I'm a software engineer working at CodeSourcery (now part of Mentor Graphics) on the GNU project, in which I've participated for many years - first at Apple Computer doing the oft-disbelieved port of GCC to the System 7 Mac, then Cygnus Solutions working on GDB, then Apple again working on GCC and GDB for Mac OS X, followed by a short stint at Mozilla Corporation working on the Firefox browser. In my younger days I got a PhD doing research on Lisp implementation techniques.
I'm also trying my hand at building a wiki-type website - StampData , a philatelic catalog and inventory system. It currently has records of over 150,000 types of postage stamps, but that is just a fraction of what there is, so lots of room to grow - come check it out!
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).
I can read German, but struggle with French and Italian.
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.
US 15c stamp of 1869
To commons: commons:User:Stan Shebs To wikibooks: wikibooks:User:Stan Shebs
