I"m Al Macintyre, currently residing and working in Evansville, SW corner of Indiana, USA. Traditionally, irrespective of individual communities, my interests include:
Science Fiction;
Simulation games; and topics from my profession, as a midrange systems computer programmer. I am also a news-junkie and book-a-holic.
:
Disclaimer: any and all opinions expressed here are the opinions of AlMac (and any vandalism miscreants whose damage has not yet been repaired) and are not neccessarily endorsed nor held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia itself.
Plagarism warning: If I see an image I like anywhere on Wikipedia, and can figure out how to incorporate it on my user page, I will do so. But now I am holding off on this until the
WP:AUM crisis is resolved sufficiently so that Image newbies like me have how-to instructions to fix what we've done with minimum of hassle.
I just got invited to
Jury Duty, which I imagine will be a great addition to my continuing interesting life education. I do not yet know how much of that education I will be permitted to share with others ... confidentiality until case is over for example. I did not get selected. They asked really good questions, of the kind that belong here & in
Yahoo Answers.
I extend my sympathies to the people of the region of the latest terrorist attacks,
Miscellaneous
This user's future is so bright they have got to wear shades.
The copper sunbird (Cinnyris cupreus) is a species of passerine bird in the family
Nectariniidae. It is native to tropical Africa, its range extending from Senegal and Guinea in the west to South Sudan and Kenya in the east, and southwards to Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It feeds on nectar that it extracts from selected flowers, such as Calliandra spp., Leonotis leonurus, Syzygium spp., and Senegalia polyacantha. It also takes fruits, spiders and insects, some of which are caught while in flight. This female copper sunbird of the
subspeciesC. c. cupreus was photographed in a
Persian silk tree in
Kakum National Park, Ghana.Photograph credit:
Charles J. Sharp
Heavily defined with the aid of userboxes. Where I give links to various
WP articles about topics of interest to me, I have also been rather involved in editing many of those articles.
Userbox concept technique
plagiarism from
User:Ali K from
User:Redvers with help from
Wikipedia:Userboxes, assuming I can figure out how to work this concept (I not want wrap around vs. next sub-topic, nor do I want very wide pages, and I want the colors to be very readable to my aging eyes.).
Note that I have joined some projects, and identified interests, but made significant contributions, in only a few areas, and I often manage to get over-committed.
I am interested in helping out with the
Cyberlaw project. However, my
cyberlaw know-how is that of spending many decades in the computer professional trenches, having had computer security responsibilities for about 40 years, and having no formal training in the law, and not a lot of academic credentials.
I've been a bit heavy with suggestions on many
WP talk pages, while rather timid in actual article editing, other than where I tried to start new articles.
Computer Security
This is a major professional interest area, a great degree due to my career.
This user uses Wikipedia as a primary point of reference.
I have enjoyed reading
Science Fiction since I was a pre-teenager, then branched out into other genres. My apartment has grown cluttered with many things, including looking like a section of a library. I started the
Time travel in fiction article, which has exploded with numerous other contributors, and now there is a
Category:Time travel in fiction.
I enjoy many traditional games like
Go (board game) and not so traditional, although it has been a while since I played some of them.
Time Travel Game Designer
I have designed a few
Science FictionGames, such as
Time travel in fiction "Simulation". In my later life, I hope to put this stuff in the public domain, so that people can play my designs over the
Internet.
I have worked on the
Time travel article and
Time travel in fiction, in fact I started that secondary article, to split the growing content between the main article which presents
Time travel as being factually plausible, and the
Science Fiction perspective.
There are several boxes I need to figure out how to revise, that are not precise mesh with my interests, just in the neighborhood.
Locate the template. For example, color combinations are hostile to my eyesight through the browser I have used. I have heard that some of my solutions are hostile to other eyes as seen by other eyes through other browsers.
Wiki places I been intermittently pretty active so far (this list is far from exhaustive), excluding those already mentioned elsewhere in this collection.
There are some problems, but proportionally small compared to some other
Internet sites.
By Signal, I mean information that interests me.
By Noise, I mean people saying or writing stuff that gets in the way of me getting at the information I want to see.
Many discussion groups have a high ratio of noise to signal.
People misconstrue what we said (some deliberately), then attack what they say we said, which is not what we said.
There can be a lot of
Deja Vu (didn't we have this conversation already?)
Massive Value
User:AlMac/Wiki Start Map explodes this so the individual details are readable, and here's the
context from which I plagarized the diagram.
Lots of people have contributed information and links of great value, but there's lots more work to be done. We all can contribute to making a great service even greater.
Al not yet figured out how to rename this as self, without copying the image.
Watch out for Correct Speech
Be bold!
Wiki Correct Speech takes a bit of getting used to.
Not just be nice
Be Very Nice
Be Bold
But also be neutral
and find ways to do emphasis on steroids without resorting to 4 letter words
High Focus on Truth, without having to cite every assertiun in rigorous academic sense. Systems for
resolving disputes when different volunteers cannot reach a peaceable settlement in this community. However, there is the risk that the concensus committee approach will occasionally design a
camel in place of a
race horse.