User:Cimon Avaro

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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (February 17, 1966) is a long time Internet user from Finland. The oldest Usenet posting by him still accessible via Google Groups is dated to August 3, 1987. [1]

He participated in the founding of City Lines and having initially not being active in the company after it's founding (except as a high volume customer), took the role of a sustaining silent partner during a particularly difficult patch of its history. (editorial note: Despite the very minor nature of his active contribution to the corporation, he feels some pride that the company continued to operate into the 21st century, at that stage being one of the oldest, if not the oldest Internet Service Provider in Finland.)

The person to whom the owner of this user page is accustomed to refer in the first person has had many near misses with wikipedia-like compendia.

While he was a prepubescent, he read a Finnish (fairly crappy) seven volume encyclopaedia called Combi through and through more than a dozen times (likely more like several dozen). it consisted of two volumes of "ready reference" (what wikikpedia would most generously call stubs). and five volumes with more expansive (illustrations no less - each illustration removing the need to pay for wordage), but also very limited in number of articles (I am not kidding; the non-stub articles - by wikipedia standards - were not in the thousands, more like in the dozens per volume.) For all that, it was all gravy.

Shortly after pubescence, Jussi-Ville made his first foray into systematizing the knowledge he had absorbed through voracious reading. That consisted of a notebook, where he collected random facts that he considered to be reasonably justifiably believable, in the preamble eschewing any direct connexion with "Truth" with a Capital T. This only ran into a handful of pages, before boredom set in. Self-discovery is not what it is cracked up to be; a very lonely endeavour.

When in his late teens, and having aquired a Forth interpreter for his Vic-20, he briefly entertained the idea of using the vocabulary based approach of Forth to embed a simulacra of the real world into it, by encoding the way the world works into it in detail. Just one of those youthful hubris sort of things.

Turning the corner into his twenties, he got a CP/M luggable, and a Prolog language for it. Now this language would genuinely have suited the conceit he had had with a much better fit than Forth, since after all, expert systems are what Prolog does best, and it is constructed out of logical clauses opening and shutting. Unfortunately, while he could grasp the Forth aproach to programming in an almost natural way, Prologs analytical approach was beyond Jussi-Villes brain structure.

Perhaps the project to create the equivalent of a wikipedia on his own, that Jussi-Ville began as a youth saw its beginning with him aqcuiring a shareware outline-program for his CP/M-80. To be sure the outline program wasn't even a hypercard stack, much less a wiki-engine; it only allowed information to be input in a hierarchical manner, top down. But it allowed some form of adding factoids in a framework of minor partitions forming larger agglomerations through the hierarchical structure. Jussi-Ville made once more an abortive effort to systematize "all that he knew" into a machine readable form, this time getting much further than any of the previous attempts, but still not making anything that could be called useful by a long shot.

The most wikipedia-like thing that Jussi-Ville encounterede before actually getting involved with wikipedia proper, though, was when he was intrigued by the opening paragraphs of the Angelique series by the french male-female collaborative team working under the pseudonym Sergeanne Colon. it had these old-wives scare stories about a person called Gilles de Rais who supposedly ate children. Morbidly curious (at the tender age of 16-17) Jussi-Ville checked out the biographical index (on cards in pullout compartments) which found the Britannica article on the man, but also a curious reference to an odd compendium. A quick search on microfiche found the compendium was present in a private library. Little did I know that the private library basically was for credentialled researchers only... Boldly Jussi-Ville rang the bell of the library which was kept in a private apartment. The librarian didn't at first want to let him in, but youthful enthusiasm is hard to resist, and the librarian made an exeption and let him in, even though he had no letters of introduction or the like.

The compendium turned out to be an expensively bound multiple volume work containing a particular bequests funded research projects, with abstracts of all the scientific works that bequest had funded. The abstracts were there to highlight what the fund had given money to as grants to researchers, and their style was not scientific, but rather a very informal text explaining what the funded research had accomplished. Long after Jussi-Ville had read the somewhat controversial take on Gilles de Rais, he was engrossed in the other curious research this bequest had funded, including UFOs, paranormal phenomena and other esoterica... The point here being that the style was very close to what used to reside on wikipedia as Jussi-Ville first found it. Not scientifically rigorous, but accessible language, and understandable to a layman who would have evaluated whether the bequest got its moneys worth in funding the research.

In the Wikipedia community, Jussi-Ville has twice run for Board of Trusteeship, and will run a third time, if and when an open election from the editorship of the project is next held.

[edit] Online communities

Bad Sector TBBS; The main alternative BBS, with quirky subjects discussed with an amazing seriousness of purpose, and some of the hardest hitting debates on the genuinely deep questions of politics and ideology to be found on finnish bulletin boards.
Intsu/Silicon Hole/Purebyte/Cute Communications; Intsu was a site that kept dumb terminal and modem combos (Think Digital Equipment VT-100 and VT-102) in a disused tunneled train depot and maintenance garage, Jussi-Ville visited it several times, referred by a friend, without taking an active part in its community; Silicon Hole was a hacker commune cum basement repository for museum-value hardware famous for housing the two students first sued in Finland for illegal hacking into university computers; the name was a nicer sounding formulation of the affectionate nickname of the site - Monttu, meaning a hole, with the common association "dumphole" - besides being a partner and co-rentee of the basement he was a sporadic hangaround member of the site even after letting the membership lapse and kept contact even after the group split into Purebyte and Cute Communications; with the latter moving into an uptown location and the former staying put, due to personality conflicts. Currently Cute Communications continues as Cutery, mostly as a gaming clan.
Radio City TBBS; The commercial radio station affiliated tbbs that was the simple TBBS precursor to City Lines, moderated by Teemu Törmä, a place where Jussi-Ville recalls Aleksi Bardy used to frequently get under the skin of the moderator, and Jussi-Ville had to moderate the moderator and him, particularly on the subject of anarchism, which the moderator equated with communism.
SuoKUG TBBS; Finnish Kaypro Users Group, where he participated in many legendary mid-1980's discussions on anarchy, paraphilia, philosophy, and science fiction. The sysop of this bbs was the legendary bohemian, Jussi "Moses" Pulkkinen, who began the Finnish Telecommunications Society and who later had his own computer store selling Bondwell luggables (Jussi-Ville bought the first computer he aquired with his own funds there; a Bondwell 12.)
HONEY/VAXI (Printti/A-lehdet VMS-box; originally run on a Honeywell and later on a VAX)
MITS (Finnish ISP)
MData (Finnish ISP)
Clinet (City Lines, Finnish ISP)
Wikipedia (en, fi)
DP-INT (Distributed Proofreaders)