Recent Articles

Mendel

I'm Rich, a geek from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I look remarkably like the handsome gentleman illustrated at right.

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Genesis

Timwi and I were talking on LiveJournal's IRC channel about BambooWeb, and next thing I know I've spent a couple hours reading policies and style guides, and a whole weekend writing a couple of articles and fixing up more and enjoying RC patrol, and it seems like I might stick around.

You can glean more info about me from and its , and my .

For two days I was known as RichL, but ten years of being "mendel" on IRC won out.

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Toolbox

All of the following make using and contributing to BambooWeb easier for me:

• My
• The plugin for Mozilla, which lets me edit the contents of a textbox in the text editor of my choice
• The Vim text editor with BambooWeb syntax mode
• The BambooWeb link script in XChat on #BambooWeb and #enrc.BambooWeb

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Areas of Interest

In which I describe in a barely-organized manner the sorts of things I expect I might be contributing to based on my interests and history.

Computing

I'm a Unix system administrator and Perl programmer by trade, and while I only briefly studied formal computer science I expect I'll touch on that area here and there.

I'm currently employed by Mitel and thus might be able to lend some help in telecommunications, particularly voice over IP.

Sociology and Economics

I have an undergraduate degree in sociology which at times started looking like I might end up studying Economics instead. My areas of concentration at the time included deviance, labor theory, queer theory, and medical sociology.

Music

I studied jazz performance and computer music at the undergrad level for three years before switching into sociology. I play rock and jazz bass guitar, jazz and a bit of classic double bass, Irish traditional music on the flute and tinwhistle, and a bit of bodhrán and guitar.

Much of my listening time is filled with indie rock. The first article I wrote from scratch was on Canadian indie rock band Hot Hot Heat.

Physics

I have no formal training in physics whatsoever, but I might have enough understanding thereof to tweak articles toward the layman level.

Canadiana

I'm a twenty-minute drive from the National Archives of Canada, Parliament Hill, and similar institutions, and am looking forward to opportunities to do research based on original sources.

The geographic areas of Canada which interest me most are:

• Belleville, Ontario and surrounding Hastings County, Ontario, where I grew up;
• Montreal, Quebec and region, where I lived for seven years while attending McGill University and working at Concordia University;
• Ottawa, Ontario and Hull, Quebec, where I live now.

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Articles for which I take some blame

Full or nearly-full blame

• Exploding sheep
• Hot Hot Heat
• Chieftains
• Emily Stowe

Partial blame

• Bodhrán
• Mitel
• Gentlemen's Quarterly
• Tin whistle
• Bagel (Montreal vs New York)

Photos

• in Bodhrán
• in Siamese fighting fish
• in Tugboat
• in Freshwater angelfish
• in Tin whistle

To-do list

• Fantastic Plastic Machine — Japanese lounge-pop "band" of dj Tomoyuki Tanaka
• Private Copying — Peculiarities of Canadian music media tariffs
• Squeamish ossifrage