Chiapas agave; see more in the Gallery This user has been on Wikipedia for 21 years, 9 months and 7 days .
I'm a retired software engineer with a specialization in tools infrastructure (LLVM , GCC , Glibc , and GDB ), a career track that started with a port of GCC 1.31 to an experimental VM in 1989. In my younger days I got a PhD doing research on Lisp implementation techniques.
I'm also trying my hand at building a website - StampData , a philatelic catalog and inventory system. It currently has records of over 744,000 types of postage stamps, mostly complete but with gaps still to fill in.
My personal interests are varied and include software , stamp collecting , sailing ships , ship models , history (particularly ancient history and military history ), rock climbing , mountaineering , languages , literature (novels mostly), botany (particularly desert plants), fish , and entomology (particularly beetles ).
Dumping my life's accumulated factoids into Wikipedia seems like a fun thing to do, we'll see how it goes.
Two weeks after first edit (mid-February 2003) - it's like being an ADD-afflicted magpie in a bottle cap factory!
August 2003 - it's consuming nearly all of my waking moments...
August 2004 - not as many of the waking moments, but I think about it a lot when doing other things.
July 2005 - monitoring a lengthy watchlist (19,000 pages), but not writing so much; mostly taking plant pictures for commons.
May 2006 - finally got tired of the old watchlist and erased it (vandals everywhere rejoice), will be gradually rebuilding it.
September 2010 - still mostly taking plant pictures, going to remote parts of the desert to find obscure species.
January 2012 - monitoring things daily, intending to finish uploading picture backlog, but still StampData-obsessed.
June 2015 - still monitoring, but more weekly than daily.
February 2020 - a year since my last edit?! I do read articles every day... US 15c stamp of 1869 To commons: commons:User:Stan Shebs
To wikibooks: wikibooks:User:Stan Shebs
