User:Martian

I was embarrassed for years seeing my username as a red link, so I figured I ought to finally create my User Page. Don't know much about this yet, but here goes...

I started down the long, pebble-and-boulder-strewn road to editing decadence in Dec 2004, and since have darted furtively in and out of various articles, making minor grammar/punctuation/format fix-ups. To date (2011-March-25) this has amounted to 157 edits on 116 unique pages, apparently giving me the right to display the Service Award you see over there. I aspire to making Novice sometime soon.

Some genetic (or perhaps an effect of those acetone fumes I inhaled as a child whilst assembling plastic automobile models) quirk in my brain causes grammar and spelling errors to blink at me in neon, and a mean OCD streak forces me to fix them. Even so, I'm still a Wiki neophyte -- I don't even know how to format this user page, and I'm only now learning how to do references. My lame excuse for not knowing/doing more (and, coincidentally, the general mantra for my life) is embodied in that 1966 hit song (am I dating myself?) Time Won't Let Me. (Where DO those prolific editors get all that time?! 11,333 edits per year works out to 43.4 edits each and every weekday, which would consume $1 1/2$ hours per day at a rate of 2 minutes per edit.) Perhaps some day...

Why Martian? Well, Martin was already taken. And some people who know me...

In the meantime, I discovered this meter—just didn't know what it was actually tracking. Now I see that in fact it displays the current level of vandalism across Wikipedia—not my personal vandalism (which of course I trust will always read zero).