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User:Catbar

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Hi, welcome to //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Catbar. It's 17:48 UTC on Dec 8, 2024.

S&TThis user is a student or alumnus of the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
 Undergraduate
ASUThis user is a Sun Devil.
 Graduate
enThis user is a native speaker of the English language.
 Я много говорю
по-английский.
ru-1Этот участник владеет русским языком на начальном уровне.
 Я немного говорю
по-русски.
To quote User:BD2412 on
User:Jeffrey O. Gustafson's talk page:
What's the big deal? It's only a mop!
This editor is a WikiGnome.
Not much lately, though.
Warning to Vandals: This user is armed with VandalProof.
 wow, man
for-2This user is an intermediate Fortran programmer.
 long, long ago
Perl-3This user is an advanced Perl programmer.
 probably on the
low end of perl-3
FS&CThis user is a brother in
Triangle Fraternity.



 Missouri Mines chapter

Just another resident of Hotel Wikipedia.

Want a Life-changing tip?

About me

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Committed identity: 7079DFE50A77B52EA3E2B087587B94C656CCF13825B3599B32049C1752AD29BF68CC341899009342E5D0CD01692109288D5363E258799FA8CD91659111A8A39D is a SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: INTP

If you want to know a bit about me: I'm a Ph.D. analytical chemist who really never used his degree directly. I've had a lot of experience with computers, statistics, and simulation, and it turns out those lead to more interesting employment, as well as more interesting resumes. If you want to find stuff related to my technical background, Google "Brian Rock" and 1) "chemometrics" or 2) "ion thruster". This won't get any hits against my dissertation, "Development of an Optical Emission Model for the Determination of Sputter Rates in Ion Thruster Propulsion Systems". For some odd reason, my dissertation seems to be invisible on the web.

Akron
Bartlesville
Tempe
Rolla
St.Joseph

I grew up to some degree in Saint Joseph, Missouri USA, went to school at the University of Missouri–Rolla (Rolla, Missouri) and Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona), worked numerous summers for Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and now live in Akron, Ohio.

Other places where I've spent some significant time are Kingston and Napanee, Ontario, Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, and Lawton, Oklahoma.

Here's a link to a picture I took a few years ago in New Orleans that I'm proud of. Note: this view doesn't actually exist in the real world. An incredibly ugly building would normally be in the background. The weeping child Details about the picture

My Wikihistory

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I've been active in Wikipedia since December, 2003 and I've been an administrator since early May, 2004. I see my role in Wikipedia, at this point, to cruise around looking for articles that just should be in any decent encyclopedia, but are missing from the Wikipedia, and give them a reasonable start. I don't do sub-stubs - my typical first efforts are 1000-1500 bytes long. As time and inclination permits, I return to enhance and expand them.

As I tool around, I also fix typos and add content to things that I care about and which need it. I can and like to do chemical structure drawings, so I add them as the fancy strikes me.

My interests

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My especial interests are beer and homebrewing, wine and wine making, supercharged breeds of cats, like the Egyptian Mau cat and the American Keuda cat, chemistry, science, and engineering, computers, statistics, especially data mining and related areas, weather, biology, medicine, entertainers, movies, especially cult films, history and other things.

My homepages

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You can find my web homepages at [1].

The sites above have some interesting stuff, including my An Introduction to Chemometrics, The Catbar Egyptian Mau Gallery, individual pages for our maus, The Shrine of the Unsung Musician, and an Ohio wines page.

Of special interest is Brain Candy Central, which contains a bunch of columns I have written for our local Mensa group's newsletter. Some of these have morphed to become Wikipedia articles, and others may do so soon.

Dot Project

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Lately, I've been working on User:Sethant's Dot Project, which intends to display the location every US city and town on its state map. I've completed Missouri, which was a booger, because Missouri has a jillion counties, with a bunch of villages in each. St. Louis County, Missouri was the toughest, with 100 cities, towns and villages, and there were 110 other counties as well. The final tally was 974 maps uploaded, and of course 974 article edits for various Missouri places, plus I fixed a bunch of typos and irregularities I found, as well as placed some cities and towns in the correct counties, etc.

Then I worked on Arizona which had fewer cities, towns and especially counties, but the state of Missouri had a lot of good online and downloadable things I could use to speed things up (like good state maps) that Arizona doesn't have. Another complication: some Arizona towns were very tiny in the 1990 census and are sizable now. They don't all show up on the maps I could find. In these cases, I let my regression-predicted coordinates determine the position of the dot, but I preferred verifying positions with a map when I could.

This was followed by Ohio. Even more places than Missouri, but I had really excellent maps to help, so it was relatively easy. My regression predictions for point coordinates were very accurate for Ohio, too, so it went relatively quickly.

Next, I completed Louisiana. Unlike the other states I've done so far, I've never lived in or near Louisiana, so I didn't have any memories to draw on. The best Louisiana state map I found on-line was a rather slow-updating pdf file that was a real pain to work with. With the arrival of Squeezit, my new built-by-hand computer, things improved some.

Kansas is done as of late January, 2005. It was slow-going, to say the least. For Kansas, I found that using the Census Bureau's Tiger Map Server Browser at http://tiger.census.gov/ worked nicely for verifying and tweaking dot placement on a county-by-county basis.

I finished Arkansas in late February, 2005. The default Tiger Map Server Browser wasn't sufficient for the more densely populated counties of Arkansas, but I found out how to access an older version of the software (mapbrowser) that lets me specify the size of the output map. The bigger maps show more detail and solved my problem quite nicely. I wish I knew about this when I did Kansas. It would have helped, but it was necessary for Arkansas, since I didn't find a decent on-line map source.

Minnesota is finished. No more dots for me.

New Articles I've created

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Things I've improved significantly

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My new article to-do list

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If you see something you like on here, feel free to tackle it with my blessing.

Articles I think I can improve

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Life-changing tips

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Life-changing tip #1: Go for the bock.

... and if that doesn't work for you a little pomegranate molasses in lightly sweetened ice tea is good, too.

Images I've done Brian Rock

Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.
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