User:Hotfeba
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A "feba" is a military map reading term, standing for "forward edge of battle area", a final coordination line for adjacent ground units in an organized assault. The adjective "hot" refers to any area of operation where enemy personnel are present and engaging friendly forces. I used "hotfeba" as a netrek player name in the early 1990's; one may deduce that I served in the U.S. armed forces prior to that period. For those of you in the know, TOGS (do NOT click this unless you "consent to monitoring for all lawful purposes" by the Department of Defense).
Additionally, "hotfeba" is a play on the noun phrase "hot fever", which in its short form has apparently been adopted by Paris Hilton as a ubiquitous ejaculation ("That's hot!").
Education[edit]
The following is provided for other Wikipedians to gain insight to my ramblings on article discussion pages as well as my random edits in the hope of improving some of those articles, and may be considered as an attempt to be welcoming and inclusive.
Early experiences with computers came with exposure in the mid-1970's to time-shared BASIC on the HP2000F minicomputer using dumb terminals. There was no Internet. There was no wiki-anything. There was nothing but darkness in the void while awaiting the arrival of our first CRT. There were lots of card punch machines and punched tape readers in my high school computer math class, and there was stolen time at terminals at San Diego State University, where a fellow JROTC field officer may have given me a brief glimpse of something called the ARPANET; otherwise, if most ordinary people wanted to flame each other in real time, they could get into CB radio and trouble with the FCC.
I have a Certificate in Computer Science from Coleman College dating from the early 1980's. Major emphasis was in mainframe programming using COBOL with CICS and 360/370 assembly language under DOS/VSE ("ahhh... the good ol' days"). Quasi-reentrant coding was the buzzword of the day. Coleman College was more practical than theoretical in its approach, including mandatory courses in systems analysis/design and accounting for graduation.
From San Diego City College, I hold associate degrees with honors in data processing (1987; Certificate of Achievement for high honors in the major) and honors in mathematics (1991). While working as an accounting tutor on campus, I got drafted to run for student government treasurer after Spring 1987 elections were thrown out on protests by a losing candidate; when same student protestor had our Fall semester emergency elections declared invalid, I drafted a new student constitution in three days while on heavy doses of caffeine and nicotine as a practical exercise in the analysis and design of living systems. When said constitution was ratified by 95% of voting students in the middle of the Spring 1988 semester, I was ordered by the dean to run for president of that California legislative body ("It's your document... you implement it!"). For my troubles, I received a national collegiate social sciences award in sociology for advocating microcomputers as cross-cultural bridge among students in multicultural K-12 settings, national collegiate student government award, Outstanding Young Men of America award, two consecutive listings in Who's Who Among Students in American Junior Colleges in the late 1980's, and an ARCO Foundation sponsorship for a 1990 Minority Leaders Fellowship at The Washington Center with a concurrent paid internship with the Resolution Trust Corporation.
After being a student government trouble-maker at City College for several years, I was kicked upstairs on the orders of the then-President of the College to the University of San Diego on a full academic scholarship in 1992. My official major was computer science with a math minor, but there was a significant emphasis in binge drinking studies in my on-campus housing area, where intramural flag football injuries provided a rationale for said extra-curiccular studies. I had a booming business writing appeals letters for other dorm dwellers on academic probation, based on my own personal experiences as my GPA fell from over 3.6 to about 1.7, and I never graduated (if I did, I never bothered to pick up my diploma), although I did complete aforementioned major and minor with a high enough grade average to be considered for graduation (darn that third semester foreign language requirement!). Despite my attempts to become a raging alcoholic in the dorms, I am deeply appreciative for the education I received in CS and math at USD, especially my introduction to formal languages, automata theory, circuit design, and mathematical logic in general.
Returning to old stomping grounds where I could always play the big fish in a small pond ("He's a professional student without giving up his amateur standing"), I entered the legal assistants' major at City College and interned as a clerk for a Chapter 13 Standing Trustee for the United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of California. While also tutoring at the City College English Writing Center, I was a shelver at the San Diego County Public Law Library where I assisted in the library's transition to a Millennium system for collections management until early 2002.
At present, my main interest in education is in developing a thesis of mass martial arts (not a set of individual fighting techniques) based on ethnic characteristics of an American subculture that does not enjoy much empathy from a certain congressman from Colorado; this thesis is being heavily influenced by FEMA's principles of Comprehensive Emergency Management. I also am interested in the analysis of the union of computers and humans into wikii as living systems, and some work may later appear in an academia wikijournal as a result. I have not been a dues-paid member of Mensa International for some decades, but I fully support its three stated purposes, especially to the extent that they are realizable through the existence of the Wikipedia as a living system.
Employment[edit]
Who, me? Employed? Ha, ha, ha, ha... very funny!... Ha, ha, ha (gag)... ha, ha (choke... thud).
See previous quote about being a professional student.
If I am doing anything resembling employment, it is dabbling in Game Maker 6.1/7.0 for eventually distributing GUI software through download.com or some similar distribution venue. That, and the occasional math tutoring session ("Every young man needs to know how to tutor the lowest level math course offered on campus. All of the party girls are enrolled in it and flunking out, and they have put off taking it so long that they are now old enough to buy booze legally. Better safe than sorry"). Also, now investigating Prolog, but not the strawberry flavor.
Pseudo-Employment in WikiWorld[edit]
No matter how unemployed I am or over-qualified I may become, I will never accept the title of administrator or bureaucrat within this Wikipedia, even if it pays in piles of platinum.
- I have no interest in herding cats.
- Besides, there are plenty of administrators around already and more added each week
- formally nominated and approved, or
- just old school self-breveted
- Among the self-breveted are those who are patrolling (see definitions of WP:TROLL) certain articles as a means of demonstrating their authority to make value judgments against other users and editors. These persons wishing to become administrators are often characterized by their written violations of WP:CIVIL in their attempts to keep others down for their own justification or amusement. The Wikipedia is essentially powerless to enforce WP:CIVIL and prevent this form of trolling from taking place, instead using these individuals as vandal suppression units without regard to any biting they may do against new users and editors.
- I have no time to become a prison guard, although in my state, they do have a really powerful public employee union. See analysis of self-breveted administrators above.
- It is much more satisfying to tutor students and see the joy of understanding in their faces. In person. In real time. The Wikipedia may be a living system, but it is not life, either with or without the indefinite article.
- No, I am not "employed" at tutor.com either. You can guess about what kind of help students get there when they are charged $35 an hour for tutoring, but only $10-$12 actually gets to the tutor. Well over 60% take by the Man for a business that only exists on the Internet - wow, that's a profit margin!
Conditions of pseudo-work[edit]
Some personal policies and guidelines I observe here in Wikipedia-land:
- I do not have a problem with external links in articles when the probability of having an article full of dead red links to non-existent articles is fairly high. Merely placing internal links to entries in a section at the end of an article for external links seems kind of inefficient.
- I KNOW that some of us insist that Wikipedia is separate and apart from the rest of the Internet... which appears to explain why most of the rest of the Internet users who are not Wikipedia users consider us to be touched with some sort of plague.
- If somebody reverts something I've edited, then that somebody gets the last word. I'm not taking pseudo-working for free so seriously that I'm going to get into an edit war over language.
- Getting reverted usually means I did not add a credible, verifiable reference, and that's my bad.
- Subjecting somebody else to a formal dispute resolution process when the fault lies in one's own failure to follow accepted mandatory Wikipedia policies will most likely make me disregard the previous personal policy, especially when one has called for and then ignored my supported comments on an article in question, and then thrown up the NPOV tag.
Plan[edit]
"Plan? There ain't no plan..."
Projects[edit]
Currently or recently looking at, where alphabetic sort order is not significant relative to prioritization:
- German General Staff before World War I (under Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history)
- San Diego Reader (hoping to add information without too much conflict as a Reader blogger)
Please note that I will not maintain this as complete, as I will edit on the fly if I believe that a wikification is possible, or that a wikified addition of information appears to offer more usable information to users.
Current favorite article: The Man[edit]
Can't approve deleting that page without also deleting this and everything under it as well.
Personal sayings[edit]
Don't let a degree get in the way of your education.
- Don't let education get in the way of understanding.
- Don't let misunderstanding get in the way of living your life.
(Also see above quote about knowing how to tutor the lowest level math course offered on campus.)
Observations from Life[edit]
- In defining a user, it was always appropriate from the earliest of days pre-dating any wiki to share programmer wisdom with one's newer peers, so I uphold the ancient tradition of the sixtyfourth degree datamasons as follows, precisely because Wikipedia editing is a subset of interactive real time programming over a globally distributed computer network over a finite but variable learning curve, and the rate of change of the rate of change of that curve, that is to say its derivative to the second degree, is often a number less than one.
- GIGO.
- Speedreading helps. Proofreading hleps better.
- Build a system that even a caveman can use, and soon only cavemen will be using it.
- Prime example: selected wiki edits of the entry for current President of the United States.
- It is possible to throw too many programmers at the problem.
- Prime example: current discussion on stub naming, showing a good reason to go off somewhere else, start up a mirror, and mung its categories until personally satisified with the result.
- See above observation about the rate of change of the rate of change of the standard wikipedian editing learning curve.
- Also see WP:FAIL.
- Sun Wu Tzu's Thirteen Chapters are applicable everywhere. If you can't see it, don't be surprised to find somebody using those teachings on strategy and deception on you.
- Self-defense in the college classroom against a lone mad shooter is not optional to maintain the lives of students in the class.
- A person who categorizes herself or himself with little boxes on a user page should not be surprised when stereotyped into little boxes by others.
- A person who publishes only Wiki newsletters as a user page should expect that page to be valued somewhere between bird-cage lining and fishwrap; otherwise, we know who has irritated the vandals as a hobby B)
- Reading is fundamental, especially of sources not necessarily found on the Internet. It is helpful to live in a city with relatively predictable public transportation and with many accessible university campuses. Unfortunately, this may require one to actually get up and leave one's own personal desktop computer. Fortunately, gameboy can help kill the time while in transit, which is probably why the i-phone was invented.
- It pleases me to no end that ISBN tags can be used ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE here...
- Academic rigor in writing and editing the Wikipedia is not optional. Without it in the least part of it, all of the Wikipedia won't be worth the blank compact discs it's burned on.
- See first observation or WP:FAIL.
- Rigor does not equal rigor mortis; for those believing it does, see WP:FAIL.
- There are consequences to lack of rigor, inspired by recent encounters with a prison guard.
- A wikipedia definition in one sentence: A wikipedia is the sum of all users and computer components that describes a stored state of the subject wikipedia at a given time, where each term is the state of the individual user or computer component multiplied by the matrix of Gödel numbers of the data strings of each input, processing, and output transaction handled by the subject wikipedia system component.
- A short equation: WP = MUD
- A short proof: If not(WP = MUD), then not(exist(TROLL)). But (exist(TROLL))* exist(TROLL), so WP = MUD.
- See also User:Hotfeba/WPMUD
- Model Motto - Wikipedia: CliffNotes of the Internet
Surveillance[edit]
The United States Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation know how to contact me (sorry: no information on previous national agency checks can be made available over non-secure modes of transmission, and that is precisely what the Internet is, claims of shtml and encryption advocates notwithstanding), and DOJ sends notices frequently. I am not kidding. Hackers and identity thieves, be forewarned.
Disclaimer[edit]
As any decent hacker or Commander Data could figure out, I have never used any of the above information to create any password used over the Internet. Even if you apply a supercomputer sieve to the above data together with every webpage in existence to derive somehow my full name and address, I declare on information and belief that there is no known algorithm for encapsulating the heuristic process used to generate my passwords in any human or machine-readable form.
template[edit]
Thanks for working on tagging those logic articles. I did a few, but then I got this bot to do it for us. It will tag everything in the categories we choose. Ooops wrong bot. I meant:Wikipedia:WikiProject Logic/Categories not Wikipedia:WikiProject_Logic/New_articles Gregbard 23:49, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
- Cool. The only reason now for keeping my list page is historical/hysterical. Otherwise, tagging did force me into actually looking at the articles, something still to do in order to offer comments on ratings. Hotfeba 16:27, 20 July 2007 (UTC)