I recently graduated from the University of Minnesota (well, actually not, but I'm about to... and I have a real job which kind of assumes that i graduated, so you see where I stand there) with a degree in Latin, Computer Science and History. I'm obviously a person of varied tastes... I love cutting edge technology and playing with computers, yet I also am deeply rooted in reading history and ancient languages (I personally believe that translation ALWAYS loses information, which is why I want to learn as many languages as possible).

I'm also into all sorts of different things. I absolutely love movies and music, but I'm also very picky about both of them.

When I rate reviews, I look at each review from a few different angles and take everything into account. The three most important things for me are the information provided, the style in which it is presented, and the eloquence that it is presented with.

The most important of these is information provided, as no review can be helpful if it misinforms whoever is reading it, no matter how well written it is. There are two ways to fail this test. The first is to provide no information, a sin which can be forgiven if you are very entertaining, in which case I will most likely just not rate your review. The second way is much less forgivable, and that is to give information which I think is incorrect. In this case, the best you can get from me is a SH since no matter how good the rest of the information is, they reader is going to walk away misinformed.

The other two criteria that are most important to me fall a distant second to the first one. These are what seperate a helpful reveiw from one that is very helpful (in my humble opinion). People will disagree with me and my ratings, but I will have to stand by what I think.

I will admit that there are some things that I find more interesting than others (now really, who doesn't have things that interest them more). Personally, my big areas of interest are ancient history and language (specifically dealing with Rome/Latin) and computer operating systems.

Really, I'm not lying on this one. I do like operating systems a lot. I specifically like to see what an operating system can do with very little as far as hardware to play with (give it the old worst case scenario and see how it handles), so I end up putting a lot of different operating systems on my 200mhz AMD system with 64mb of RAM, which was cutting edge about four years ago. When you do something like this, you get a real feel for what the programmers are good at in certain areas