It’s Episode Thirty-Eight of Season-Nine of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Martin Wimpress and Jon Spriggs are connected and speaking to your brain.

The same line up as last week are here for another episode.

In this week’s show:

Thing Explainer Competition

The competition was to describe your job, using only the 1000 most common English words using the upgoer5 text editor to help.

To all the software engineers, oncologists, system administrators, electrical engineers, doctors, technical support staff, project managers, games developers, petro-chemical engineers, information security analysts, surgeons, user experience researchers, network engineers, prison wardens, sales personnel, digital forensic analysts, medical technicians, speech therapists, digital artists, DJs, teachers, machinists, translators of ancient texts and would-be astronauts who entered this competition…

Thank you for taking the time to enter and making us laugh!

The winner is Magnus Lindström!

Our congratulations Magnus, who won signed copies of “What If?” and “Thing Explainer” by Randall Munroe (creator of XKCD) with this entry:

The police and others send people who have done bad things to me. I give them a room in my ‘house’ and they are not allowed to leave until I say so. I tell these people not to do bad things again and I also help them with how not to do bad things. I write papers when they do bad things while they are living in my ‘house’ and give them warning. I have some rooms that have little in them where they get to stay if they have been doing really bad things to others or to themselves. Some like to live there because they get food, clean clothes, something to do and help. Some hate it and try to leave even though they are not allowed. If these people have done many bad things in my ‘house’ or tried to leave without checking with me, I can tell them that they have to stay for a longer time.

The runners up

Listen to this episode to hear us read out the runner up entries from:

  • Dave Hingley
  • Ivan Pejić
  • Tai Kedzierski
  • John Garner
  • Jordan [redacted]
  • Surma Saif
  • Katherine Hill
  • Iain Forbes

John Garner’s Thing Explainer Picture

This picture accompanies John Garner’s competition entry. Listen to this episode to hear how he explains what he does.

johngarner-thingexplainer

That’s all for this week! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our Google+ page or comment on our sub-Reddit.