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piranha

about me

email: piranha@gooroos.com

hi. i am piranha (pronounced pi-RUN-ya). i know you prefer UseRealNames, but i thank you kindly for not forcing it on me. i believe trust is earned, not contained in a name, and i will endeavour to earn yours since you give me this space. i have not used my given name in 30 years, and i am a little strange when it comes to names; i have several i consider real, but other people who don't yet know me seem generally not to understand. little wry grin. names i consider real to me at this time are piranha, alix, and pleonastic. i'm trying to use AlixPiranha over on the TaoRiver Wiki Hive, but it looks really odd to me, not like "me" at all. sorry. :/

[de]hallo. ich bin piranha (sprich pi-RAN-ja). ich weiss, dass ihr UseRealNames bevorzugt. ich danke euch dafür, dass ihr mich nicht dazu zwingen werdet. ich glaube, dass vertrauen erworben werden muss und nicht am namen hängt. ich will mich bemühen, das eure zu erwerben, da ihr mir hier raum gebt. ich habe meinen zugegebenen namen seit 30 jahren nicht verwendet - ich bin ein wenig komisch, was meinen namen angeht. ich habe mehrere namen, die ich als "wirklich" betrachte. andere leute, die mich nicht kennen, verstehen das oft nicht * kleines trockenes grinsen *. namen, die ich zur zeit als "wirklich" ansehe, sind: piranha, alix, und pleonastic. drüben auf dem TaoRiver Wiki Hive versuche ich AlixPiranha zu verwenden, aber es erscheint mir echt fremd - überhaupt nicht "ich". t'schuldigung. :/

my portrait is a picture of the real me. i'm in general very open with things that are mine to be open with (i am also a strong believer in the right to privacy). the following websites are where i am present on the net:

piranha's tank – my livejournal userinfo

photographs – am slow in uploading, but at least something is there

my profile on orkut – membership required. temporary; i am not a big fan of social software of this type.

gooroos software – my company; we write customized plugins and scripts for Alias's high-end 3D animation product Maya.

here's my FOAF file and here you can explore the FOAF world with the FOAF Explorer.

i am "pir" on the #wiki, #wiki-de, and #onebigsoup IRC channels. see WikiChannel to find out more.

2005-08-19 – alas life has had other plans for me, which is why i've been absent for so long. planning to return, however.


most of my activity has not been on the web, but on usenet. google will find roughly 12,500 articles (good grief!) by me. and that's only since i bought my own domain. i co-administer the big-8 of usenet, and the moderation database for all moderated newsgroups on usenet.

[de] der großteil meiner tätigkeit findet nicht im web, sondern im usenet statt. google findet ungefähr 12,500 artikel (puh!) von mir. und das erst seit ich mir eine eigene domain gekauft habe. ich bin einer der manager der big-8 im usenet und der moderatoren-datenbank für alle moderierten newsgroups.

i am brandnew to wikis, but i love the concept. i've been a member of online communities since the early 1970's when i first encountered PLATO, and i am very much interested in adding a lot of the information i've accumulated over the years to the corpus of the PublicDomain. i'm a strong believer in the gift culture, in sharing information, in teaching each other. and the better we can interconnect the multitude of public fora now in existence the happier i'll be. i'm a systems analyst / programmer by trade, i support the open source movement, and i hope that i can use my expertise to help build something interesting.

[de] ich bin brandneu in wikis, aber ich finde das konzept großartig. seit den frühen 70ern, als ich zum ersten mal auf PLATO stieß, bin ich ein mitglied von online-gemeinschaften. ich bin sehr daran interessiert informationen - die ich über die jahre angesammelt habe - in den korpus der PublicDomain einzufügen. ich bin fest überzeugt von der geschenkkultur, davon, dass wir informationen miteinander teilen sollten und uns gegenseitig lehren sollten. wenn es uns gelänge, viele foren im netz miteinander zu verbinden, so würde mich das sehr glücklich machen. beruflich bin ich ein systemanalytiker / programmierer, unterstütze die open source bewegung, und hoffe, dass ich meine erfahrung dazu verwenden kann, mithelfen, etwas interessantes zu errichten.

i speak english, dutch, german, some french, a little swedish, a wee bit of russian, and have just started to learn japanese, and seeing a number of pages here translated into different languages has just added to the notion that this might be a good place for me. i view myself primarily as a citizen of the world, not as a member of just one nation state.

[de] ich spreche englisch, niederländisch, deutsch, etwas französisch, ein bisschen schwedisch, ein noch kleineres bisschen russisch, und ich habe begonnen, japanisch zu lernen. als ich gesehen habe, dass hier eine anzahl von seiten in unterschiedliche sprachen übersetzt worden war, liess mich das denken, dass hier der richtige ort für mich sei. ich sehe mich primär als weltbürger, nicht als ein mitglied einer einzigen nation.

my motto is: embracing the power of "and", since i am interested in just about everything, and think there are usually not just two but several sides to each story. :)

all my contributions on CommunityWiki are hereby placed in the PublicDomain unless otherwise indicated.

what does that mean? it means that i don't concern myself with my own copyright on wikis, that i don't want to worry about it, don't want to talk about it endlessly, don't want to defend it, don't want to attach conditions to it – i just want to give my stuff to the corpus of human knowledge. i realize this is not really helpful unless somebody can figure out which text i wrote, and i am not going to indicate that on each page (i think that would feel slightly rude to me, to go against CW's stated licenses). i am using this notice mainly as a flag to indicate my attitude about text i write on wikis.

practical goals

i am particularly interested in creating a facility to allow a person to log everything zie write anywhere (usenet, IRC, LiveJournal, any wiki, online diary, any blog, IM) and store it in a database on zir home machine from which zie can easily feed (parts of) it back out (depending on some as-yet-to-be-determined markup) to whoever would like to see it.

musings

it's very interesting to me how very differently i react to the "atmosphere" of different wikis, what things encourage versus deter me from participating, what things confuse me, what rubs me the wrong way, what delights me. a lot of those things are very subtle.

useful links

to do

write down thoughts about plain talk for FormOfWriting

my wiki connection tree

what is this? an experiment of sigi and MattisManzel, connecting people who care about wiki. how is it different from FOAF? sigi says FOAF is like a meadow while the connection tree is like, well a tree. :) that's about all i understand of it, but i like the way it looks. see WikiFolks and WikiDe:VerbindungsBaum.

*piranha **mattis ***sunir ***christophe ****anthere *****yann ****arnaud ****bayle ****florence ****heather ****karl *****charles ****laurent ****luc ****pierre ****seb ****serge ****sylvie ***helmut ***luigi **sigi ***karlos ****martin ***marti **lion

comments and messages

Welcome to CommunityWiki, Alix! – BayleShanks

Welcome Alix. They have real frightening teeth. Interesting to watch through the glass of an aquarium. But I wouldn't even hold my hand over the waters surface - do I know if they attack jumping? Maybe a good name for a boxing champion. I look forward to see your teeth here. And thanks for the compliment on multilingual.

Bienvenue Alix.

[fr]toujours intéressé pour développer le WikiAquarium ;)

[en]thank you, Bayle. the seahare is amazing; i've never seen one alive. [de] danke, Mattis – ich beisse nicht zu hart solang jemand es nicht verdient :). [fr] merci, Christophe; je visiterai bientôt. ;)

wow, i love the language stuff, and how easy it is to read contributions here. that's just really exciting. bounce.

Sunir – wave. talk to me anytime.

they're fun to hold, too. this page has a another pictures of it.

Welcome, Piranha! It's great to see you here. :)

Piranha, excellent German intro, few mistakes, I'm pretty happy to know you speak German this good. It has been little things in German going on here since Helmut Leitner and the bunch of other German speakers left shortly after Community was created.

thanks for the welcomes, and the compliment – it's been a looong time since i last spoke/wrote german, i feel incredibly rusty. it'll be good to translate some of the core pages here, which i'll start with after finishing this one.

[en] .. and now that 64-bit address spaces are possible, it's theoretically possible to do away with file systems and just have all objects accessible by their adress. (personally i think we may need 128 bit for this but still…)
[de]http://www.wikiwiki.de/newwiki/pmwiki.php/Wiki/DasDateienProblem was hälts du davon? --sigi

Hallo piranha! Ich habe mir die Freiheit genommen ein wenig an Deiner deutschen Übersetzung zu feilen. Jetzt entspricht es eher dem was ich als Deutschsprachiger vom englischen Text erwarten würde. Ich habe mich bemüht ein wenig von Deinem Stil zu erhalten, aber leider verliert es dabei trotzdem viel des Charakters. Schmeiss es ohne schlechtes Gewissen weg, wenn's Dir nicht gefällt! – DavidSchmitt

hey there, David! nice to see you here! no, i don't mind at all, i really appreciate the corrections, style can come later. thank you! however, i have one request – it's not very wiki-like, but i would learn a lot better if y'all didn't change the translation i wrote, but put your changes into a copy right beneath. i've tried to track back through revisions, but that's complicated, especially if there are several ones in a row. alas i don't have an eidetic memory :). i'll do the integration myself after seeing where your translation differs from mine. would you mind?

WikiDe? performs better now. Martin switched some cachestuff off. It still hasn't but 128 MB Ram. I'm pretty positive Martin will soon put more, so that we can fully use it. I like the new PmWiki version. I even finally understood the clusterstuff!

Hi piranha! yes, if you could take the image I put on my page and shrink it that would be fab! or the other picture at http://markdilley.blogspot.com. Thanks, MarkDilley

RSS from my journal

2009-07-05

2009-07-03

2009-07-02

2009-07-01

2009-06-30

2009-06-29

  • 06:48 UTC hard as iron
    big, old, rusty iron chain, covered with barnacles and kelp, almost entirely rusted through in parts

    i like that most things humans manufacture eventually get eaten by nature. i know, that sucks for archaeologists and others who investigate our past, and i do feel that loss. but deep down i'm rooting for the planet (no embalming desired after i croak either; feed me to the fishes).

2009-06-28

  • 08:01 UTC apocalyptic wasteland
    dark water, ships, cranes with mountain in background, under grey-blue-pink sky bisected by glowing contrail

    or sun-lit contrail above the peaceful ladysmith harbour.

    your guess is as good as mine.

2009-06-27

2009-06-26

  • 06:48 UTC fireweed
    tall weed with bright magenta flowers against grey wavy ocean background

    this seems a little early for fireweed (epilobium angustifolium).

2009-06-24

2009-06-23

2009-06-22

  • 07:26 UTC infrared experiment
    glowy, whitish leaves; in IR green turns white

    no CCD filters were harmed in the taking of this picture; it's all photoshop. i really like how it came out, though maybe it's a bit too glowy.
  • 01:36 UTC advertising by Misogynists Ltd
    i have alas no chance to boycott bacardi because i so rarely drink alcohol, and bacardi isn't on my list for those times. but if i did, oh man, i'd throw out even unopened bottles now.

    i'm mostly used to misogyny in ads directed at men, but this one is directed at women: all you need is an ugly girlfriend. bonus: it comes with a fat phobia chaser.

    and of course, my idea of ugly doesn't match bacardi's at all. WTF is wrong with these people? i mean, i know what's wrong, actually, but how come THEY don't see it?

    [ETA: the online ad was produced by israeli agency mccann digital. apparently the site has since been pulled, because bermudan-HQed bacardi isn't happy with its israeli affiliate. but, you know? not good enough, if you wait with the pulling until the shit hits the blogosphere.]

2009-06-21

  • 06:53 UTC alstroemeria confetti
    bunches of pink, blush, orange, yellow, purple peruvian dwarf lilies
  • 06:42 UTC ixnay on ableist language
    spurred by a post from the ever-thoughtful [info - personal]coffeeandink i think it's time that i attack my own ableist language. for example, i use terms such as "lame" and "dumb" to disparage myself, and i believe i should stop. not with the disparaging, mind, but with side-swiping disabled people while i am doing it.

    i'd never call a person with a disability "lame" or "crippled" to their face (or behind their back, or even just in my mind), and i thought that was good enough. i also used the justification that those terms i liked best were outdated. but i missed the fact that they still carry their history, and that people who're living with a disability are often all too aware of the history and of its remaining echoes, and how that affects their treatment today.

    saying "that was a lame excuse", or calling some software "cripple-ware", or using metaphors such as "the government remains deaf and blind to the plight of native peoples" still support society's negative attitudes and often false beliefs about disability. and why in the world should disabled people be designated the go-to folks for us temporarily abled folks expressing the particular suckiness of a situation? that seems quite wrong to me. and it goes deeper than being wrong because it hurts their feelings; it's also wrong because it reduces them to this one sucky thing, and because it gives altogether a false impression of what living with a disability is like.

    while it'll take some getting used to (old habits are hard to break), i don't consider it a hardship to do without those terms -- it's not like english has a shortage of colourful words if i really feel moved to insult. heck, it could be a fun challenge to come up with good ones that don't put down an already disadvantaged group.

    here's my starting list of words to no longer use to disparage something or somebody: blind, crazy, cretin, crippled, deaf, dumb, idiot, imbecile, insane, lame, moron, paranoid, psycho, retarded, schizo, spaz, stupid, using something as a crutch. please call me on them if you notice a slip-up. and you might consider your own use, at least in my journal. i am not gonna police them, but i appreciate mindfulness and support for a habit change.

    i don't doubt there are more words like that; feel free to share any you think are problematic, and why. i am consolidating comments on dreamwidth because i want to keep them all in one place for this.

EditNearLinks: PatrickAnderson PmWiki DavidSchmitt LiveJournal

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