User:Mendel

I'm Rich, a geek from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I look remarkably like the handsome gentleman illustrated at right.

You can glean more info about me from my LiveJournal and its userinfo page, and my website.

For two days I was known as RichL, but ten years of being "mendel" on IRC won out.

I am engaged to the lovely Nyxie.

Toolbox
All of the following make using and contributing to Wikipedia easier for me:


 * The Mozex plugin for Mozilla, which lets me edit the contents of a textbox in the text editor of my choice
 * The Vim text editor with Wikipedia syntax mode
 * The Wikipedia link script in XChat on #wikipedia and #enrc.wikipedia
 * CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter, a Java recent changes ticker

Areas of Interest
In which I describe in a barely-organized manner the sorts of things I expect I might be contributing to based on my interests and history.

Computing
I'm a Unix system administrator and Perl programmer by trade, and while I only briefly studied formal computer science I expect I'll touch on that area here and there.

Sociology and Economics
I have an undergraduate degree in sociology which at times started looking like I might end up studying Economics instead. My areas of concentration at the time included deviance, labor theory, queer theory, and medical sociology.

Music
I studied jazz performance and computer music at the undergrad level for three years before switching into sociology. I play rock and jazz bass guitar, jazz and a bit of classic double bass, Irish traditional music on the flute and tinwhistle, and a bit of bodhrán and guitar.

Much of my listening time is filled with indie rock. The first article I wrote from scratch was on Canadian indie rock band Hot Hot Heat.

Aviation
I possess (but have not used for some time &mdash; in fact it expires any day now) a student pilot permit, and am predictably a bit of an aviation nut, although I'm certainly not an aviation historian. Nonetheless I expect I will be dabbling in some general aviation articles.

Physics
I have no formal training in physics whatsoever, but I might have enough understanding thereof to tweak articles toward the layman level.

Motorcycling
I am a neophyte motorcyclist, having picked up a license and a 1981 GS250T this summer and will find my way around relevant articles soon enough.

Full or nearly-full blame

 * Exploding sheep
 * Hot Hot Heat
 * Chieftains
 * Emily Stowe
 * Loyalist College
 * Banana bread (and the recipe that Nyxie uses)
 * Little Italy, Ottawa

Partial blame

 * Bodhrán
 * Mitel
 * Gentlemen's Quarterly
 * Tin whistle
 * Bagel (Montreal vs New York)
 * Folk etymology versus fake etymology, especially on pages that link to folk etymology
 * Sorting out what the heck pomelos are, and if they're different from pummelos (they aren't)

Photos

 * Bodhrán in Bodhrán
 * Betta splendens in Siamese fighting fish
 * Tugboats in Tugboat
 * Freshwater angelfish in Freshwater angelfish
 * Tin whistles in Tin whistle

To-do list

 * Fantastic Plastic Machine &mdash; Japanese lounge-pop "band" of dj Tomoyuki Tanaka
 * Private Copying &mdash; Peculiarities of Canadian music media tariffs
 * Marcel Breuer &mdash; Bauhaus architect and designer
 * Village Vanguard &mdash; seminal New York jazz club
 * Expand DLT &mdash; mechanics of drive and cartridge, stripes, DECtape history
 * Clamato &mdash; start with http://www.cincypost.com/2004/05/19/clam051904.html
 * Check performance numbers at Cessna 150 (>100 kt cruise?) and format like Cessna 152