I am currently 19 years old, and a student of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

I first edited an article in March of 2003, and started contributing on a regular basis in the wee days of May. I am Russian by birth, Jewish by heritage, American by citizenship and allegiance; libertarian by political persuasion, Republican by general party affiliation; and nerd by personality.

My nickname is a slang term, at least in Irvine, California, for a somewhat cocky smart person. I do think I've outgrown it, but it's good enough for Wikipedia.

My email address is ivg in the immediate vicinity of berkeley very small spot edu email-address harvesting software must die. ('92604' is my ZIP code. When I got this email address, Yahoo suggested that I be either smack16 or smack17, so I decided to go with a number I could remember. You may also AIM at brainybuffoon, YIM me at smack92604, or ICQ me at 26220039.

Current status

I've been too lazy to look at the the steady stream of obscure Wikipolicy that seems to be an inevitable byproduct of Wikiwork. If I break any rules, though, please do tell me.

As of January 16, I'm back at school. I try to keep myself busy up here, so I probably won't undertake any major contributions until the summer, but I will log in from time to time to check my messages and watchlist.

Whenever I see an article, think that it needs a lot of work, and think that I'm capable of performing this work with at least an average level of competence, I put it on my To-do list.

I've written an essay. I've called it "A rewrite a day keeps the critics at bay".

Some contributions of note

If an article is listed here, it usually means that I wrote a pageful or more, as seen at a decently high screen resolution.

• Philmont Scout Ranch (sole substantive contributor)
• Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) (this one doesn't quite meet my length criteria, but I like it)
• List of BSA rank requirements (a rather shameful article)
• Tent
• Portable stove
• First Age, Fëanor and other Tolkien-related stuff
• Campfire (initially How to light a fire)
• Season
• Hiking
• Boy Scouts of America
• Jefferson Davis (refactored from a timeline)
• Colonial History of the United States
• Test (student assessment)
• Archaeology
• Peterhof
• Atomic orbital (begun at Electron orbital, then cut and pasted)
• Radioactive decay

Images that I have authored and uploaded

The technical diagrams were created using Micrografx Designer. All images, except for diagrams containing text, are hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

Multi-licensing nonsense

I was recently informed about a rather ironic situation. We all thought that our contributions to Wikipedia were freely released, but there's a rather hairy issue involving noncompatibility of the vaunted GFDL with other licenses used by other allegedly free information repositories. It's a bloody mess, so in an effort to resolve my small part of it once and for all, I'm attaching this little note to my user page.