User:Orschstaffer/AboutMe

O=MC⁴ 04:22, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Don Quixote goes mad from his reading of books of chivalry. Engraving by Gustave Doré.

Greetings colleagues of improving Wikipedia,

I have reviewed many images from Wikipedia Commons and have determined that Gustave Doré's engraving fits my personality well.
File:Gustave Doré - Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote - Part 1 - Chapter 1 - Plate 1 "A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination".jpg

"Verbose flirtations from the exagerated mind expands the unexpected."~_Pappy

A small encounter with autodidacticism

While growing up there were two sets of Encyclopedae in my closet; World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Brittanica. The World Books had a subset, Childcraft – The How and Why Library, that began my journey of extra-curricula knowledge finding. It basically began as looking at the pictures and progressed into reading the most interesting articles and eventually led to the bigger volumes of the two sets of encyclopedae culminating into the use of the index which could lay out up to seven volumes at once (on the kitchen table) just for one subject which may have spurred my interest. I do not profess to having a photographic memory, contrarily, I have a difficult time at remembering short term or long term, however, when any given subject might be breached (broached) I recall from somewhere in my brain, having read something about the subject or topic, and I have been accused of being a know-it-all. Later in life I purchased a set of Colliers Encyclopedia for my children which I used more than they did and mostly just because I enjoyed the newness of the information within. Then in 1998 I bought my first computer and the www was at my fingertips. HTML caught my eye and I wanted in and soon I found the w3c organization. Many hours were spent on their website but I found the technology progressed much faster than my ability to keep up. So I had to let it go its way for my own sanity. It was at this juncture in life Wikipedia came to the rescue as it was and is yet another encyclopedia to fill my autodidactic tendancy. Now I am helping to improve Wikipedia.