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User:Tarquin

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Tarquin: the grouchy side of Misplaced Pages.

Misplaced Pages is in desperate need of articles on nose-picking!

  • How to get quality bogeys
  • Stopping before the nosebleed threshhold -- and also how to go beyond it
  • Nose-picking for the calorie-conscious
  • aftercare: cleaning under one's nails
  • bogey etiquette
  • bogey cuisine: petrissage, squashing and moistening techniques
  • bogey-flicking olympics

Vague rambling biog

Hullo. I'm Tarquin, for long and complicated reasons. Okay, they're not complicated at all. It's just an in-joke in my family. I may get round to explaining it one day, but it's really not that interesting.

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.

Meanwhile, I'm British. With, as well as the French ancestry, a few touches of other European countries thrown in.

I fall under the "hey, I ordered a cheeseburger" personality type. Not that I'd be seen dead doing such a thing. I'm reliably informed on a semi-regular basis that I'm cantakerous.

Interesting life skills: I have both perfect pitch and relative pitch. I've never been able to pin down just what the term "photographic memory" is supposed to mean, but I do have a good one. Stuff just tends to drop in of its own accord. It's very handy for building up the Wiki Web, as I tend to click if I've already seen a page on a given subject. It also means I regard pages like Mnemonic with complete bemusement: remembering "Roy G. Biv" or "HOMES" seems to me to be an extra burden on the memory, not a lightening. There's the mnemonic, plus what it actually is supposed to represent. "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" was drilled into me at school, but decoding that to get the order of colours is slower than just visualizing a colour wheel.

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.

I run a wiki on the Unreal engine here: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/


Wikipediholic/Are you wikipediholic test score: 20 (increased now I'm on wikipedia-L)


Finding stuff

Arg. I just went looking for the conventions on names of saints. Simple, eh? You'd think so. Well, I had to go through this list of pages:

  1. Misplaced Pages:Policies and guidelines
  2. Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (good start)
  3. Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (names and titles) (seems reasonable to expect it here... but no. It says "see the talk page. So I move on...)
  4. Misplaced Pages talk:Naming conventions (use browser's search function to find something in the morass... nope, not here either. Link to another talk page)
  5. and finally Talk:List of saints

... only to find it's not decided yet. Four pages, wandering with no visible signs of organization. This is not a good way to organize things.


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:

Stuff I've added to lately:


Stuff I intend to read up on:

To do:

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!


I'm vaguely collecing links to style guides found dotted around: User:Tarquin/Style Guides