One always wonders how to begin such an autobiographical piece without falling into one of two traps, the first being that of vainglorious megalomania, the second being self-diminution to the point of rendering the information all but useless. With an eye on avoiding these two pitfalls, I shall thus continue!
My real name is David Edwards, I was born on January 24, 1962, and I currently reside in the United Kingdom. Specifically, I live in a grimy northern industrial town called Widnes, located about 14 miles to the east of Liverpool where it adjoins the River Mersey opposite the town of Runcorn.
My interests and passions are something of an eclectic mix. I shall cover these under their own section.
My educational background comprises a somewhat idiosyncratic mix of what was once known as a 'Classical' education with a heavy leavening of science and mathematics (indeed, I studied mathematics at university, which probably qualifies me as a masochist), and in more recent times I have attempted, with limited success, to teach myself Classical Greek, an exercise whose difficulties are compounded by the lack of access to approrpriate scholars locally.
Career wise, I trained originally as a programmer specialising in assembly language development for real-time systems. I have since moved into web development and SQL, though my attempts to rebuild my career after an enforced break have met with somewhat limited success to date. The reason for the enforced break was a less than happy one - the need to nurse my mother through a series of illnesses including osteoarthritis and Alzheimer's Disease, although what ultimately proved fatal in her case was lung cancer.
Matters are complicated somewhat in this vein due to my having been diagnosed late in life (as of 2002) with Asperger's Syndrome. However, as the case of Temple Grandin amply demonstrates, this is not a cognitive deficit ... I would hardly have secured a place to read mathematics at university if it were! However, it presents its own, shall we say, interesting (in the sense of the old Chinese curse) difficulties, and while the necessity to stand back and apply considerable thought to social situations has led to a certain amusement at the conventions that have arisen among what I have recently learned are now termed "neurotypicals", the fact remains that some of the obstacles to progress presented by the condition are, as if it needs stating, a considerable source of frustration.
For an explanation of the unusual choice of user name, see below.
Entomology - I am an amateur entomologist and volunteer entomological recorder, with a significant subsidiary interest in taxonomy;
Tropical Fishkeeping - I am a veteran fishkeeper with 30 years to my name, and include among my successes the raising of three generations of catfishes belonging to the species Corydoras panda (and now I've written the article on this species - my first full article!);
Creative writing - principally centred upon children's stories, including a collection of faerie tales inspired by the digital art of Charles Faris, who also taught me how to use PhotoShop and thus produce my own illustrations for the stories ... my user name, incidentally, is derived from one of the characters from these stories!
Programming - even though of late I've been lax in this areea, it's still an activity I enjoy, when I can find a task that requires the skill and which kick starts the old enthusiasm that used to keep me awake into the small hours when I was younger and had more energy ...
Mathematics - still a topic that occupies my time even though it's a long time since I studied it formally. Comes in handy when engaged in various programming tasks!
In addition, the introduction above should make it fairly plain that I have a compelling interest in autistic spectrum conditions, and as a corollary of this, I have become acquainted with the research work of Dr Patricia Rodier. At some future point, I would love to include references to her work in the Wikipedia article on autism, but as it is a featured article and therefore demands scrupulous attention to style and factual accuracy, I am at this current novice stage of my Wikipedia career aware of the need to temper my considerable enthusiasm! If there are skilled Wikipedians who could assist, this would be welcome.
As stated above, I maintain an interest in autistic spectrum conditions, and so the Wikipedia pages on autism and the heritability of autism are fairly frequently visited. Likewise, given that my education contained a pretty heavy scientific component, I maintain an interest in a range of scientific and mathematical topics here, even though I may not contribute to them editorially. These include quantum mechanics, general relativity, evolution (I have an interest in seeing that much-vandalised page 'ring fenced' from the trolls), various topic in computerscience, and given my fascination with flight, I can be found browsing assorted aviation pages in addition. Sometimes, however, a topic catches my eye and diverts me from these realms - the biographies of certain interesting people occupy some of my time here too, not all of them famous for benign reasons!
One BIG problem with becoming engrossed in Wikipedia, however, is that I can find myseif staring at a browser with 40-plus tabs open! (Yes, I am a Mozilla Firefox user). "Popping the stack" back 40 levels or so can be an interesting piece of mental gymnastics, especially when the "pushing onto the stack" has involved some intricate changes of subject matter! I suspect it is this feature that led to the creation on a bulletin board I subscribe to of a game called Six Degrees Of Wikipedia, in which one picks a topic, hops randomly across links, then posts the first and last stages of the process and invites others to fill in the gaps. An amusing pastime that may not only spread, but which may, in time to come, feature in its very own Wikipedia page? You saw it here first if it does!
I have to make a comment at this juncture that editing Wikipedia pages eats into time enormously. As a devourer of time, Wikipedia can be a veritable temporal black hole - I have just discovered after making some relatively minor edits that I have spent four hours on a task that would probably have taken a good deal less time in another format! I think that this is an issue that should be addressed ... :)