Me, Myself and I...
But seriously now. Well, I guess I am supposed to tell you something about myself. Let's start at the very beginning: Shortly after the Big Bang... Uh no, that's a different story...
I was born the son of two teachers in 1971 in Hannover, Germany (yes, having two teachers as parents isn't all that easy). When I was one year old, my parents moved to a beautiful little town called Hannoversch' Muenden. Hann Muenden has a known history of over 800 years and is surrounded by three different rivers that, together with the surrounding green hills, build a very unique and stunningly beautiful scenario.
The next eighteen years of my life I lived there with my parents and my sister Sabine who was born 2 1/2 years after me. Very early in my life, the first signs for a serious infection with the "knack" showed up. An obsession with everything technical drove my family crazy since nothing was safe from me. I started fixing radios and building electronic circuits when I was about nine. I had my first computer at twelve. It was a very simple experimental machine code microprocessor, but it surely was fun to code with. A Commodore 64 followed soon after. It didn't take me long and the poor C64 wouldn't fit into its case any more because of all the hardware modifications that I had performed to it. Several years later I was extremely excited to add a Commodore Amiga 2000 to the collection, a computer that I still sometimes late at night cry a tear for because of its early and completely undeserved death.
After I graduated from the Grotefend-Gymnasium Muenden with a German "Abitur" and after a short and unfortunately obligatory (German men have to go) acquaintance with the German army I moved to Muenchen (Munich) in Bavaria in 1991. For the following two years I took part in an apprenticeship at the Siemens Technik Akademie (Siemens Technical Academy) with a major in Information Technology. During this time I was exposed to Unix for the very first time. It was love at first sight. I also finally gave in to moving my Amiga to the attic and buying myself a 486 in order to run Linux on it. What pure, genuine fun and excitement! I had a short but intense period of activity on bulletin boards but only until I found out about the Internet. Wheeeeaew! Did I say love at first sight in regards to Unix? This one was a hot obsession! Try to keep me away from the keyboard at night!!!
I graduated from the Siemens school in 1993 and enrolled into the Electrical Engineering program at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (Technical University of Munich) in the following summer. During the time in college I did several UNIX System Administration and Software Development jobs and I fell in love with Perl. I did some pretty impressive programming gigs using perl. Thank you Larry Wall! For a while I also worked as a Windows NT consultant. No worries, I am not getting into any religious discussions here. My opinion is that you cannot ignore either side these days. I obtained my Vordiplom (Bachelor of Science) early in the year of 1996.
Late 1996 I traveled to California, USA to stay for a five months consulting assignment at Siemens Components, Inc in San Jose. And I did. At the time of this writing it is about six years later and I am still here. So what happened? Did I stay because of the fantastic weather? Did I stay because of the amazing opportunities of the Silicon Valley? Because of the wonderful surrounding nature? Because of the Redwood trees? Because of the Pacific?
Yes and no. Yes because it certainly made my decision to stay easier, no because the actual reason was that I had met my beautiful wife Dawn during that time. I actually met her two weeks after I got off the boat :-) So I decided to stay. I got myself a job as Network Engineer for a consulting firm. I had to go through huge mountains of red tape in order to get a work permission for the United States and started to work for my new employer. For more working history you can check out my resume.
Dawn (that's my wife's name) and I got married on December, 27th 1998. We had a constant party for four weeks in that December! There is a dedicated web page for our wedding, if you want to check it out. September 17th, 2001 we had a little baby boy with the name of Johannes.
Right now (May 2002) I am working at Sony Electronics, Inc as a Sr. Security Analyst. We live at the beautiful Pacific coast side, in Moss Beach, a small village close to Halfmoon Bay, California.