User:Xyzt1234

Born in Lisbon in 1954, male, married university professor, of the MD-PhD sort; currently teaches medicine students to use word processors and spreadsheets.

Main hobby is was photography, with a couple individual exhibitions.

Many photos of mine are on Usefilm and DeviantArt.

Contributes to the English Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikipedia, Wikiversity and Wikiquote, where Xyzt1234 user pages exist.

=Pages I've been about=
 * Abraxas
 * Alchemy
 * Almendres Cromlech
 * Anta Grande do Zambujeiro
 * Carl Jung
 * Escoural Cave
 * Évora
 * Fernando Pessoa
 * Kishin Shinoyama
 * Portuguese Proverbs

=This User =

This user
 * remembers smoking in buses, trains, airplanes and hospital infirmaries as a matter of course
 * flew on a DC-3, a Noratlas, a DC-6 and a Caravelle
 * flew a Chipmunk and a T-37 as student
 * remembers carbon paper, copy paper, and retyping an entire work because of a single typo
 * had his life saved by this new medication, tetracycline
 * remembers having thrived on unpasteurized cow milk
 * was considered badly retarded by his rather illiterate Portuguese primary teachers
 * remembers when there was no TV in Portugal, no FM, and only 4 radio stations
 * remembers using London-style red phone boots, double-decker buses and mail pillar boxes in Lisbon
 * remembers having sent and received telegrams
 * made standard 8 mm movies in black and white
 * made and edited 16 mm movies in color
 * remembers watching 70 mm movies
 * remembers when bikinis were still unthinkable if not forbidden in Portugal, and that many people sunbathed in dress or suit
 * remembers houses without bathroom (or kitchen, or plumbing) and still knows of many within a 2 km radius of his country house
 * was taught set theory, probability theory, algebraic structures and basic calculus in 10-11th grade
 * remembers when photocopiers were so expensive and far-fetched that stencil stayed an option
 * remembers that the poorest women and children went barefoot
 * knows first-hand that you have to kill if you want to eat (plants are alive too)
 * was born when world population was two billion something
 * once thought that the year 2000 was beyond his wildest imagination
 * once thought that autofocus was an interesting possibility for photo cameras
 * remembers calling operator to phone out of town
 * briefly operated a telephone switchboard
 * remembers Lisbon almost without cars and no outdoors
 * remembers the Tagus with dolphins and clear waters and seeing the bottom
 * received only the smallpox, polio and tetanus vaccines as a child
 * had mumps, chickenpox, measles, epidemic hepatitis and you name it and feels great, thanks
 * remembers taking six hours by car from Lisbon to Oporto, about the same to Évora and eight or so to Serpa
 * learned to use a slide ruler and tables of logarithms with six decimal places
 * remembers having used a time-sharing teletype with BASIC
 * learned to program with a Ti-58 calculator
 * this user's first personal computer was a Sinclair ZX80
 * this user first did word processing with LocoScript running on CP/M on an Amstrad PCW 8256 computer
 * used WordStar 4 as a text processor (though WordPerfect 5.1 was far better)
 * first computer at workplace was a Wang_2200
 * remembers colleagues who used punch tape and programmed directly in octal with the computer's console switches
 * used punch cards
 * remembers using MS-DOS 3.1
 * and Windows 3.0 and that it wasn't very good
 * was the sysop of a BBS he set up working
 * remembers when there were no ads nor commercial sites on the Web. And when there was no Web.
 * is a Civilization IV and Flight Simulator junkie and flies on the IVAO network
 * was a doctor when hearing the patient and a thorough physical examination were important and would have loved to have worked for the Médecins_Sans_Frontières, but thing$ being a$ they are...
 * this user etc.