After having posted occasionally @ blogs.dogzor.org, I finally got around to creating a personal blog.
I suppose my life has been increasingly infiltrated by technology since my youth.
I ‘wrote’ my first application (copying it from a book) using QBasic on DOS 5 in SoftPC on a Macintosh Performa 630 when I was 11 or 12 years old.
What can I say, those were the days 
By the time I was 16 I got Ivor Horton’s Beginning Java 2 published by Wrox Press for my birthday (€ 60 was a lot of money). It was a first edition and
I was sad to find out the latest available JDK for Mac was version 1.1 (back then Apple had it’s MRJ, MacOS Runtime for Java), and even worse, Java 2 would never be supported on the 68k platform (PowerPC was *expensive*). In the end it didn’t really make a difference as I only got around to doing real Swing development when I started university. As it turned out by the way, the first MacOS version to support full Java 2 was Mac OS X. I was a happy Mac user, but not always.
By the time I was 19 I got to know Filip in Leuven who became a dear friend and an influence to be reckoned with when it comes to IT. He was the first I knew to have GNU/Linux as his primary platform (Gnome 1.4 powered Gentoo) and I remember gasping as I saw him pull in some dir structure over an SMB network from a commandline after filtering out the files he didn’t want. Furthermore, his Dell laptop had a nice framebuffer, HD encryption and so on. I wanted it.
It took me at least a year to get up to speed on Linux (still learning of course) but by the time I had switched to a professional highschool (university was a tad too theoretical for my taste I guess) I was doing school work in OpenOffice 1.0 and fought many fights. At the same time I got more and more into Java and finally got around to using Eclipse as an IDE. As the Java as a language and framework became more and more clear to me, I got to use Netbeans once they release version 5.0 (Matisse!) and spent quite some time developing this ‘n that.
In February 2 years ago, I left to do an internship in Nantes, France, where I spent my time in mysql, php, xhtml, css & javascript.
After graduating, I started my own one-person company and got to work on a made to measure software solution for the medical sector.
About six months later I joined an IT company and was lucky enough to be able to run Linux on a ThinkPad in a fully supported manner.
At home I still enjoy my Gentoo most of the time, although a CentOS found it’s way onto my system a few months back as RHEL is one of the supported platforms. Learning the ins & outs of WebSphere Portal, Workplace Web Content Management and Lotus Quickr prove to be a challenge in their own right, but I love the software itself so no problem there
In my time away from the screen I quite often grab a hold of my guitar or lay back and enjoy a good music DVD or episode. One day I hope to be able to produce some quality music, on the right place at the right time.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a good thing with someone going for a good 2 years now, so quite often we’ll be cooking and watching a movie, getting some beers, doing some trip. Needless to say she provides a welcome counterweight to my sometimes too IT-dominated life (it’s an imperfect world) .
I’ll probably be adding some of my posts from their previous location, since some were as much for self-reference as anything else. And yep, the theme etc. is on the todolist … somewhere