User:sldownard

sldownard is a small robot, commonly found in the wild in public houses which serve good beer and scotch. it can often be lured out of hiding with promises of tickets to go see a band or the White Sox. in domestication, sldownard can typically be found camouflaged in a cramped cubbyhole, surrounded by multiple LCD displays, and often is caught terrorizing those in its environs with pop music and/or schemes to re-engineer systems.

it is frequently speculated that the source of sldownard's unique abilities is an externally-connected device which appears to others to be a small red notebook. at various points in the past, certain extra-governmental operatives have executed skilled attempts to acquire the notebook and therefore crush the revolution before it can begin. fortunately for the free world, they have not been successful, and further, sldownard remains undefeated by any other chef in Kitchen Stadium.

sldownard is always spelled with lower-case letters, sadly unlike how most Wikis like to spell it. its alternate, extended form, sabrina downard, is also generally spelled with lower-case letters except in the case of special missives from HMG (HM is allowed to capitalize as she pleases), or communications from the inattentive.

to direct communications appropriately and better serve your needs, sldownard's public key can be found at http://ziggurat.org/sabrina/misc/viv.pub.asc. please pay attention as our menu options have recently changed. thank you for calling.

Docs I've contributed to, that I care enough to recall or note:

• WorldWide Access -- An ISP I used to work for, back in the dot-com glory days. Made substantial additions to the document, as it started out as a stub when I found it. (Also, added a redirect from "Worldwide access," for those who like me are too lazy to type CaMeL CaPs.) I hope no one nominates this one for deletion, as WWA was a significant part of the development of Internet use in the City of Chicago in the mid- to late-nineties, which I should hope carries some historical significance.
• John Sheppard (Stargate) -- I would have sworn that this was the Stargate article that I stumbled across one day to look something up, and found it so regrettably poorly-written (from a technical standpoint, not necessarily factual -- the spelling and syntax was just *bad*) that I rewrote the entire thing nearly word by word. But I looked through the history and my name's not on any of the changes. Maybe I'm thinking of Rodney McKay. (Hey, how come McKay's article doesn't get a little "(Stargate)" world-distinguishing parenthetical? No fair. Nobody respects the geniuses.) No, now after looking at the McKay article, I'm sure that wasn't it. I really thought it was the Sheppard article. Someone apparently deleted the article at some point in the past, maybe my changes are gone with the RfD. Oh, Wikipedia, so tenuous your retention of my blood, sweat, and tears. Speaking of which:
• Brian Kwon -- I once wrote a long and fairly scholarly article on a very bizarre event at work -- as a member of the Postmaster team for the University of Chicago, we and a number of other Ivy+ institutions' Postmaster teams were receiving regular emails from a person (jumping from free Yahoo! mail account to free Yahoo! mail account, on a daily basis) who, at various points, claimed to be a Messiah -- one of two, an artist, a student who had been screwed over by his financial aid, and more. Furthermore, there were news articles in the mainstream press about a person by that same name, in a location in Florida where the emails claimed he was, documenting strange behaviors, so I believe that it was a single real (and probably disturbed) person. The emails continued for a period of about a month, and gradually became more and more strange, and garnered a noteworthy amount of attention in higher-ed postmaster circles, where they were alternately admired as truly singular bizarre literature or crackpot spam to be disgarded at the email gateway. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia community disagreed with me that this was an event worth recording, and my article was deleted while I wasn't paying attention (and hadn't realized it was nominated, or I would have defended it). The official consensus was that the article was somehow in promotion of spam -- though I'll note that no reason ever given was actually on the Wikipedia standard list of reasons to delete an article. I considered appealing, but in the end figured that if the Wikipedia community had the poor academic skills to equate recording of an event with celebrating it, any such attempt would be in vain. Alas, my poor article; so much effort, and your life was so short. I shall miss you ever. (Fortunately, I still have a printout.)