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I have received university degrees from Stanford and UCLA in mathematics, music, and computer science. A strong side interest of mine throughout my life has been linguistics. At various times during my life, I have studied Spanish, French, German, Norwegian, Czech, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Latin, and (most recently) Georgian — though, regrettably, I am not fluent in any of them. I have also studied phonetics, and I have been known to drive people crazy at times when I comment on minute details of their speech that they weren't aware of and "can't hear" despite my attempts at explanation.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote three spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation and submitted them through an agent to the producers of the show, but none of them were accepted.
Although I grew up in California, I lived in Ontario, Canada for several years during the mid-1990s, and I am a dual citizen of the USA (by birth) and Canada (by naturalization) — hence my long-standing interest in immigration and citizenship matters. While living in Canada (and intending at the time to stay there permanently), I lost my native California accent so thoroughly that even after moving back to the US, I never could manage to get it back (and eventually just gave up trying). This is also why I routinely use Canadian spelling (a compromise of sorts between British and American standards) — though I am still able to write 100% American English, with effort, where necessary.
I am a believing, practising member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly known as the "Mormon" or "LDS" church). Essentially all of my editing activity in the Romanian Wikipedia has involved the Church's article on that site. I have also been paying attention to the Church's article on the Georgian Wikipedia, and although I lack sufficient ability in Georgian to be able to work on that article directly, I managed to find a native speaker of Georgian who was willing and able to replace a very poor-quality, biased article (copied from an anti-Mormon source) with a brief, reasonably neutral piece. I am committed to the idea that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should be treated in a balanced and even-handed fashion on Wikipedia — neither smeared nor whitewashed — in keeping with the "neutral point of view" policy.
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