I was born a long, long time ago, back in March 1964. That means I'm too young to have seen Kennedy and Martin Luther King get shot, but old enough to remember the first man on the moon. Actually, I seem to remember that rather well, staying up late and watching these grainy black-and-white pictures on our TV.

My parents were, and still are, living in Haarlem (Holland), though they moved several times. So There I was, born on a Sunday in a small apartment on the top of a very low high-rise. My Dad, Nol, was a police constable and my mother, Meinie, decided to quit her job at Schiphol airport when I came up. Some two years later I got a baby brother, by the name of Jeroen. After I decided to climb from one balcony to the neighbouring one, my parents decided it was time to move us to safer pastures.

My Dad stayed with the police force until he was not only grey but old as well. He retired from the force at sixty. No longer a constable, but a commissioner, heading the region of Southwest Kennemerland. I still think he looks great in uniform.
He's currently spending his time by working on the genealogy of our family..., having trips with my mother all across the country, painting tin soldiers, collecting comics, and working in the garden. Recently he's taken up playing billiards.
Every other year he's busy organising summer school trips for the American University, Washington DC every other year. The kids all agree: He's the best part of the trip. If you want to know more about the American University, just follow the link.
So what is he like? Well, I have to be careful here, as he's has a web browser. Let me think. He's a big man, with a big voice and a big heart. He can be very stubborn at times, but he always tries to be fair. He loves to talk and teach. He used to read us fairy tales, took us out to do things and got us interested in almost everything. I could have done worse, much worse.

My mother was born and raised in West Friesland and move to Haarlem in her twenties. She met my Dad when he dropped of a colleague at her mother's. They got on well and decided to get married. They managed to do without me for four years. It took them that long before they decided to have me, then again, who can blame them. My Mum then spent days on end looking after her three men and being a dedicated wife and mother. In her spare time she likes to paint and make quilts and wall hangings. She loves to read but recently has taken to falling asleep after a couple of lines.
What is she like? For one she's about a foot shorter than my Dad's 6'6" Her eyes are the colour of seawater, all green, blue and grey together. She's a warm, caring and loving person. She's very emotional and cries easily.

When I was almost two years old I stopped being the center of my parents attention as I got...a baby brother, Jeroen. So we spent the next couple of years, all the way through puberty, arguing and fighting, and every now and then we played together nicely. It really wasn't all that bad. When we were little and sharing a room I used to tell him stories about our stuffed animals and he used to climb in my bed and stay there for the rest of the night.
He went through high school the hard way, started at the lowest level and worked his way through and up to university. He started with a year in Biology and switched to Art History. In the mean time he started refereeing American Football and made a bunch of friends in the US. We visited a few of them in 1993. A Dutch version of our trip can be found at...

Currently he's working on his Ph.D. at the University of Delaware. He's spending a lot of time as a research assistant for CHAD, the Center for Historic Architecture and Design. This year he is heading the survey team, recording historic buildings in the Delaware Valley. He hasn't got his own homepage, but you can have a look at the CHAD Homepage...
When he got to Delaware he was rather lonely, so my parents got e-mail to give him some company while at the same time keeping the phone bills within reason. Then he was asked to teach a young lady the intricacies of the Dutch language. One thing led to another; they got married on December 28, 1998 and currently they are living together in Newark. You can see some of their wedding pictures by clicking on the pen...

The last time the four of us were living in the same house was back in 1994. The house, my parents are still living there, is located in one of the outskirts of Haarlem. The dunes are a several minutes walk away, the beach fifteen minutes by bike.

Childhood was long and filled with warm summers and cold winters, but then again, isn't it always?

Kindergarten was fun: playing with wet sand, chasing girls, and being the teacher's pet.

Then came primary school and  being the teacher's pet turned out to have some serious drawbacks. The most obvious one being that the kids that weren't, decided it was fun to beat me up. I survived and went to high school.

During this time, my parents took me to far away places such as the UK and Germany. I was two when I first went abroad, all the way to Old Blighty. I saw York and Hardrian's wall and all I remember are the slides my Dad took. Later we visited most of the English South Coast, from Rye to Bude, and East Anglia. In Germany we saw the Harz and Black Forest, the Pfalz and Mosel areas. They were magical times and each day seemed to last a summer.

The high school I went to was a rather posh school, that went by the name of "Het Kennemer Lyceum." I hadn't learned to keep my big mouth shut yet, so it didn't take long for the other kids to start picking on me again. Still, I had a great time, okay, apart from the 'picking on me' bit, but still. I flunked the fifth grade and the next two years were the best I had in high school. Most of the kids didn't know me, or my 'reputation' and it had finally dawned on me that sometimes, just sometimes, it is actually better to keep my mouth shut. I still see some of the people I got to know. We also had some trips and I saw both Paris and Berlin. The last before the wall came tumbling down.

Utrecht University was next. I studied geology for seven long years at the Instituut voor Aardwetenschappen. Why geology? I can almost hear you ask. Well, my high school geography teacher told me about this study where you needed to have a tent and a backpack and had to have boxes filled with colour crayons and were send to Spain and Italy for months. It sounded just great.

Boy, was I in for a surprise. The first year consisted of courses in physics, math, chemistry, and bits of geology such as: sedimentology, paleontology, structural geology, and, my own private hell, geophysics. Oh, I did get to use those pencils, mostly in the paleontology and cartography classes. I also ended up in Northern Spain in a hamlet that went by the name of Castel de Cabra, near Montalban. This must have been one of the strangest months in my life. I survived on soup and bread, as I was too picky to try the local food. I also had the worst sunburn ever, my ears were peeling and I hurt so much I could hardly sleep.

The next year started me on the continuing story of statistics, rock mechanics and physics. I think it took me five or six years to get some of these exams. During the next years I finished most of my major in structural geology and almost got a second major in sedimentology. 
I had much more fun out of the lecture halls.

I went to Spain again: Cremenes, just South of the Picos de Europa. I had a wonderful time there with a girl called Susan, who'd flown in from San Antonio, Texas, a young priest by the name of Julio Recio and a lovely Spanish girl, named Susana. I remember the icy cold river, the "agua clara", only half of which was water, late nights gazing at the stars and very early mornings, with mist crawling over the river.

I went to Italy: Valtorta, in the Orobic Alps. Huge mountains, I thought, all of 2500 meters high. Steep slopes, thunderstorms, and incredible plant life. Locals who thought being protestant, which one of my team mates was, meant he wasn't allowed pork and hadn't a clue what I was talking about when I told them I was agnostic. I also remember a camp filled with little catholic girls, guarded by a priest and two nuns and writing long letters to my then time girlfriend.

The next year I didn't go anywhere, but the year after saw me in Spain again. This time in Huete, Guenca. I was there with Henk and Koos, both of whom moved out of my life since, but the time we had was great. I remember our landlord, Evaristo, a grubby looking, older gentleman. I remember the "Casas Colgadas" in Guenca, the "Ciudad Encantada" and the barbeques at the "embalsa." I saw my first bull-fight, and, this is going to cost me, loved it. We were heard on local radio and spent long afternoons in the swimming pool, by now I had gotten used to the sun and was tanning nicely. We met a bunch of Spanish students from the village, Nacho, Tiema, Rosa, Blanca and Carolina and spent our evenings in the bars and at the fiestas. I also met Susanna again.

Ending my last year we crawled and waded the canyoñes near Barbastro. It sometimes made as feel as if we were wading the Vietcong delta, up to our knees in the luke warm water and humid. We never saw the choopers, though. We camped in the Southern Pyrenees near Puente de Montaña and hardly met anybody. It was a quiet kind of trip, not much happened, no brilliant memories except for meeting in English folk group on Sort and trying to stuff six people into an old Volvo.

I finally managed to major in structural geology and am now allowed to put "Drs" in front of my name. Not that I ever, but it's a nice thought. What's a Drs? I guess it's closest to a MSc.

One of my professors at UU landed me a job at a now extinct geological consultancy by the name of InterGeos. I got the job because of my skills with pencils and crayons and kept it because they needed an assistant programmer. So I got apprenticed to a guy by the name of Ynze Baumfalk who taught me most of what I know about programming in C. Most of my time was spend in the office in Leiderdorp, but every now and then we were send abroad. I seem to have spend a lot of time in Stavanger, Norway.
I worked there for close to four years, bought a house and two months later the company went bankrupt.
It was a great time and I still have some friends among the people that used to work there.
Oh, part of the crew continued in a new form and named themselves IGC. I didn't join them as they didn't ask me. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, as they folded two years later.

By now I was 30 years old. I spent some time fixing up my new place and looking for a new job. Geology in Holland was dead and didn't fancy moving abroad. Half a year later I landed a job as C programmer at a company named Irdeto. I don't think I ever programmed more than a few lines of C in the four years I've worked here. What did I do? Well, I wrote code in Visual Basic, Delphi, ASP and HTML, a bit of JavaScripting , and even a bit of OpenTV.
I'm still working there and don't think I'll be leaving in the near future. I did switch departments and instead of working on a Studio Management System I'm now into Subscriber Management Systems and the company has renamed itself to Mindport.
Mindport seems to be doing well and IBS, my current unit, seems to be happy with the work I did on the GUI.

Having a little money, i.e. a steady job, I started travelling by myself to far away places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the Eastern USA, Crete, India and Nepal, and China and Tibet. You can see my travelogues, by clicking on the little pen...Sorry, all of them in Dutch although there are English bits  on the India and Crete pages.
I don't think I'll have much money left for a big trip this year, but maybe we can do a few little ones and maybe see Barcelona and some bits of the United Kingdom.

When I'm into travelling or working I read lots and lot of Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, spend money on CDs and comics, do a bit of Fantasy Role Playing and paint miniatures..., work on my garden, write poetry..., and maintain my web site. I also try to keep track of my social life, visiting friends, going to the theatre, and email a lot. Time permitting I ski a little and play some squash, but nothing too seriously.

April 1998 something wonderful happened. I bumped in to this absolutely lovely girl while waiting in an elevator at the office. She called out for help and I assumed she wanted to go up as well. We met a few more times and got more and more involved with each other.
A few late drinks, a late night pizza, a stroll along the beach and next thing I know is we've become an item. We kept is quiet for a couple of months, so as not to get other people's hopes up too high. Late in June we decided to let the world know. So far we've only had positive reactions and we are still growing closer. I must admit it feels very good to have somebody to hold and curl up against at night. Oh, before I forget, her name is Hetty and she's a couple of years younger than I am.

The two of us found a place big enough for the both of us and spent half a year getting everything into order. We've managed to most of it before we moved in early August 1999. In the year that followed we bought some more furniture and finished most of the paintwork inside. We also spent quite some time and effort on the garden and turned it into a wonderful secluded spot.

Mexico was a wonderful experience and I uploaded quite a few pictures of the trip. However, I'm still working on the travelogue.

My time at Mindport came to an end when they decided to move Research and Development to the Carlsbad, California. Hetty and I decided we'd rather not move to the US and so I allowed myself to be bought out. This tidy sum allowed me to spend a month working on the house and the garden before beginning at a new job, working for a small company in Hoofddorp, by the name of DSA•Vision. The work has me translating functional into technical specifications. A rather interesting challenge.

We also ended up getting a car, a little Opel Astra, so the both of us took a little refresher course in driving and are now zipping around the country, seeing all the little places where public transport does not come.

An extra floor was added to our house late in 2002, we spent most of the winter finishing it. However we also found time then to place a new deck in the back yard which not only looks stunning, but allowed us to have some wonderful dinners and a cocktail party in the garden.

Oh, I also added a page showing some of the impromptu visitors to our house and garden.

Early 2004 we remodeled the kitchen. This involved taking out the old one and moving stuff around in a serious way. The result is very pleasing and we ended up having a kind of pantry on the first floor. Since then we moved the television upstairs giving us more space (and quiet) in the living room, and a dedicated entertainment room in the attic. Yes, it's the yellow room and it still functions as a spare bedroom too.

Guess that's most of it...

Some links...