I don't remember much of the event myself but I was born one day.

    I was born on the 31st of January 1962. I got written into the registers the day after. This was February and the clerk made a mistake and wrote the 31st of February 1962.
Unluckily this was later corrected.

    People that know me will confirm that I have something like a computer memory. Multi megabytes of fast RAM. Fast indeed, I forget in 30 nanoseconds flat and RAM because it really is Random. Consequential I don't remember much from my early years. Well I remember a lot but mostly in short fragments and without dates.

    When I was about six we moved from Tienen to Hasselt where I still live with my father.

    I ran school at the Athenaeum, direction sciences, where the teachers (most of them) called me "a bright kid, but ...". I had to double the last year because of that "but". The problem was that I did not really care about the things I had to do but rather concentrated on the things I liked to do. I liked a lot but not everything so ... . Later I went to University, where I doubled the second year for the same reason.

    While at school I was with a swimming club where we trained daily for competition. I was almost 10 years with the club and though I never became a top swimmer I reached the national championships where I even got a third place with the relay team (I had to replace some one at the last moment). After the competition swimming I switched over to Water Polo and later Diving. The main lasting result of these sporting years is that I came trough adolescence with a well trained physique and no addictions. I never smoked or drank and I kept a well balanced diet without excesses. All very good and really sport is the best and easiest way to get your kids into a healthy life. And it teaches them to compete. Competing means winning but also losing, And it is more important to teach how to lose than how to win. I learned well.
I lost most of the time, which made the winning so much more enjoyable.

    My father was teacher Geography (he was training new teachers) and well versed in history and so each year, during the summer holidays we went on vacation throughout Europe. That was by car and sleeping in tents. Real adventurous for us kids. We visited primarily historic places and geographically interesting regions. It was also typically to places that were discovered by mass-tourism only years later so we almost never had to contend with crowds nor with junk souvenir sellers. No lazy sunbathing for us but rather active and educational trips. And fun.

    My mother died in 1978.

    In 1981 I started at the University, going for Biology, if I had been good enough in maths I might have gone for physics. The first two years, which I did in tree, were in Diepenbeek so I could stay home. The last two years were in Antwerp. I finally finished university as Biologist in 1986. I stayed on the university for another year. I did my end thesis on a computer simulation of a farm community. The biological data and rules that I provided was converted by two students from Informatica into a Pascal program. The program was not finished before the summer yet the programmers left so I had to learn how to program in Pascal and then finish the program. Before September. In the year after my diploma I converted quite a lot of programs from BASIC to Turbo Pascal. In those days schools had some Commodore 64 computers and a lot of Apple II boxes with most programs used in education written in BASIC and now IBM clones were appearing into schools. A lot of programs appeared in GWBASIC and I converted some of them as well.

    I had to join the army in 1988 for my regular military service which was 12 months then. Since 1994 military service has been abandoned in Belgium and now we have a professional army. Because of that military service I couldn't find a job before 1989 because companies aren't likely to invest in training a new employee that is going to leave them. Until I joined I programmed a lot in Turbo Pascal but after my service I let it slip so now I can still read Pascal (and its successor Delphi) but I don't speak it anymore.

    Immediately after my service I got on a course provided by IBM (but paid by the government on a job provision schema). The course was for midrange computers, basically the then new AS/400. Immediately after the course I got a job at Orthos. Orthos was later bought by RealSoftware as one of their early external acquisitions. I worked for many projects, sometimes as a mere coder, sometimes managing a small team. The way RealSoft works is that you are placed at a clients location and work closely with the management there. Some clients, basically the smaller ones, have no IT management at all or just pro forma (most often the IT manager is the head of accountancy). I had a few such projects where I was manager, architect, software designer, developer, coder, customer support and help desk. All at the same time. And I had to report to (and make a profit for) someone at RealSoft. Sometimes this is great fun but sometimes this is a real hell.
Most of the time I was at the designer-coder stage and I really love this the best. You get feedback from the users, filtered trough local or remote project leaders and yet you can steer development.

    I still work for Realsoft. And I still love the job.

    I am currently on a more or less fixed contract for a Dutch firm. I started there on a conversion job, rewriting a custom interface to JDEdwards accountancy software. Then I took over an old EDI communication module (mostly written in COBOL) (I didn't know COBOL, now I am "expert" in it :~) ). After that I started a GUI project, building a graphical shell to lay on top of the classical AS/400 'green screen' interface. Now I am head developer for the sales module. This module is being converted to Progress by one of my colleagues and I should be learning Progress as well.
The problem with the whole Dutch firm is that is located in the Netherlands. This means I have to commute about three hours a day. I leave at 7h20 (up at 5h40) to get there at 7h45 (that way I avoid traffic problems), and I am back home at somewhere between 19h00 and 20h00.

    The only thing I can get done in the evening is the day book. The rest of the site is being done during weekends. Since I started the site not much time is left for creating new content for it. So for the time being all that finds it way to the web will be older stuff that I have lying around here.