About me
I'm born in Belgium and I've lived most of the time just outside Brussels. In 2005 I moved to the center of Bruges, or Brugge as it is called in Dutch.
My first go on computers was with the Commodore Vic-20. Later, like so many others, I migrated to the Commodore 64. After playing around with peeks and pokes for hours on the C64 I bought a Commodore 128.
In the early nighties I bought an Atari ST. The first in a very long row of Atari-machines. After the first Atari ST there came an Atari STF...another one...and finally two beautiful Atari Mega ST2. Only 2MB RAM...but so much space compared to the old Vic-20.
In 1992 I bought my first PC. Running only DOS and mostly using GW-Basic. That machine really gave me headaches. Where was the nice GUI I've been used to on my Atari? I started fooling around with Windows for Workgroups and when Windows 95 was released I ran to the store and installed it on a brand new pc. I can't remember it quite well but I think it was a Pentium-60 with only 16 MB RAM. Humm...after 3 days there was already a nice 'blue screen of death'. At first I thought it was my fault but as it seems, there were other people around the globe who had the same problem.
What else was there to do with this 'tool' than playing games? I've spent hours and hours shooting those bastards in Wolfenstein. Finally, I decided to take up Visual Basic. Wrong choice.
In 1998 I started working for a company that used both Foxpro for DOS and Visual Foxpro. Although Visual Foxpro ha(s)d many things in common with Visual Basic it is robust and quite a pleasant environment to work with. I was very charmed with the built-in-database-structure. In 2000 I changed jobs and started working for the Flanders Government. They were using Visual Basic and MS Access. Arrrgghhh. Fortunately, my job wasn't only programming in Visual Basic. I also maintained (together with my colleagues) the network (a bunch of Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 servers with NT4 Workstations, some Linux-servers and some OpenBSD-servers), doing some help-desk support (hum...not to my delight I must say) and caring about everything that has to do with the 'internet' (including building web-applications with Visual Interdev and the 'beloved' ASP) and the 'security' of our perimeters.
After a while I've started to get in touch with GNU/Linux. In october 2000 I've installed my first Red Hat 6.2 and kept on installing until now.
Mid 2004 I switched jobs and I'm now working for the Belgian Research and Education Network (BELNET) as a member of the Computer Emergency Response Team.
