User:Michaelpb

Hello! My name is Michael B, and I live in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.

Interests
I am especially interested in (and thus interested in editing)...
 * Computers -- I am currently working on a PHP Web Content Manager called Planet Mongo. I am working currently (2008) on the Condor Project at UW-Madison.
 * Martial Arts -- Kempo, Hapkido, Wing Chun, Tae Kwon Do, and others
 * Electronic music -- I enjoy Digital Hardcore, IDM, Breakcore and others, and produce under the aliases Smockpuppet, Tonal Discrepancy, Michael B, and Mark Skram.
 * Wikipedia -- (of course)

And have a casual interest in...
 * Classic movies, such as Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, or Orsen Welles.
 * Videogames
 * ASCII art -- I wrote the ascii art comic strip Top Hat Man
 * CCG / TCG, Nomic, Carcassonne (board game), Puerto Rico (board game)
 * Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Rocky Jones
 * Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, and The Lord of the Rings
 * The Wheel of Time fantasy series
 * Slavonic folk music, Russian opera, punk rock, postpunk, medieval rock, and many others. I have made a goal to understand every single type of music in the world.
 * Wargames, and RPGs
 * Robots, Pirates, and Ninjas -- Robot pirate ninjas exist, and they are totally cool.

Wikipedia Related Ideas and Projects
Here I'll briefly outline a few of the Wikipedia related projects that have been floating around in my head.

Wikatholon
Eventually, I hope to get a few friends together, split into two teams and have a Wikipedia editing contest: see how many pages you can edit in, say, three hours. It will be scored based on quality of edit (spelling mistakes, grammar etc are less valuable, while making new, good articles are more valuable), and will have a focus on being productive and fun, not focusing on being too competitive: I don't want it to lose the focus of improving Wikipedia and instead turn into spamming fluff or unverifiable content.

A Wikibook on Self Defense
I want to have something substantial completed before I wiki-ify it. It will be very narrowly focused on self-defense, with very little actually covering combat. The little that will cover combat will be very simple and to the point -- nothing fancy, just how to stun the aggressor long enough to get away.

Any comments, please feel free to spew away!