Topics on which I write reviews: Hong Kong gun-fu and chop-socky movies. Anime. Computers, especially Unix and Linux. Disney Parks. Movies. Theme parks.

Topics on which I write essays: Most of the above. Family. Children, especially disabled children, specifically autisim. Epinions.

What do I do: I was a systems administrator for 5 years on a mostly-unix-centric network. I'm now a testing engineer. I write Bourne and Korn shell scripts to drive command line tests.

In my spare time: I spend my time with family, or surfing the net. Once a month or fortnight I end up at the movies. I sometimes tweak my unix box at home, but since I've changed jobs, it is no longer something I feel I must do to keep sharp.

For reviews, I ask myself, "Would someone interested in this product or service reading this review find it helpful?" By someone, I mean the hypothetical average person (unless the reviewer has defined his or her audience in the review).

Misspellings make a review much less helpful if the hypothetical person cannot easily make out the intended word. Repeated misspellings make a review less helpful, even if each one is easily deciphered.

Whitespace is important. If the whole review is a single block of text, I feel the averge person will have a hard time reading it. WebTV users evidently cannot put blank lines of text in their reviews. If I know a reviewer is a WebTV user, I'll make an exception.

Length is not important, but completeness is. I'd rather read more details than go away from a review wondering about an attribute I consider critical, but was not detailed fully. Better to err on the side of caution.

Style is important, but only in my deciding to follow an author's writing. Homogeneous sentence structure I wears me out, and while I will not rate a review lower because of it, I will also not seek out reviews by an author with an absolutely invariate style.

EpinionTalk: The Unofficial Epinions. com Dictionary (ET:UNED) by mobiprof. If it's not there, you probably don't need it defined.

How to write a "Very Helpful" Book Review by solleks. While the author and title focus on book reviews, this applies directly to movie reviews as well, and with some imagination to most other reviews (as opposed to essays).

Epinion Tips from a Techie is my contribution to the "things I wish I knew when I first started" body of knowledge.

EpinionForums, the most active part of EpinionAddicts, a site by, for and mostly about members of Epinions.

NewEpinions, ptiemann's amazing subscription manger for your favorite Epinions authors. Lightweight, intitutive and multifacted, this site will keep you notified when new Epinions are published, either by category, or by your favorite subscribed author.

Note: I have stopped using Epinions "New Opinion Alert" in favor of this website. This website also allows you to query which other members subscribe to your writings.

Xangaa free weblog (blog for short) site that does not suffer from GeoCities' policy of prohibiting external links to images. This is where I store my profile picture.

HTML 4.0 Latin-1 Entities, listings of HTML entities supported by most major browsers.

ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) Characters List is a listing of all characters (including many escape sequeneces not applicable for HTML) from 0 to 255. To use it, look up the character, note the decimal value next to it, then prepend &# and append a ; to the number. For example, the ¿ character is decimal 191, and the HTML representation for it is ¿.

I work for Sun Microsystems, but I do not speak for them. All opinions voiced here are my own.