User:ExNoctem

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My Userboxes My Music This user enjoys heavy metal music. This user is a fan of Linkin Park D This user owns a copy of Disturbed's Ten Thousand Fists. D This user is Down With the Sickness. KoЯn This user is a freak on a leash. My Animals This user is owned by one or more cats. This user owns one or more dogs. This user's favourite animal is the giant panda. My Games This user plays the Xbox 360. LIVE This user uses Xbox Live, with the gamertag Zikullor. This user still uses a Sega Mega Drive or Sega Genesis. My, um...Other Stuff? This user practices Shotokan karate. This user just created the above userbox. "Eventually software systems will be able to create bold new designs without human help. Will most people call such systems intelligent? It doesn't really matter." - K. Eric Drexler This user believes that a user's edit count does not necessarily reflect on the value of their contributions to Wikipedia. This user is interested in chemistry. This user uses a TI calculator. met? This user prefers metric units, but, having grown up in the U.S., cannot relate to them. This user knows 12 digits of pi. Dune This user knows that fear is the mind-killer. This user believes global warming is a reality we will have to face. This user has memorized the elements' names and symbols.

Contents 1 "...venit diem." 2 My Languages 2.1 French 2.2 Latin 2.3 Esperanto 3 Current Project(s) 3.1 SocWall 3.2 Neatorama 4 Near/Completed Projects 4.1 Shahbano Bilgrami

[edit] "...venit diem."

As a beginning Latin student, I found the preposition "ex" quite attractive. I coupled it with the Latin word for night, tossed proper grammar out the window, and came up with "ExNoctem" - "Out of night...". "...comes day." is how I end the phrase - one meant to explain my work ethic. "Focus on long-term goals, not short-term losses", the kind of thing you put on job applications when asked how you motivate yourself.

[edit] French

That said, I have taken five years of French, all in the classroom, and have loved all five of them. I'm not fluent, but I know enough to get around.

[edit] Latin

Ihave one year of Latin, which is another story. While I love the language and its descendants, I could not force myself to stay awake during actual classroom instruction time, due to the monotonous lesson plan of my teacher. Not to mention the fact that the class started with fifteen people, and progressively dwindled to a measly eight or nine on a good day.

[edit] Esperanto

My Esperanto is, thankfully, in better shape than my Latin. I have been studying independently, on and off, since early June 2007. In January I registered an account with a great site called lernu!, and have been about as active there in recent months as I have bee here (read: not much at all). My username there is just another butchering of this one, albeit in Esperanto: ElNokto. If you have an account and you care to drop me a message, go ahead; I'd be more than willing to reply.

I highly encourage anyone even slightly interested in languages to give Esperanto a good look, because it is such a friendly and idealistic language. lernu! is a great resource, with online and email correspondence courses, though the independent student may choose to find a book at a local library, like I did. I found "Teach Yourself Esperanto", by John Cresswell, to be a good starting point, even if it is a bit dated (and British).

[edit] Current Project(s)

But enough of the lingua-babel. I also have a great time just being a generally helpful Wikipedian; referencing articles, fixing busted links, editing typos, etc.

[edit] SocWall

I have recently created my first article: Social Wallpapering, a community-driven desktop wallpaper site. I was disappointed that there was no WP site on it, so... I created one! I also uploaded the screenshot myself, and consequently shared my life story in the fair-use rationale. I was also disappointed there was no WP site on...

[edit] Neatorama

... but I haven't gotten to that one yet. Neatorama is just a daily-updated plethora of cool (and occasionally useful!) information, and is also the site that directed me to SocWall. However, I've been having trouble finding information on its history and who runs it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[edit] Near/Completed Projects

[edit] Shahbano Bilgrami

Shahbano Bilgrami is a Pakistani author recently longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize. I don't pretend to have any interest in Asian lit, but I do have an interest in helping Wikipedia. I came across the Bilgrami site through the Recent Changes page while scouring for IP vandalism edits. Upon discovering that it was unformatted and the text was cut-and-pasted off one of the given links, I set out to better it. I formatted it, rewrote the entire article, and added a picture, but the pic violated WP:NONFREE, so it's gone now. It's pretty much done now, but maybe I'll update it after the MALP decision is final.