User talk:Cernen/Archive 1 - Birth to 03:55, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

HOW DARE YOU DISPUTE MY NEUTRALITY! RAAAAGH! Cernen 12:04, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I DISPUTE YOUR NEUTRALITY OF DISPUTING YOUR OWN NEUTRALITY! And welcome to Wikipedia, like. i cant be bothered to put one of those massive fangly welcome templates in. -- jeffthejiff  ( talk ) 10:06, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Thank you, jeffthejiff, for not sticking one of those massive fangly welcome templates in. I appreciate it. ^_^ And I no longer dispute my own neutrality. Heh. Cernen 10:09, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

A Cernen's Plusbox
Thanks. That made me laugh. I'm going to put it on my user page somewhere. I took the Personality Disorder Test yesterday and scored 62% on the Schizotypal. In other words I have "thought or perceptual distortions, and peculiarities of behavior" as you noted in the box.

By the way:

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~&#126;); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help pages
 * Tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Manual of Style

As per above. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 21:48, 17 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Thank you for applying the M.F.W.T., and I look forward to being a certificated Wikipedian. Congratulations on your score...I think? Cernen 02:15, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

List of White Americans
That sir was a very racist thing to say. And that's coming from someone who is part Native American myself.Gateman1997 08:06, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I apologize if you took the above as name calling. I however don't see speaking the truth as name calling. Whites aren't any less deserving or more deserving of recognition then any other race. To say otherwise is racist, even if Whites do make up the majority in 49 states. Maybe I'm skewed by the fact I live in the one state where they aren't the majority anymore *shrug*. I would just ask you be more careful about that in the future.Gateman1997 19:31, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Double plus thank you
Thanks for the Cernan Plusbox (pussbox?). I had a good chuckle and longed for the days when I got gold stars in 4th grade (seriously). --Tiger Marc ROAR! 17:32, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Intruder Alert (beep)
Hi, I'm Puppet, and I just intruded on your privacy. I fixed a broken userbox, if that's ok by you. I also supplied a Matrix cross; it's only a quick job on Photoshop, so feel free to kill it. --Mas  t  er of Puppets 01:15, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Hello again, just thanking you very much for my Christmas present (the Plusbox). If you would like, I could design a better image... I'm feeling very generous, and besides, I don't have much to do these days anyway. --Mas  t  er of Puppets 18:43, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

aligment templates
Please see here for proposed D&D userbox templates xaosflux  Talk  / CVU  05:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Response posted on resp. talk page; gorgeous. Cernen 11:43, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
 * New message here xaosflux  Talk  / CVU

Limits?
Now that you have 70+ boxes (I think I had about 40 until I subsumed them into a sub-page) I am wondering whether there might arise an issue of limits for the average user? I have had crit from one fellow person, and am wondering that maybe there is a point where users will be required to limit the number per page due to technical reasons? Just a point to make, before some authoritarian minded admin person decides to call the shots? Just to be totally contradictory, I'll load a couple of my boxes for you. Keep sane. Beware the gooks, not the clowns! vcxlor 11:12, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

You are welcome to cleanup my userpage userbox - but I do have a friend who is an admin who watches my user page (and others_) who fiercely defends anything so I may have to unrevert a revert if he's not off line due tochristmas... I have no programming experience so its interesting looking at the 3 or 4 ways of laying stuff out... vcxlor 10:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

WikiProject Userboxes
The WikiProject you supported has been created, so please visit it and consider joining. Thanks! Ian13ID:540053 18:14, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


 * About the page, Userboxes/Non-ISO Languages, there is a mistake I don't quite know how to fix. Under gb (gibberish) there is a template for users that are from Great Britian, found at  . Can you fix this? —  M o e   ε  22:42, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I have now fixed. Ian13ID:540053 20:27, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Also, thanks for your sandbox, I remembered ending up there once before, and liking it, so I hunted my histroy, and found it, and have made the userboxes page from that :) Ian13ID:540053 20:27, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Totally forgot about the Wiki. Looks like I'm on a break, I suppose. ^_^ Good hunting. Cernen 01:07, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Arranging Userboxes
I now have on top, and   on bottom, of my list of userboxes, to enforce one single column, because when I first started listing them, they went three across, wrapping off my browser screen. Yours are two across the page. How do you accomplish that? I went to edit you to copy the code, without actually changing anything, but did not see anything relevant. I still need to figure out how to change colors to make combinations pleasant to my old eyes, through rose colored glasses of IE, without getting combinations that are ugly to users of other browsers. User:AlMac|(talk) 03:47, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I use...well...not IE. If there's any way you can change browsers, do it. IE isn't W3 standards compliant, uses a lot of proprietary code and processing and rendering etc etc. Mine are three across because Safari and Firefox are both smart enough to figure out "Oh, there's no line breaks here, better just go ahead and set this one over here and that one over there. Oh, not enough room to the edge of the screen, better put the next one on the bottom." Mine do go 2 across if I resize my browser window. It's just another one of those reasons why I switched from PC to Mac, I suppose (though I had switched to Firefox a while before that...

"old fogie" out of practice as a student
Thanks for your clarification. At your convenience, could you also look at my 2 pictures effort where I have been unsuccessfully trying to reverse engineer what should not be rocket science. I do not think this is a browser reason, but rather a dense nut behind the wheel. User:AlMac|(talk) 03:11, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your help. I immediately put your solution to good use, and let the Usability Project know. I hope this is acceptable, because I really want to help the disabled as well as the everyone. Perhaps a separate userbox will be needed to address that down the road. User:AlMac|(talk) 08:22, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Al Mac finds another interest
A few days ago Wikiproject Cyberlaw got started to help some Harvard Law School students learn about Internet collaporation, in which part of their class is on our Wiki. If you visit the project page, then link to the student groups, then from there to their contributions, you can see that they have been extremely productive. I think I can be more helpful helping them. See talk pages of the project and the individual student groups. Hopefully your vacation helped you escape getting embroiled in the userbox administration war, which is probably still raging, but the combatants rather wore out. Briefly (from my memory, so I may have misspelled a bit here, because I know if I go to the relevant pages to check things, I am going to get sucked in again):
 * There is the meta tag problem described at WP:AUM and a general lack of how-to for novices, other than community helping each other
 * There is the question of whether fair use images belong in user space userboxes
 * Over Christmas holidays, some pro-life interests used the user box categories to locate each other to abuse consensus building with other interests.
 * A number of administrators feel that the userboxes as eye candy are a distraction from the purpose of us being here to build an encyclopaedia
 * One administrator (Kelly Martin first, Tom Slidel later) started to delete hundreds of user boxes without going through the approval process, claiming that is too cumbersome a process.
 * This led to a storm of protest for not following procedure that applies to non-administrators
 * Some of that protest was far from polite NPOV
 * This led to some of the protesters being blocked
 * Other administrators thought both the mass deletions, and the blocking, were unreasonable, and so several started undeleting what had been deleted, and blocking the other administrators they thought had been unreasonable
 * When blocked administrators got back on board, they claimed they had been blocked inappropriately, and they blocked those that had blocked them
 * More than one administrator engaged in mass deletions, so we at risk of 3 revert rule on userbox images. I think there is a similar rule on multiple administrators blocking each other.
 * This led to WP:RFC on
 * each administrator doing the mass deletions, without going through process
 * The one on Kelly Martin ran to hundreds of people commenting on scores of propositions, making it almost impossible to grok the big picture
 * I think Phil Wolf deserves a Barnstar for renaming the original into archives and restarting it with a digest of the gripes on each side, but a ton of people felt there was something inappropriate about Phil's action, and since in the resulting debate, it sure looks like the majority is not interested in compromise, Phil was one of several moderates to bail out of the discussion
 * Several other contributors also bailed out of Wiki, because of how this whole mess got handled, and the strengths of views contrary to theirs
 * several administrators engaged in mass blocking associated with the dispute
 * policy debate on what is appropriate in userboxes
 * request for arbitration, in which at least one of the arbitrators remarks seemed to me to reflect not even they are cool and calm and even handed about this
 * appeals to Jimbo on his talk page
 * I posted a suggestion, that in the interests of rethinking the deletion approval process so that it is less cubersome, Y"all might find value in reading the old classic The Mythical Man Month since the number of Wiki administrators probably exceed the project size that book solves.
 * Most all of the work of the Userboxes project has now been nominated for deletion.

So in your Wiki vacation you probably managed to avoid quite a firestorm. Since I am still a nebie to many aspects of Wiki, I do not know if this is business as usual, that has managed to escape my notice until now. User:AlMac|(talk) 00:37, 6 January 2006 (UTC)