User:Btball/layout/aboutme

About me

I am Brian Ball, retired from the computer business and living in France (near Paris) with my wife and two sons.
 * What I spend the most time doing: New page and recent change patrol, finding copyright violations, fighting vandalism and fixing spelling errors.
 * First edit (which was also my first article: May 9, 2006 to Lycée International de Saint Germain-en-Laye.

Sandbox
One of my interests is bringing information about the world to people, especially middle school and high school students, through experiential learning. A friend of mine and I created the WorldDay event which we've held four times so far. You can learn more about that at the Sandbox website.

Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson
I've been influenced by the thinking of Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson. One of Bucky's many inventions, besides the geodesic dome was the Dymaxion map. For the WorldDay event we created what we believe to be the World's largest, most accurate, flat map of the World (it is 10 meters by 20 meters). You can see pictures of it at the Sandbox picture gallery.

My background
In 2002 I retired from the computer business after working almost thirty years. I first started programming on an IBM 360/40 when I was in high school. I've programmed in many languages, too many to bore you with the complete list, but ranging from IBM assembly language through FORTAN and PL/1 to current languages (including scripting languages) like PERL and PHP. Now, I do a small amount of consulting for software startups but mostly spend my time doing volunteer work. I am on the boards of two schools, one of which I co-founded, The French Immersion School of Washington.

Other interests

 * Cartography Now that we've made one map the hard way I'm learning how to use GIS and generate maps. I hope to be able to generate maps that will be useful on Wikipedia and Commons.
 * Math, especially prime numbers. For a while, participating in the search for large prime numbers was a hobby of mine. Some of the titanic primes I found are listed here The prime pages
 * Global issues. I believe Global warming is an urgent issue and if you haven't already seen An inconvenient truth, I urge you to do so.
 * Millenium development goals.

Wikipedia participation
Mostly, I've been participating in new page and recent page patrol and doing minor cleanup using AWB. I've improved a few articles by translating information from the French version of the article to English and will do more translation as time permits.

You can see my barnstar at my barn.