Natural Languages
- English (impeccable; four years' UK residence, culminating in Oxford D.Phil.)
- Estonian (excellent, but not impeccable; significant book editing)
- French (sufficient for competent socializing; j'ai passé un été fort agréable en France en 1972; maintenant j'écoute Radio Canada quelques minutes par jour)
- classical and ecclesiastical Latin (two years' university, culminating in one book of the Aeneid; skills now rusty through disuse)
- classical and koiné Greek (self-taught; massive studies a couple of decades ago, culminating in much reading of Aristotle as graduate student in Oxford, of Plato as lecturer subsequently; I never touched the poets; the Greek, although now rusty, is still a modestly useful tool for reading an interlinear-translation New Testament)
- German (in case you're wondering, an absurd smattering - I can say "Oh weh, mein Ei ist in den Fluss gefallen" and suchlike, but would not really sparkle over Glühwein at the local Austrian or German consulate)
Professional Library
- standard shelf of manuals for English-language editor in general Canadian practice, with specialization in science: Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition); Words into Type (3rd edition); Editing Canadian English; Judith Butcher's Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers; Nancy Mulvany's book-indexing manual; Peggy Smith's workbook on North American proofreaders' marks; the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and Physical Review guides to notation; the CBE Scientific Style and Format manual, ...
- standard shelf of dictionaries for English-Estonian editor in general international practice: (unabridged) fine-print Oxford English Dictionary; (unabridged) Webster's Third New International Dictionary; smaller English-language dictionaries, including Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition) and ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary of the English Language; Collins Robert French-English English-French Dictionary in a 1982 edition; Brockhaus-Bildwörterbuch Englisch-Deutsch Deutsch-Englisch in a 1976 edition; Paul F. Saagpakk's Eesti-Inglise Sõnaraamat; Kull-Raiet Õigekeelsus-Sõnaraamat in a 1980 edition, ...
- standard shelf of technical manuals for an editor using TeX and LaTeX: Wynter Snow's TeX for the Beginner, Donald Knuth's The TeXbook, Leslie Lamport's LaTeX: A Document Preparation System: User's Guide and Reference Manual, and the Goossens-Mittelbach-Samarin LaTeX Companion
- standard shelf of technical manuals for an editor using HTML, XHTML, SGML, and XML: the O'Reilly Definitive Guide books for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets, Charles F. Goldfarb's SGML Handbook, the O'Reilly DocBook guide, the Simpson Just XML and Just XSL books. ...
- standard shelf of background books for knowledge worker running PPP-dialup Linux workstation (including the New Riders MySQL offering and the Sun Microsystems Java Tutorial: Third Edition; and I'm particularly fond of my O'Reilly books by system-administration gurus Welsh-Dalheimer-Kaufman and Frisch)
Computing Skills
-
solid skills in plain TeX (user since summer of 1996;
self-training done in Linux, from
both Knuth's and Wynter Snow's manuals; see also,
in the "Literary" section of my http://www.metascientia.com,
the unpublished articles "TeX Self-Test" and
"Whither TeX in the XML Régime?");
in JadeTeX
(used for typesetting to PostScript
of 700-page Estonian-language book drafts; HTML output from Jade
is uploaded to
to http://www.interlog.com/~verbum/kv/ladumine/book1.htm);
and in LaTeX (self-training done in Linux from extensive reading
of Leslie Lamport's LaTeX, and consolidated by
the copyediting,
in 2003, of 6 physics papers for NRC RP Research Press,
with NRC RP
*.clsand.*styLaTeX add-ons) - intermediate-level mastery of Linux system management (one achievement is a pair of successful IRAF astronomical image-processing suite installs at the University of Toronto; another is the installation of Debian GNU/Linux on a small machine under my control in Nova Scotia, though not under my ownership)
- rudimentary grasp of scripting in bash and Perl (an instance from the toolbox I have created, with a little outside help: a routine that, when invoked at the command line with an argument such as somefile.txt, copies somefile.txt to the backup somefile.txt____BAK20031210T054520Z if the time happens to be 2003-12-10 05:45:20 UTC, and to the backup somefile.txt____BAK20040210T054521Z if the time happens to be 2004-02-10 05:45:21 UTC, ...)
- solid grasp of SGML principles (veteran user of DocBook DTD, in 700-page Estonian SGML-to-simultaneous-PostScript/RTF/HTML publishing project)
- solid grasp of contemporary Web typography - XHTML 1.0 (equivalently, HTML 4.01), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Computer Hardware (Desktop, Laptop)
- Intel Celeron (600 MHz) 642-MB desktop machine with two hard drives
- IBM ThinkPad 128-MB laptop machine with internal drive and USB external drive
Computer Software:
Desktop Machine
- open-source (GNU public licences or similar) Debian GNU/Linux with standard TeX, Perl, ... tools; secured through a customized firewall (IP Tables-invoking) shell script, and kept up to date with download checks, through a small shell script, on essentially every business day, so as to conform continually to the very latest state of the Debian 3.0r1 stable-branch "Woody" distribution
- VMWare virtual machine and Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Microsoft Word 2002, MathType 5, CINDEX 1.5 book-indexing tool - all with formal commercial licences
Computer Software:
Laptop Machine
- Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Word 2002, MathType 5, CINDEX 1.5 book-indexing tool - all with formal commercial licences
- WordPerfect 8, from legitimately purchased shrinkwrapped copy (installed in 2003, when Corel Corporation had discontinued formal support for WordPerfect 8, but needed to service a client who in 2003 specified this version number rather than the currently supported versions 9, 10)