User:Pashley

A baby boomer Canadian who has lived & travelled in Asia off-and-on for decades. Back in the 70s, I travelled Istanbul to New Delhi over land then down to Goa, all the way around the coast to Calcutta, and up into Nepal. I've also lived and worked in Iran, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and 2002-12 in China.

In 2014, I began alternating, summers in Ottawa and winters in the Philippines. Due to COVID, though, I was in the Philippines continuously October 2019 to May 2023.

I was active on Wikitravel from about 2005 and was an admin there; now I'm here.

I think my most important work here has been creating a few articles that solve problems.
 * Metro Cebu ties together some lower-level articles & solves problems discussed at Talk:Cebu_City/Archive_2014-2017.
 * Gemstones came from pub discussion now archived at Talk:Gemstones, providing one place for information that was previously scattered.
 * Downtown Shanghai solved Talk:Shanghai. It later became a redirect to Shanghai, but that's fine.

I like working on travel topic articles. Two that are almost entirely by me are Retiring abroad and On the trail of Marco Polo. I also contributed quite a lot to Teaching English, Digital nomad, Ibn Battuta and On the trail of Kipling's Kim. I also like creating extra-hierarchical regions such as Lake Tai and Bactria.

I am also Pashley on Sensei's Library, the Wiki about the game of Go (I wrote much of the article here), on Rational Wiki which does amusing criticism of Conservapedia & other irrational sites, on Appropedia, an appropriate technology wiki, and on Wikipedia. At one point I was quite active on Citizendium, but that project has fizzled out.

At various times, I have worked as an English teacher. At other times, I've been a hacker, doing more-or-less every computer job at one time or another, mainly training and technical writing. My last large writing project was documentation for FreeS/WAN, a Linux implementation of the IPsec security protocols. From 2010 to late 2012, I managed to combine my language & computer skills and travel, working as an editor for technical papers that members of the Computer Science dep't (mostly PhD candidates) at Shanghai Jiaotong University (one of the country's top schools) were submitting to English journals.

Contact me via my talk page or email.