About me

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My name is Matt, born August 13, 1983, and I'm from Syracuse, New York. I am a guitarist (musician), skateboarder, snowboarder, electronics technician, and a C/C++ programmer.

I am a big-time music buff. I respect music that takes true virtuosity, natural genius, and hard work to make. I've always been a punk, but my musical interest runs very deep. I think music's true purpose in life is to entertain, educate, enlighten, and provide a soundtrack to our daily lives, that we can choose to our liking. Real music can make you laugh or cry, uplift, depress, and impart any feeling or emotion it attempts to (or may by accident.) Music plays such a huge part in every person's life for a reason. It defines generations and societies, creates fads and styles, and can change a person's life forever the first and successive times a piece is heard. Writing a song is easy. Writing a song that can do the things I mentioned before takes true understanding of life in general. Music is life recorded.

I do like a lot of rap music, but at the same time realize that not much really goes into it. Anyone can make a nifty beat with a computer program or synth, and write tough-guy rhymes on a sheet of paper. However, I really respect alternative rap artists like Talib Kweli (whose Reflection Eternal album i consider one of the greatest rap albums of all time), Mos Def, The Roots, De La Soul, and generally anybody who trys to be truly poetic, original, and intuitive with their music.

Aside from that, my true love lies in rock music, especially innovative artists who are not afraid to try new things and push the envelope. My favorite artists include Pink Floyd, Primus (anything by Les Claypool in general), Maynard James Keenan (Tool and A Perfect Circle), Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, The Beatles, The Doors, Ween, The Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Sublime (Bradley Nowell was a true genius), The White Stripes, and shitloads of others I can't think of at the moment.

I also dig a lot of the classic soul and rhythm and blues from the sixties and seventies, by people like Marvin Gaye (What's Going On), and The Temptations. Funk bands like Sly and the Family Stone and P-Funk, who were directly inspired by this kind of music, also kick serious ass.

I have made contributions on all sorts of random pages, but most of my contributions are to music, programming, and computer game-related pages. I take a specific liberty in updating anything Primus-related. I started Todd Huth's and Jay Lane's pages.

I have an ever-unrequited love for tremolo picking and octaves, ala Ler LaLonde. Excessive pinch harmonics are for people who need to mask the fact that they can't play.

Thou shalt not diss the whammy bar.

Ceast and desist

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I'm getting really fucking tired of attempting to read or edit pages written by people who have absolutely horrible English grammar. While I'm no novelist, I do know how to write in a manner that is informative, to-the-point, and grammatically correct. The absolute worst of this are edits made by people who do not speak English natively. Edit your own language's version of Wikipedia! If you're not completely confident in your ability to write content that is encyclopedia caliber, cease and desist.

The "also" syndrome

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I'm getting really fucking tired of seeing "also" everywhere. People just randomly slap sentences in the middle of paragraphs, or in their own single-sentence paragraphs, that stick out like a sore thumb. I think everyone knows exactly what I'm talking about here. Doing this just turns articles into a list of trivia sentences, and it completely murders what were previously well-written paragraphs.

Womens' basketball on TV

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I'm not sexist; women are capable of doing anything a man can do. But please, ESPN, stop trying to cram womens' basketball down our throats! No one watches it. No one. There aren't even people in the stands during the NCAA tournament! Stop trying to be fair and politically correct, you fucking assholes.

The Curse of Wikipedia

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Unfortunately, The Curse of Wikipedia will always be, in my mind, the ability for ABSOLUTELY anyone to edit pages; its just too difficult to even attempt to maintain. You try hard to maybe keep some facts straight on a certain page, and somebody insists that their objective, bullshit opinion is fact. What can you really do to correct this? Nothing. They can even cite some bullshit website that happens to echo their opinion.

It's too open to really be taken seriously. People can slip in bullshit facts and figures without anyone sometimes even noticing.