User:Nickshanks

''“Here I am standing in a street with mud and a cow” — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia.

Nicholas George Shanks was born on 1 May 1981 at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, to a Scottish father and Hungarian mother. He was raised in West Bridgford before moving at age 18 to Hatfield to attend the University of Hertfordshire where he read Astrophysics.

Although presently a web developer at the Royal Opera House, in London's Covent Garden, Nicholas has won an Apple Design Award whilst working as a Cocoa programmer for Boinx Software of Bavaria, where he wrote Mac applications. Interests include learning languages (Gàidhlig, Latina, 日本語, Русский). Besides astrophysics, computing and linguistics, his interests include archaeology, paleontology, paleoanthropology, human and robotic spaceflight, terraforming, females, natural disasters and a plethora of other topics. His musical tastes include Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Die Prinzen, Chris Isaak, Jefferson Airplane, Peter Gabriel, The Steve Miller Band and U2 amongst many many others.

Languages
For anyone who's interested, I have an RP‐like non‐rhotic East Midlands accent with linking and intrusive [ɹ], and almost exclusively use a short /æ/ in words like grass, path, laugh, dance; exceptions being aunt, can't, half and calf. I read wh as in almost all cases, except where distinctions are significant (which witch?), and exhibit partial and sometimes inconsistant Yod dropping for example in lute, suit but not new, dune or Zeus. The words chew and juice may be pronounced both with and without /j/ with no apparent (to me) reason why I would choose one over the other, and I more frequently coalesce the noun tune to /ʧuːn/ than not; the verb to tune is never coalesced. I have written an IPA transcription of myself reading the above passage and made an audio recording of myself reading the passage from the English Speech Accent Archive.

Computing

 * Apple Advanced Typography – wrote article
 * (Apple typography) – added section on Apple Advanced Typography, now moved to seperate article
 * Comparison of web browsers – added two browsers
 * Comparison of layout engines (CSS) – created article

Events

 * Hatfield rail crash – created article
 * List of rail accidents in the United Kingdom – created article

Locations

 * Hatfield – greatly expanded, categorised
 * Hatfield House – expanded content
 * West Bridgford – re-wrote article, categorised
 * Bayfordbury – created stub
 * Old Market Square – re‐written and cleaned up
 * Rongbuk Monastery — created stub

Space

 * Hot Jupiter – re&#x2010;wrote article from scratch
 * Extrasolar planet – corrected a lot of errors
 * Planetary migration – created stub
 * Rossiter–McLaughlin effect — created article
 * HD 189733 — created article
 * HARPS – created article
 * NGC 2403 – created article
 * Hodge 301 – created article
 * 41450 Medkeff – created stub
 * SN 1604 – added table
 * SN 1987A – added table
 * SN 2004dj – created article
 * Geoffrey Marcy – created article
 * R. Paul Butler – created stub
 * Debra Fischer – created stub
 * Didier Queloz – created stub
 * Машиностроительный Завод им. Мясищева — created stub
 * Category:Astronauts – organised by nationality
 * Template:Minor planet – created template
 * Template:Supernova – created template
 * Template:Galaxy – created template
 * Template:Star – created template
 * Astronomical objects project member

Miscellaneous

 * Baby boomer – re-wrote article as non-US-centric. moved existing contents to Post-WW2 baby boom and Year 2000 baby boom
 * List of English words with diacritics — created stub
 * Nik og Jay – created stub
 * Kent's Cavern 4 — created article
 * Iceberg B-15 — created article
 * Lunar Government — created article
 * List of fonts in Mac OS X — created article
 * History of copper currency in Sweden — wrote article
 * Category:British archaeology – reorganised sites into subcategory

Images
All images created by me are licensed through a Creative Commons Attribution license of one form or another, some require Share Alike, some just attribution. My photographs have the additional condition that I be notified by email explaining when and where they are to be used. I retain copyright on these works, unless otherwise noted. See english gallery (content in English) and commons gallery (language neutral content).

Photographs

 * Photograph of myself
 * San Francisco City Hall
 * Lombard Street, San Francisco
 * Big Sur, California
 * Pebble Beach, California
 * Lone Cypress, Pebble Beach
 * Hősök tere, Budapest
 * Palace of Art, Budapest

Diagrams & Artwork

 * Extrasolar planets
 * Mesoplanets
 * Large rocky planets
 * Rossiter-McLaughlin effect
 * Delta 4 rocket family
 * Fonts supplied with Mac OS X
 * Gold price, Troy Oz morning fix, 2001–2006
 * Territories under control of Britain
 * Territories under control of Britain (1897)
 * Territories under control of Britain (1921)
 * English‐speaking countries (2005)
 * General election seats won in Northern Ireland, 1997-2005
 * General election seats won in Northern Ireland, 1997-2005, including 2000 South Antrim by‐election

SVG Optimisations

 * The following were optimised by me in a text editor. I did not draw the originals.


 * Info icon (reduced to 1,315 bytes from 4,351 bytes; 70% reduction)
 * Padlock icon (reduced to 17,658 bytes from 27,265 bytes; 35% reduction)
 * Y Ddraig Goch (reduced to 122 KB from 245 KB; 50% reduction)
 * UK general election results, 2005 (uses classes instead of inline style attributes)
 * BBC Computer Literacy Project owl logo

Wikipedia

 * Notice Board
 * Meet-ups

Space

 * (Xena & Gabrielle)
 * (Santa & Rudolph)
 * (Buffy)
 * (, Easter bunny)

Friends

 * Rebecca Heineman

Software

 * HexEdit
 * ResKnife
 * Alkor
 * BoinxTV

Subpages

 * /Multilingual Macintosh software

Reference
© Copyright 2004-2008 Nicholas Shanks.

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