About me and my blog
This is the blog of Matthew Smith, also known as Yusuf, a convert to Islam who lives in New Malden, in south London or Surrey depending on your point of view. I'm 30 (as of January 2007) and converted to Islam in the summer of 1998. At the moment, I live at home with my parents. I mostly drive trucks and vans, although I really want to get out of that.
My interests, besides religion, are computing, particularly programming with the Qt programming toolkit, which is particularly "at home" on Unix but also works on Windows and Mac and on embedded devices. I'm the author of QTM, a desktop content management client which can post entries to websites which use Movable Type, Wordpress and other systems which support the same interfaces. You can read more about that on my QTM web page. I also enjoy cycling and I spend a lot of time in London, particularly Foyle's bookshop.
I'm strictly Sunni, that is to say, pro-madhhab (Maliki in my case) and anti "salafi", although I can get on with "salafis" over a curry in Tooting. But I prefer Moroccan food. My favourite restaurant is the Moroccan Tagine, in Golborne Road (London W10). I also like Al-Mirage (Indian) in Tooting and Abu Zaad (Syrian) on Uxbridge Road (Shepherds Bush).
Colophon
This blog uses Movable Type version 4. While I didn't use the betas or the release candidates, I upgraded to MT 4 within days of its release. So I might not be quite an "early adopter", but some might say it makes me a fool. I have been using MT since version 3.2 was released in late 2005; before that, I had been using Wordpress since version 1.5 was released, before which I had also used Movable Type.
I must be one of the few people to still use MT for a personal blog; many others deserted it in 2005 because of the spam problem. What I like is its flexibility; you can choose whether to publish any part of the blog statically (as a file) or dynamically (as PHP, which serves up content as demanded). I have another blog (A Qt Blog) and also used to run a Muslim group blog, Blogistan. With MT, you can run them all off the same installation of MT, and deal with the spam on all of them in one go. You can't do that on Wordpress.
The design is based by one by James Bow which was featured in a competition for Movable Type themes. The original featured a red Toronto streetcar on the masthead; this one features a K1 bus. The K1 runs the long way from New Malden to Kingston, via Old Malden, Tolworth, Hook, Surbiton, east Kingston and the various housing estates in between. The view is of the New Malden fountain roundabout, facing south.
The colour scheme originates with Becca Wei's Wordpress theme, Almost Spring. I adapted it myself, first for the MT Vicksburg theme (using Arvind Satnarayan's theme generator) and subsequently for this theme.