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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

2008-10-12

  • 06:46 UTC gloriosa daisy

    rudbeckia hirta -- maybe 'autumn colors'. (i sure will have a long list to ask the butchart gardens plant identifiers next time.)

2008-10-11

2008-10-10

  • 05:08 UTC single dahlias

    don't know which cultivar since there are about a gazillion. i remember when dahlias were those big, stiff balls, and i thought them boring. but these days there are a lot that i like, mostly single and collarette variants. i wouldn't grow this particular one; it's not a colour combination i like -- but it looked nicely dramatic,

    rain rain rain. i mostly slept, read, and worked in lightroom. i also got a beta copy of photoshop CS4, which is very different from CS2.

    the news for the reformatories today wasn't good: the federal parliamentary budget officer released his report on the projected cost of the war in afghanistan, and it's more than double what the reformatories have been telling us -- pretty much what a couple of other sources have said recently.

    he also said said it’s impossible to come up with an accurate number because there are many variables and not all the government departments involved have provided enough information. and he warned that the figures are so ill-defined that the war might threaten the government's long-term budget projections as expected surpluses decrease.

    ah yes, these "conservatives" are so good for our wallets. (nevermind the other problems with being this involved with a war on foreign soil, a war the US mostly pissed away after getting us involved.)

2008-10-09

  • 07:48 UTC PSA: check your voter registration
    Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

    if you live in colorado, indiana, ohio, michigan, nevada, north carolina, alabama, georgia, or louisiana, check your registration with local election officials. don't wait until election day! even if you were to be allowed to fill in a provisional ballot, these are not always counted because they require extra verification.

    don't let yourself be disenfranchised. there might not be any purpose to those violations to begin with, but i can guarantee you that the republicans will have lists of "ineligible" voters and will challenge anyone who is on those lists.

    read the article for details.
  • 06:42 UTC suck-u-lent


    only threatening rain today! cut the pieces for the paramour's bed.

    the reformatories steadily dropping in the polls over the last week is starting to get me excited.

2008-10-08

  • 07:29 UTC cyclamen


    rain rain ... wait a second. it cleared up! so i went to home depot to buy lumber for building the paramour's bed.

    canada post now wants the person to whom a package is addressed to pick it up zirself. this is cumbersome when two people who live in the same household frequently pick up each other's packages.

    i backslid (without shame, even) and watched the debate, largely because it is more fun to watch the daily show and colbert if one's seen the original. ah, i am so politically evolved, eh. now i want a tshirt that says "i'd vote for THAT one".

2008-10-07

  • 07:29 UTC south african daisy

    osteospermum.

    rain rain rain. lightroom good, outside not so much. mostly worked on keyword taxonomy today.

2008-10-06

  • 04:46 UTC etude in green


    rain rain rain. i drank coffee and ran a whole bunch of photos through lightroom (my favourite digital image management software) in preparation for actually trying to sell them. nice, quiet sunday.

    now that the mccain campaign has seriously dipped into the slime well with its accusations of "obama associates with terrorists" and the obama campaign seems poised to shoot back with "let us remind you of the keating five", i think it'll be relatively easy to mostly withdraw from watching US politics. mind, i don't think these are equally slimy, but i simply don't want to watch this type of fight. i've never participated in food fights either, and think frat initiations are inane. i'll tune back in on november 4th where i'm hoping indiana will be too close to call.
  • 01:59 UTC BC hydro brutality
    these are mainly for the paramour and the *poing* so as to see how BC hydro really went to town this year with the tree killing. :) unfortunately, none of this helps the landlord (who's after a better view from his living room, which the cutting of those three trees did not provide).


    bacchus and bang helped with the survey.

2008-10-05

  • 05:55 UTC kissed by droplets

    charles austin, england 1973.

    rain rain rain. i did nothing today, after an early phone call ripped me from a lovely dream. oh, except i calculated how much lumber i'll need for the paramour's new bed. just need to figure out the cut list. i should have a program for that; it's a bit of a pain to do manually.

    also, i need to stop obsessively refreshing fivethirtyeight.com.

2008-10-04

  • 06:40 UTC mystery tree/shrub


    from butchart gardens. i don't have a clue what it is. :)

    rain rain rain. had dinner with P and discussed mainly what all i want to store in the fo'c'sle and what sort of space i need to work and sleep. we might not be able to do the circular staircase. i didn't talk about making it all organic (art nouveau-ish); i might later. or not. it's bound to be expensive and P has never built anything like that, and this is his last boat.

    i've barely read the new bailout plan (but i've seen the pork hidden in it, which i consider more offensive than usual), and now i find this article at forbes, which claims contrary to wide-spread panicky statements, bank loans have not dried up. WTF?

2008-10-03

  • 07:13 UTC falls of grass

    this is one i'll have to inquire with butchart gardens about, but i suspect it's hakonechloa, japanese forest grass. i've never seen anything quite so bright growing in full shade; i want. it looks really lovely when planted in great swaths too.

    rain rain rain. bacchus is completely back to normal.

    i slept on our new memory foam mattress topper last night, and had the best sleep. i am glad i didn't buy the thinner, less dense (and cheaper) version i found locally, but ordered this one from bergad in pennsylvania, based on favourable online reviews while i did research on memory foam. it arrived here quickly, and with free shipping (to canada!) -- which was alas eaten up by UPS's ripoff brokerage charges. all in all it was still way cheaper than tempurpedic, and it's much higher quality than the local storebrand imitations.

    it's 3" thick, and denser than anything i've found elsewhere. when lying on my old futon on our fold-out couchbed, i can feel every piece of wooden support dig into my body, but with this mattress on top i don't feel a thing.

    the cats all totally love it. i had 4 of them at once on the bed last night. it's made for happy-paw kneading.
  • 04:59 UTC vice-presidential candidates debate
    you know, that sexy puritan thing with the down-home folksy accent and the cute winking at the camera totally does not work for me when i am thinking "future {vice}president of the USA". substance? what substance? soundbitey snarks do no substance make.

    that looked like tina fey up there on the podium, not like a serious candidate. i wanted to make LOLcat captions.
  • 03:04 UTC go, richard trumka!
    an impassioned speech against racism by the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. i especially like the standing ovation after he says "there is only one really, really bad reason to vote against obama". this is an extremely important speech IMO.


    via [info]kightp; thank you.

2008-10-02

  • 03:50 UTC fuchsia


    the colour is named after the flower, and was first recorded in england in 1892. like that whole bluish red range around magenta it's another one of those colours i only like in nature, with lots of green around.

    did you know that in 1949, the colour names of crayola crayons were reformed to become more scientific (thank you, wikipedia)?

    bacchus is doing fine today; he was still a little slow this morning, but later on he walked with me, eliminated without problems, jumped up on his usual spots, and glared at cal and bang, which is all perfectly normal. probably the vet threat worked. :)

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