User:Curly Turkey/Misc

I also occasionally edit other ages, particularly music (I like hardcore punk and progressive rock—yes, I do), and computer-related (mostly templates and cleanup, I like computers but I'm no Ph. D.). I also do grammar and spelling cleanup on whatever articles I happen to come across.

Lit

 * The End of the Road Sandbox done
 * Lost in the Funhouse Sandbox
 * Giles Goat-Boy Sandbox

Music
I like a lot of kinds of music, but particularly rock. I'm not stuck on any particular period, like most people seem to be. I just like loud noise.

My favourites include Captain Beefheart, Black Flag, Slapp Happy, Yes, Jefferson Airplane, The Pixies, Henry Cow, Meat Puppets, Soft Machine, The Voidoids, the original Alice Cooper band (including their overlooked first two albums), The Velvet Underground, King Crimson...Jesus Christ, where should I cut this list off? There really are a lot of great bands out there, although I'm not familiar with too many new ones. Kids & work do make one an old man.

I do enjoy a lot of other kinds of music, but I've never managed to figure out what people hear in techno, country or hip-hop music. When I was single and had more peace and quiet at home, I spent a lot of time listening to Charles Ives, George Crumb, Harry Partch, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse and a number of others. Now I have something to look forward to in my retirement days.

Computers
In the summer of 2007, I finally said goodbye to Microsoft Windows. I ceased dual-booting, and have been using (and making my wife and kids use) GNU/Linux systems (Ubuntu for them, Debian for myself). The day Adobe Flash dies, I can completely wipe any trace of proprietary software off my family's desktop.

I'm not a professional programmer, but I like to play around. While I certainly don't have MIT smarts, my favourite language is Lisp. I use mostly Common Lisp, and some Emacs Lisp. I've "learned" C, Java and Python to enough of a degree that I can get something more-or-less done in them, but I would not claim a level of expertise with them.

I use GNU Emacs almost every day, and use AUCTEX to make LaTeX documents at work, not because I have to, but because word processors turn out such ugly documents. Actually, I use XeTeX instead of regular TeX, because I use a lot of Japanese mixed with English in my documents. I also sometimes edit Wikipedia using mediwiki.el, although it is buggy enough that I don't use it unless I have a big job to do (like lots of search-and-replace). 