My Micro-Bio

Once upon a time

Well, let's start in the beginning: I was born in Cologne, Germany on the 9th of August in 1967. By that time, my father was a drummer, and my mother worked as a waitress in the nightclubs. That funny life came to an end, when I arrived. My father started working as a joiner, the job he had learned, my mother became a housewife.

For a while, I naturally wanted to become a joiner too. Later, growing up with things like Billy Gilezby (spelling?!?) and Charly Parker, I tried myself in doing music too. Drums where not my thing, but somehow I made it to playing classical guitar for a while - actually, I was really good with that.

Whoa, a Computer!

Then, in 1980, I faced an option that changed my life quite drastically. I was about to get a new stereo, when I read that Tandy announcement about TRS-80 Model I machines that were becoming payable, and that was a real computer!

I think I had met the best possible time for getting a computer. I had no friends that had one, so I couldn't get lost playing computergames. I started playing around with BASIC - naturally with the intention to write my own games...<sigh>

It took me two more years to start looking into other programming languages - keep in mind, that I was quite young, and literature was really expensive and rare by that time, over here in Germany.

Learning, and more computers

By the age of 16 I switched schools and met the first other computer-guys, most of which have since then become really good friends. I started using a CP/M computer at school, and had the chance to learn PASCAL, and Z80-Assembler. Later that year, I got my first introduction in Lisp with the muMath/muSimp packages. Wow! That was cool stuff. I never again left that language, and these days, even my editor of choice - Emacs - is programmed in Lisp.

1986 I got myself a Atari 260 ST, with the huge amount of 256 KBytes RAM, could you imagine that?!? My raving stopped rather fast, when I found out, that I had only about 40 KBytes left when the Atari-Basic was started.

I fiddled a bit more in PASCAL, did my first paid job for a sick guy who thought that the letters of your name would tell you something about your destiny - ROTFL.

Then another year later, I started learning C. I hated it, because the only thing I ever really learned was PASCAL, but slowly I got the hang out of it. Jesus, last year I had 24 hours to write a 1500-liner in PASCAL, and yes, I still can do it, but really, that's not a programming language! PASCAL is great for teaching, but please, for real jobs, let's stay with real languages!

I continued learning, and started teaching computer-stuff on my old school. Somehow I quit school to become a free-lance programmer, doing a bit statistics, admin on a Novell 2.x Network, lowlevel Postscript programming and other stuff. This went well up to my 24th year. Then the army took me in, just one year before I'd have been out automatically.

You and what army?

You know, here in Germany we have the option to do other stuff instead of militair. I already had that procedure running, when they said they wanted me. Just a few month before, Saddam had taken over Kuwait, and I started thinking about all that army stuff.

Up to Saddam, I was sure that the need for an army was not existant in the 20th century. Russia was opening, Germany was reunited, everything was getting better, and right into that jumped a guy, took over a country, and it looked as if he was getting away with that?!? I decided to withdraw my civil services, and went straight to the army, wanting to become a professional soldier.

Ooohhh man, was I stupid! Really, folks! There may be great armies out there, that do good jobs in stopping wars, and protecting civilians in war areas, but trust me: The German army is not in that league! While I did my time with them, an official guy of the government did a report that said it'd take more than 4 weeks, to get us up and running, just in case anybody would march in here.

That put every single one of my reasons into ridicule, so I did the standard-year, and went off, back into my life, quite a bit more mature now. Nowadays, with Jugoslavia, Russia, Rwanda and all the other places where we have war again, I believe there is a real need for an international army, but I have strong doubts that any of the ones we have are right for that job.

Back to life...

After that year, I decided to get a regular 9-2-5 job. I found one quite easy, and have stayed there since then.

And now? 'ts up, huh?

This year, I have started doing night school now, so perhaps I'll start studying something in my early 30ies, but I don't think it'll be computers primarily. You know, I think I'm really good at what I do, I have a lot of experience that no university could have taught me, and there have to be other things out there.