User:Ardonik



I like the Redwall book series of books by Brian Jacques. Though often found in the children's book sections of libraries and bookstores, I find his stories (or yarns, as he calls them) to be remarkably well written, not the least bit condescending, and surprisingly mature, emphasizing virtues such as freedom from cruelty and avenging the death of loved ones. Read them! Start with Redwall, then read Mossflower. I won't need to remind you to read other books in the series--you'll do so on your own.

Some of my favorite quotes (digging through backpack--not there! I guess I'll find them later)

I'm also a C++ programmer, but they're a dime a dozen these days.

 I wrote this on a fellow Wikipedian's talk page, and I felt it was worth preserving:  &#1071; &#1085;&#1077; &#1087;&#1086;&#1085;&#1080;&#1084;&#1072;&#1102; &#1088;&#1091;&#1089;&#1089;&#1082;&#1080;&#1081; &#1103;&#1079;&#1099;&#1082; &mdash; &#1075;&#1086;&#1074;&#1086;&#1088;&#1080;&#1090;&#1077; &#1087;&#1086;-&#1072;&#1085;&#1075;&#1083;&#1080;&#1081;&#1089;&#1082;&#1080;, &#1087;&#1086;&#1078;&#1072;&#1083;&#1091;&#1081;&#1089;&#1090;&#1072;! Ja ne ponimaju Russkij jazyk -- govorite po-Anglijski, požalujsta! Translation, please!

You got it: "I don't understand Russian -- please speak in English." (Written in Russian, of course.) 

Vandalism
Like a grandfather proudly showing unwary travelers photgraphs of his grandkids, so I proudly show you the attempts that have been made to vandalize my page in the past. I am privileged to have joined the ranks of the resented ones.
 * [], by 80.136.147.72 - July 16, 2004
 * 1) * Probably in response to my removal of linkspam from List of search engines.
 * [], by 67.87.179.124 - September 18, 2004
 * [], by 68.105.147.66 - September 18, 2004 (actually tried it twice!)
 * 1) * The above two acts of vandalism were done in response to my vote for the deletion of the nigger6 "article."
 * [], by 152.163.100.201 - June 13, 2005
 * 1) * Not sure what this one was all about; I was inactive for months at the time of the act. People can be strange sometimes.

To any would-be vandal: anonymous changes to user pages are almost always reverted, so if you want some act of vandalism to stay on my user page, it had better be good.

Bookmarks

 * Formatting tutorial - had to look for this the first time
 * Wikipedia HOWTOs - so that's how they do that!
 * How to edit a page - covers much of what the above leaves out
 * Meta:Help:Formula - TeX markup: what to put between &lt;math&gt; and &lt;/math&gt;
 * SVG image support, GNU LilyPond support - other enhancements to the Wikipedia
 * Meta:Category:Humor - especially the humorous logos section!
 * Cite sources - standard citation format ( ==References== )
 * Revert - I'm getting the hang of vandalism reverts now.
 * Cleanup - for articles needing general cleanup (due to bad formatting and disorganization, for instance)
 * Category:Articles that need to be wikified - for the subset of cleanup articles articles specifically needing wikification.
 * Pages needing attention - for articles needing cleanup in a specific area that the submitter is not able to address (POV, needing more research, or needing another section are just a few examples.) Listing something here is considered to be a strong plea for revision.
 * WikiProject - suggested structure for many different genres of new articles.
 * TourBusStop - I really like this concept.
 * Substub - stub articles vs. not-even-a-stub articles.
 * Special:Upload - upload images here. (See also Picture tutorial.)
 * Captions, WikiProject Writing Captions - once you've uploaded an image, you should describe it well.
 * Manual of Style - date formatting is here, among other things
 * Meta:Help:Table - table syntax for all of the mediawiki projects
 * Peer review - help make good articles even better
 * Neutral point of view
 * List of Latin proverbs - the sort of delightful thing you'll only find in the Wikipedia.
 * WikiEN-l mailing list archives - always good for lively debate and keeping up to date on policy. It was reading this that brought me to the Wikipedia to begin with.
 * Association of Deletionist Wikipedians - of which I am a proud member.

Articles to add

 * Sonobe module - I've folded many of these in my spare time; I should write the article for them.
 * There's no page on Zoltan Kodaly's H&aacute;ry Jan&oacute;s Suite!
 * What? No article on Supertorus?  How is that possible?  (There is an article on Super ellipses; I should format the supertorus article similarly.)
 * We have no articles on implicit surfaces or parametric surfaces, two concepts important in 3D rendering. Any specific instances of these surfaces should be modeled after roman surface, in my opinion.
 * Despair, Inc. and its Demotivators product series (the latter should perhaps be a redirect to the former.)
 * Created as a stub; the redirect is there, too. Now I need to expand it.
 * Code page 437 - the encoding of my youth. Merge with Extended ASCII, perhaps?
 * An article on the murderous Asian Giant Hornet, Vespa mandarinia.
 * Hoorah, the article already exists at Asian giant hornet!

Articles to revise
This is my own miniature version of the Cleanup page, listing articles whose contents I hated caused me some concern but that I may have the ability to improve. Items will be removed from the list as they are improved or slated for destruction.
 * 1) Rainbow - I have a book with a lot of optical phenomena in it (Color and Light in Nature) -- I could singlehandedly double or triple the list of optical phenomena on the Wikipedia if I put it upon myself to do so.
 * 2) Redwall - clearly, I must do justice to this series of articles as well.
 * 3) I e-mailed the webmaster of Redwall.org for permission to use his biography picture. But, I mean, his mug is on the back of every one of his hardcover books, isn't it?  I own all of the hardcover Redwall books.  Maybe I should have just scanned one in...
 * 4) Pattern: embarassingly bad. Probably started as a dicdef article (don't create those!) but got worse and worse as people kept on adding things to it in random places.  If I can't turn it into a disambiguation page, I'm going to move it to VfD.
 * 5) Demo: can probably be split into Demo (music) with the rest merged into demo scene, but should still become a disambiguation page.
 * 6) VNC: needs serious work. I use it daily; it could probably be rewritten in a day or so, confining VNC clients to a list in the an external links section.
 * 7) James van Hoften: is it an encyclopedia article about an astronaut, or a major-league baseball trading card?
 * 8) Shatranj: I have a book. I should help.
 * 9) List of recipes, List of cocktails: these need to go to Wikibooks--that's what wikibooks is for. There are so many that it would be a daunting task.
 * 10) Valhalla: needs to be turned into a disambiguation page and split up into stubs, after correcting whatever links to it.
 * 11) Common phrases in different languages: a nice idea. Whatever common portions there are should be scrounged up and transwikified to the Wiktionary, like the Wiktionary's "Where is the toilet" article.  It'll take a while to copy them all, though.
 * 12) Macrophage: needs minor rewriting; I should have a biology textbook handy before attempting it, though.
 * 13) List of numbers: informative junk. An experiment in the anarchy of knowledge.  Pure, unadulterated disorganization tainted with the occasional useful fact.  (Reworking in progress.)
 * 14) *Need to merge with English-language numerals.
 * 15) *Names of large numbers is more comprehensive, and should absorb some of the tables from List of numbers.
 * 16) **The Names of large numbers article should probably be called List of large numbers!
 * 17) *I'm astonished at how quickly the List of numbers article has improved (take a look!) but the matter of keeping the information in List of numbers, Names of large numbers, and English-language numerals unique and non-redundant is still a concern.
 * 18) Plainsong: I've only touched the beginning of this subject. I'll need to read more.
 * Category:Sorting algorithms: need pseudocode for every single one.
 * 1) Utah teapot: We need another teapot image; the original is gone for some reason.
 * 2) DJ Delorie's DJGPP is in my mind at least as important as MinGW, and more should be said about it.
 * 3) April 1st RFC - Format with tables.
 * 4) Links, ELinks - ELinks is my favorite text browser; it ought to be treated with more justice. It really is better than Links.
 * 5) Adolphe Mouron Cassandre - a poster artist of the 20s and 30s who used stone lithography to create absolutely stunning posters (some of which have been used in the Propaganda Remix Project; see .)
 * 6) Memory manager - easily improved.
 * 7) List of interesting or unusual place names - create a #Footnotes section at the bottom of this article and move the revelant beginning paragraphs into it.
 * 8) Bathysphere, Bathyscaphe: we need big, full-color, underwater images of these machines. (And expanding those two stubs wouldn't hurt.)
 * 9) Pazzi Chapel - a substub recently contributed by an anonymous user, in spite of the fact that information on the structure was readily available on the web. Sigh.  Oh, well &mdash; at least it's encyclopedic.

Articles I have created or significantly reworked
Created articles are in bold.

From now on, I'm listing articles that I've wikified here, since I also consider those to be significant reworkings. (Well, then again, if most of the words in an article aren't mine, I wouldn't feel right listing it here anyway.)

On certainty
(From #wikipedia, September 22, 2004)  anyone want to have a riddle, name me something you are certain of and why :)         ...that no things are certain.            Ardonik, are you sure?          I'm certain.

/I ate my cat