If you are not viewing this page at http://en.wikipedia.org, then you are viewing a mirror site. The mirror site may not be verified as meeting the licensing standards for adhering to the copyright stipulations of http://en.wikipedia.org to display this information on this computer under American or International law. The (unverified) mirror site may not accept responsibility for any damage to this computer as a result of accessing or displaying an unverified mirror site page.
Be aware (1) that (unverified) mirror site pages may be outdated, (2) that depending on this computer browser's settings, there may be on-load software accessed on visiting (unverified) mirror sites, and (3) that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal, commercial, or other affiliation with any site other than http://en.wikipedia.org. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hotfeba, and appropriate copyright information will be found on and linked to the original page on http://en.wikipedia.org.
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!").
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.
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.
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.
Some personal policies and guidelines I observe here in Wikipedia-land:
"Plan? There ain't no plan..."
Currently or recently looking at, where alphabetic sort order is not significant relative to prioritization:
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.
Can't approve deleting that page without also deleting this and everything under it as well.
Don't let a degree get in the way of your education.
(Also see above quote about knowing how to tutor the lowest level math course offered on campus.)
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.
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.
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)