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

You can glean more info about me from my LiveJournal and its userinfo page, and my website.

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

I am engaged to the lovely Nyxie.

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

• The Mozex plugin for Mozilla, which lets me edit the contents of a textbox in the text editor of my choice
• The Vim text editor with Wikipedia syntax mode
• The Wikipedia link script in XChat on #wikipedia and #enrc.wikipedia
• CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter, a Java recent changes ticker

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.

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 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.

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.

I possess (but have not used for some time — in fact it expires any day now) a student pilot permit, and am predictably a bit of an aviation nut, although I'm certainly not an aviation historian. Nonetheless I expect I will be dabbling in some general aviation articles.

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

I am a neophyte motorcyclist, having picked up a license and a 1981 GS250T this summer and will find my way around relevant articles soon enough.

• Exploding sheep
• Hot Hot Heat
• Chieftains
• Emily Stowe
• Loyalist College
• Banana bread (and the recipe that Nyxie uses)
• Little Italy, Ottawa

• Bodhrán
• Mitel
• Gentlemen's Quarterly
• Tin whistle
• Bagel (Montreal vs New York)
• Folk etymology versus fake etymology, especially on pages that link to folk etymology
• Sorting out what the heck pomelos are, and if they're different from pummelos (they aren't)

• Bodhrán in Bodhrán
• Betta splendens in Siamese fighting fish
• Tugboats in Tugboat
• Freshwater angelfish in Freshwater angelfish
• Tin whistles in Tin whistle

• Fantastic Plastic Machine — Japanese lounge-pop "band" of dj Tomoyuki Tanaka
• Private Copying — Peculiarities of Canadian music media tariffs
• Marcel Breuer — Bauhaus architect and designer
• Village Vanguard — seminal New York jazz club
• Expand DLT — mechanics of drive and cartridge, stripes, DECtape history
• Clamato — start with http://www.cincypost.com/2004/05/19/clam051904.html
• Check performance numbers at Cessna 150 (>100 kt cruise?) and format like Cessna 152