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There's a family rumour that we're descended from René Descartes. My great-great-grandfather's family was from La Haye, Descartes' birthplace, and his father was mayor. It's completely unsubstantiated.
I run a wiki on the Unreal engine here: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/
I fall under the "hey, I ordered a cheeseburger" personality type. Not that I'd be seen dead doing such a thing.
Interesting life skills: I have both perfect pitch and relative pitch.
Wikipediholic/Are you wikipediholic test score: 20 (increased now I'm on wikipedia-L)
I'm a very sloppy typist. I have the unfortunate tendency of saving articles with one or two atrocious typos. On the other hand, I'm an excellent proofreader when it's someone else's work. So karmically it balances out... ;-) I probably fix two typos for each one I leave.
Stub Tennis
We should hold Olympics. Pgdudda mentions "WikiRoulette". I hereby coin the name "Stub Tennis". (I can be fairly sure I've made the name up, a search draws a blank both here are on WardsWiki.) To play stub tennis, do this:
- Find a stub
- add something to it, either
- some vague factoid you remember
- do a search on the topic or some of the names in it & create two-way links (LinksAreContent...)
- for stub tennis to work, someone else has to react to its being bumped on Recent Changes.
- the article is batted to and fro between two or more wikipedians.
Thoughts on Misplaced Pages
I wonder sometimes... at what point will Larry Sanger's holographic image step out of the vault and tell us what our real purpose is?
How I ended up here
For those who really wish to know, I landed on Misplaced Pages quite by accident in January 2002: I was idly reading an article on operating systems for the next generation of mobile phones (I am not sure why...), which was detailing Micro$oft's foray into this field. The article went on to say that many cool things would be possible with the colour screens that we'd be seeing on advanced models; but that given minimal memory and ways of addressing the screen all aimed at minimizing power consumption, programmers who worked on games on 1980s computers such as the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum would find their skills at squeezing the maximum effiencency out of the minimum code once again in demand.
In particular (it said), the problem of "attribute clash" seen on the Spectrum was again rearing its ugly head. Intrigued by the term — it was implied that it related to colour on the screen — I Googled it, and the first link got me to Misplaced Pages...
I do of course try and tone done my style when writing Misplaced Pages entries: I do have a tendency to ramble. ;-)
Rant and Rave
My (current) number one Misplaced Pages grouse is this: "Venice, Italy", "London, England" and so forth. That is how cities are indentified in the US; not in the rest of the world. A rout through UK train timetables for the few duplicate towns shows they use "Gillinham (Kent)", for example. The same form or "Gillinham in Kent" is usual in newspaper or reference articles if readers may not know which country a place is in. However, in the interests of consistency in page names, we're stuck with the stateside terminology. It's probably all irrational reactions to cultural imperialism. That or seeing that dratted comma always reminds me of Marilyn Monroe saying "Paris, France is in Europe?" in Gentlemen prefer blondes...
Second grouse: bad French. Most Anglophones are shovelled some sort of French at school, and are under the impression that they a) recall it and b) it was correct in the first place. I tidied French phrases used by English speakers, and just spotted Twinkle twinkle little star. Translation is a sticky art, but I wish people would at least ensure nouns and adjectives agree in gender and number.
Articles
My principal fields of interest are music and maths, but also a mixed bag of things:
lately, I've started:
- Through the Looking-Glass
- Arlo Guthrie
- Oliver Heaviside
- Pink Panther
- Henry Mancini
- Baron Haussmann
- Oulipo
- La Vie mode d'emploi
- Joseph Heller
- Penrose triangle
- Raymond Smullyan (couldn't believe he wasn't already covered... )
- Disability: radical new start and moved older things to subpages. I somewhat see the sense in having the "disability etiquette" page, yet I can't help but think "how would people react to a page called 'how to address a black person'?". Were things like that written in the 1960s?
- Fitts' law
- Tower of Hanoi (the algorithm I linked to on KnowHowWiki is mine too...)
- TGV
- Axe historique
- Periodic table/Wide Table
- Pere Lachaise
Stuff I've added to lately:
- The Simpsons (but, like, who hasn't?)
- Goscinny
- Paris Metro
- French Revolutionary Calendar
- Isambard Kingdom Brunel
- T.H. White
- SAMPA: seeing this bastardized ascii IPA bugged me to the point that I had to dig up the page on it... found it in need of work; made tables and added diphthongs (...). I plan to upload recordings of phonemes soon.
- Acronym: gave this a polish
- Alexander Technique -- it's great. I recommend it. Hard work and most teachers are expensive but it really is worth it.
- Mercator projection
- Tube map: gave this a rewrite. I've been fascinated by the tube map (& the metro map) as far back as I can remember (Goodfellas voice-style ;) )
Stuff I intend to read up on:
To do:
- keep an eye out for Ealing, Ealing Studios and Ealing Comedies -- all three links exist, with no page yet. Clean up links when one is created. Also musing which name is most appropriate.
Reading list
For no good reason' (Pinky and The Brain-style), here is a rough and incomplete list of what I'm currently digesting, newest first.
- writing the page on La Vie mode d'emploi meant taking it down from the shelf, so I may be dipping into that
- Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate
- Wuthering Heights, on hold
- ..and of course A la recherche du temps perdu -- currently taking a hiatus from volume 4, Sodome et Gomorrhe, safe in the knowledge that I've got further in this than most people do.... *smug grin that only lasts until I realise how much of it I haven't yet read...*
- Brian O'Doherty's The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. -- features Anton Mesmer, Mr Hypnoto himself!