From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This picture captures the
mad scientist side of me that I wish I had.
Welcome to my Wikipedia page! My name is Alex Peppe. I am currently a student, tutor, and grader at the University of Southern Maine.
[edit] The University
I was released from my job as a teacher in the computer science department at the University of Southern Maine because I lack a Bachelor's Degree; at least, that was the formal reason, although I believe it was primarily because of my age. I taught for two semesters and had been scheduled to teach for two more. I will, however, be continuing to grade and tutor.
I am the current president of the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery at USM. We work for the furthering of computer science community and education. We operate programming contests, we bring people in for speeches and, of course, we operate regular LAN parties and movie nights. The operations of the ACM@USM can be seen at our home page, although this web site is often behind.
[edit] Interests and Beliefs
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This user knows by heart an unspecified number of digits in the decimal representation of pi. |
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This user considers ain’t standard English usage. |
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Clearly, I am very interested in computers. I plan to eventually be a teacher, and I found my experimentation with teaching over the last two semesters to be a great success. My computer-related hobbies are computer security—in particular, cryptology and network security—and video games (in particular first-person shooters such as Wolfenstein and real-time strategies).
I am also interested in mathematics (in particular, number theory), politics (both American politics and political theory), as well as science (particularly physics). I am fond of folk and bluegrass music, and I enjoy listening to the Kingston Trio, Schooner Fare, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and many others. I play the banjo, and have experimented with several other instruments in the past.
[edit] Veganism
I am a vegan. I avoid animal-derived products to the best of my abilities; that is, I avoid all meat and dairy products, as well as egg and honey. I do not believe it is acceptable to kill or exploit any animal intentionally. I am most definitely not a vegan for health reasons, and identify that the average vegan's diet would be drastically improved by adding a little meat (emphasis on "average"). The diet takes a lot of work to keep properly balanced since most food is targeted at non-vegans, particularly as of late (with the low-carb craze). Another significant motivation for me is that I wish to avoid supporting, in any way, factory farms and the exploitation that it brings to both animals and humans.
A number of people now understand how easy it is to get protein while adhering to a vegan diet, so the only fact I feel I need to state publicly is that calcium is not an issue. Milk is not a significant source of calcium, and can even contribute to osteoporosis! Some nice dark green vegetables are substantially more effective. I'm telling you this for two reasons: First, I'm telling you so as to further explain my veganism. Second, I'm telling you to explain why not merely will I never edit an article on dairy, but why I should be forever blocked from doing so.
[edit] Politics
I will now state my political beliefs. If this will be displeasing to the reader, avert your eyes and hide your children. My logic is that, if I am going to be making modifications to what is intended to be a reliable and unbiased encyclopedia, I need to make my beliefs as publicly available as my edits. That way, whenever I edit articles on certain topics, people can have a warning ahead of time and revert the changes as soon as they are made.
Up until recent years, I sympathized strongly with the Democratic Party. I am now best described as a libertarian socialist—a polite way of saying anarchist. To grossly summarize, I do not believe in the expediency of either government or capitalism. My beliefs do not neatly map to either "liberal" or "conservative" as defined by the the current American political system. However, with the Republican Party progressively supporting larger and more powerful government and the Democratic Party supposedly standing for personal freedoms, I more clearly associate with the perceived "liberals" of the Democratic Party. Please do not mistake my last statement for support of the Democratic party; both parties clash directly with my ideology.
[edit] Religion
I have studied various and sundry religions. I, personally, am an atheist, although I do not believe that the question of the existence of any gods can be answered conclusively one way or another now or ever, and therefore I believe that it is inappropriate for any group, regardless of belief, to hold other groups incorrect. It is not that I believe that no god exists, but rather that I do not personally believe in any god.
I should clarify that, although I definitely think people should be allowed to believe whatever they want, I am very much referring to their personal beliefs. However, when those beliefs are thrust upon somebody else, or when those beliefs are used to make decisions which affect others negatively, I think that it is very much justified to call the accuracy of those beliefs into question. Attacking a person's religion is fair game if that religious belief is damaging to others.
[edit] Free Software
I am a strong supporter of the free software movement. I run GNU/Linux on my main machines, and use entirely free software whenever possible, which is nearly always except for when I take a course requiring Visual Studio. I occasionally contribute to free programs (most notably BZFlag), and would like to do so more often. I do, however, contribute here on Wikipedia whenever I encounter a flaw in an article I'm reading. I believe that such projects as Wikipedia—that is, projects that educate those who would otherwise be reliant on for-profit "experts"—are very important for furthering society and eliminating the corporate middlemen who may have their own motives.
In the primitive field of books, Mark Twain is one of my favorite authors. I also enjoyed (and will continue to enjoy in the future) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein, and the works of H. G. Wells. My favorite book that H. G. Wells wrote was probably The War of the Worlds, although The Time Machine was also superb. Come to think of it, so was The World Set Free, The War in the Air, and The First Men In The Moon. Heck, everything he wrote is superb.
I greatly enjoy the works of both Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I am presently reading A People's History of the United States by the latter. I find their respective political beliefs very appealing and very elegantly expressed.
On to another topic, the criminal exploits of Frank Abagnale (Catch Me if You Can) are very interesting, as is his other book (The Art of the Steal) wherein he outlines the techniques of modern day criminals. Speaking of wrong-doing, Kevin Mitnick has written a couple of excellent books on modern criminal techniques as well, the most famous of which is probably The Art of Deception.
[edit] Computer Preferences
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This user can program in C. |
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This user can program in C++. |
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This user can program in C#. |
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This user can program in PHP. |
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This user is an intermediate VRML programmer. |
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In the field of computers, I am significantly interested in older machines. I am the proud owner of a Tandy CoCo3 128 (otherwise known as the TRS-80 Color Computer). I have a number of older machines which I have rebuilt and made good servers out of. My latest rebuild was on a custom built system which came with a 266MHz Pentium II slot processor, 16MB of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive. I left the processor (although I may replace it eventually), gave it 392MB of RAM, and gave it a 5GB harddrive. It ran Windows 2000 for a while (and surprisingly smoothly, I might add), but I eventually converted it to College Linux to run as a server system. It now runs Fedora Core 3 quite swiftly, although the boot process is, unfortunately, very slow. Since it is a server and thus boots only every few months, this speed is acceptable.
As regards home distributions of GNU/Linux, I am very fond of Fedora Core and I use it almost exclusively. Others have described Fedora Core as "bloated," but I believe that a complete set of software packages is very helpful for those converting to GNU/Linux from Windows, not to mention those who wish to just save some time and effort. I also have some experience with SuSE Linux, which I guess is SUSE Linux now. I used SuSE 9.1 on one of my systems, and I found it significantly inferior to Fedora Core, but overall quite usable (besides some bugs). I never much liked the KDE interface that they force you to use. You can, with some great difficulty, switch to Gnome—or so I've heard—but they have left Gnome mostly unsupported, so you'll lose access to a lot of features. Of course, my moral issues with Novell now prevent me from ever letting the SUSE lizard step its disgusting little clawed foot into my house ever again.
[edit] The End
If this is insufficient information for you, you can access my USM home page. If you wish to contact me, you can contact me at peppe@cs.usm.maine.edu, or by phone at 207-400-6009, or by AIM at anarchogeek, or by Yahoo! Messenger at linuxgeek90. On the Internet I am most widely known as The Crooked Elf.
[edit] Related links
| This is a Wikipedia user page.
This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alex_Peppe.
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