User:Eriksiers

Yeah... my user page... uh... My basic information can be found over there. -->

(I can't believe someone came through and linted my userpage. What the hell?)

I've lived in Arizona most of my life (all but about 8 years), but have also lived in Florida, Illinois, Virginia, and San Diego, and have been literally around the world, courtesy of Your Tax Dollars At WorkTM. (San Diego -> Pearl Harbor -> Singapore -> Phuket -> Muscat -> Manama -> Kuwait City -> Amsterdam -> Los Angeles -> back to San Diego.)

When I was 9, I won a Ladmo Bag (and other stuff) from the afternoon Ladmo show. People my age and a little older (through, say, their 50's 60's I'm getting old ) from the Phoenix area know that this was a bit of a big deal for a kid back then.

In the navy, I was an Operations Specialist. (That page says "The job of an Operations Specialist can be very intense and stressful while the ship is underway." Major understatement.) I was also a horrible sailor, but I don't think there's a page for that...

My interests are pretty wide and varied; enough so that I'm not going to attempt to list them, at least not right now. I play bass guitar but haven't picked one up for quite a while now. (I also played various kinds of clarinet and saxophone in school; I could probably pick them back up, if I had incentive to.) I'm also a "computer hobbyist" -- which translates to "geek" -- and I'm the author of a handful of geek-type things. If you really want to see them, Google for my name (I'm one of only two Erik Siers's on the intarweb; the other one is about 28 years younger than me and last I heard lives in England) or look at my Rosetta Code user page for links.

Like many other programmers, I have a large stack of projects that I abandoned at some point in time. Most of them will never see the light of day, but one of them I consider my magnum opus, and if I can ever complete it, I'll consider my lifetime computing goals met.

I believe that it's not my place to dictate what others do with their lives. Just because I happen to feel one way doesn't mean that I feel the need to push my viewpoint on others.

As for this page, feel free to edit it, if you wish. (I'd rather you didn't mess with the essay below, but... shrug. Do as you wish.) PLEASE don't undo other people's edits to this page, no matter what. I'm on Wikipedia almost every day; I will (eventually) notice if someone changes my userpage, and will take whatever steps I feel are necessary.

My real name?
There are a lot of anonymous editors on Wikipedia (and many other sites that I visit) that use pseudonyms. I do not do so; indeed, I tend to use "eriksiers" as my user name pretty much everywhere. My user name on Rosetta Code, Sourceforge, and The Code Project are all eriksiers. My email addresses are all eriksiers@whatever. My banking login name is... well, none of your business. Even my pitiful home page is eriksiers.altervista.org. (And as it happens, I'm almost the only "Erik Siers" on the internet. (I'm not English.) If you search for "erik siers", with quotes, every single thing will relate to me in some way... at least on the first page or two of results.)

Some people may wonder why I do this. Certainly, I have the option to use a pseudonym -- for example, maybe I'd rather be called Spidermonkey or Lurch or Banhammer. In fact, if I was using such a pseudonym, then perhaps I might be a bit more "free" with my editing; I could say what I wanted, and this would only reflect poorly on my username, not on me as a person.

And that is why I choose to use my real name.

You see, when we are hiding behind anonymity, we are free to be as crazy as we want, and I don't really think that's a good thing.

Since I edit using my real name, every single edit I make is a reflection upon me -- "Erik Siers", and not "StupidUser123" (or whatever). This gives me added incentive to ensure that what I'm posting is not nonsense, or anything else "bad" in some way, because the edits I make could (potentially) be a source of embarrassment (or worse) in the future. Negative things I do could (potentially) even affect my employment in the future, you just never know.

Since I have to think about what I'm doing on WP, I feel that it makes my edits overall better than they would be if I was editing anonymously. And that's a Good ThingTM.

(For what it's worth, I used to use pseudonyms in various places, because "hur dur handles Я kewl imma l33t hax0r hur dur". I've grown up a bit since then.)

(My userpages, here and elsewhere, tend a bit toward silly, but my feelings about my userpages are more along the lines of "this is what I'm like", not anything overly-serious.)

(This essay is a work in progress. It gets updated whenever I think of something that needs to be added. Or whenever.)

Graffiti
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Feel free to deface this page as whim or fancy takes you. If it bothers me, I'll clean it up.