seen each other or spoken. i'd rather not say directly who i am on the net. however, it's been fun to read your journal. i came upon it through a wikipedia entry for you (which will be deleted any day now unless someone makes a good argument to keep it), and had no idea that you have been writing it for 3 1/2 years! i do occasionally check in on the latest progress on your website - always intriguing to see what software you're writing. sorry also to hear that you have been diagnosed as coeliac; i seem to remember that a relative of yours (grandmother, great aunt or something) suffered from the same thing. i'm sure it's not difficult for you to guess who this is by the way - we spent a lot of time together, and even started a "company" when we were 14. by the way, was it just pure chance that you started writing this livejournal on the 216th anniversary of independence day?

Ooh, hello. As you say, with the clues you give it's easy to know exactly who you are. Nice to hear from you.

(It's my grandfather who's also coeliac. Still alive, pretty healthy and completely cantankerous by all accounts, though, so it doesn't seem to have done him too much harm in the long run :-)

Yes, it was pure chance. The start date of this LiveJournal had no particular significance to me; I actually started keeping an online diary on Monochrome on 1st January 1998, and the day I began mirroring it into LJ was just the day I happened to get round to sorting out the technical obstacles. Still, 216 is a nice number. Ooh.