reflection@gmail.com wrote:

There are a few pictures of me in my photo gallery which I believe is linked to on my Wikipedia user page. Here you go: http://www.br1an.net/alterego/ As you can tell I like photography and I travel a lot. I am also a Journalist in the Navy stationed in Naples, Italy. I work on my Admiral's staff so perhaps I am a little desensitized to working with rank as well as people I don't know well (or at all, most of the time). In addition I am attending UoMaryland European Division (just working on my requirements, it's hard to be in the military and school).

Thanks for telling us a little about yourself, Brian. It helps overcome the barrier some of us may feel because we haven't had a chance to observe or interact with you before.

So, I don't think I am your bird

Yes, I think it's probably safe to conclude that you aren't User:Bird. It's just your choice of Alterego as a username, combined with the fact that Bird and some other disruptive people here have a habit of misusing sockpuppet accounts, that made me suspicious.

(but I do have a picture of a pigeon in my gallery)

Indeed, from my experience with some of the sites you visited, I would be surprised if you managed to take all of those photographs entirely pigeon-free.

I was asked to help out with the Staff section and I did my best considering the time constraints. I received a rather decent lambasting publicly and privately for my effort. My apologies.

Likewise, my apologies for contributing to the lambasting. I was trying to warn people on the list of my concerns about sharing this kind of information with someone we don't know, rather than condemning you for making a good faith effort to help. In the rush created by the grant deadline, you got put in a difficult position. Your calm response to the problems this created is commendable, and should make it easier for people to trust you more in the future. I hope you will not hold this experience against us, and continue contributing to the project in whatever way you can. We have a principle of "not biting newcomers", but sometimes we're not as good at that as we should be.

So perhaps we won't get this grant application in on time, but perhaps we can in the future. In regards to resumes, we should probably have someone keep some on file. They are going to be needed in the future.

I agree, all of the work put into this grant application needs to be preserved for future applications. For any résumés we've collected, we should keep them unless the individual in question requests that we not do so.

By the way, it would still be nice if you don't reply to this list by including a copy of every message in the digest, since it wastes a lot of space.

--Michael Snow