First of all some minor details that you may or may not wonder about, the NAQ (Never Asked Questions):
Why "Sanity"?
January the 1st, I changed my nick as a bit of a joke to "sanity". I rather liked it. See "IRC" for more details. A lemon tree has been named "sanity" because of me, this is explained in the "Usenet" section.
Sanity shall make ye -ing fret!?
It's a reference to "The Truth", the 25th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. It's about the newspaper business, and the Disc's first newspaper has the motto "The truth shall make ye free", with free sometimes misprinted as "fret". It also contains a character Tulip, who uses "-ing" every few words. I had Pratchett sign my copy of The Truth with the phrase at the Elf Fantasy Fair.
How is that surname of you pronounced??
This is actually a question that has come up a few times. For the people intrigued by my surname, you can hear it here. That's not my voice but an on-line TTS thing. My voice can be heard on the A-Files.
My family tree has been looked up by relatives, and can be found
here,
with a full cast of ancient and recent relatives.
My real name is Michel, I'm living in Gouda together with my fiancee
Astrid, who became my sweet and adorable girlfriend in May 2001 (and will be my wife in May 2005) and has a cat called Felix. My parents
and brother
live nearby, which is good because that means I can easily borrow the
car. My father-in-law and mother-in-law
live a bit further away in a town called Waddinxveen.
Gouda is, apart from the cheese, a city in the Netherlands. Famous for the cheese and stroopwafels
. Google on photos and Gouda to see how
nice it is. I study Urban Geography, which is my main subject in the
study Social/human Geography at the faculty of Faculty of Geographical
Sciences, Utrecht University. In the first year I met Astrid, who continued in the
social-environmental branch, but like me wants to become a
Geography teacher.
Before starting Uni I travelled XXXX[1] for 10 months, which was nice. I will go back there,
eventually sometime. Whenever. Since XXXX I am wearing a hat occasionally, the crocodile was only a
one-minute stand.
Apart from studying, I "work" (it's voluntary work) at the
local radio station Gouwestad Radio. I do way to much there, but my
main activities currently are the youth magazine Why You and the
Internetteam, responsible for the website and e-mail. I am also in the
promotion thinktank. In the past, I was one of the makers of the
satirical cabaret[2] show called
Cabaret Sauvignon ( presenting and writing), and was and am a
"technician"[3] as well, though currently mainly
for Why You. For a while, I was also involved in national
radio. I was producing reports and interviews for the youth magazine BNN United as a
kind of education/training. At the end of my time there, there was a contest
with all 6 "radio students", where I ended up on a (shared) second
place.
Despite of all the fun and pleasure from radio-making, I have no (serious) plans to make it my profesional career (yet). I want to finish my study, and then become a Geography Teacher.
My further intests include, apart from Doing Stuff With My Computer (see Geektoys), politics. I am a member of GroenLinks, a left-wing party concerned about social welfare, sustainability, the environment, immigrants etc. I am of course not entirely happy with our current PM, who looks like Harry Potter.
Especially for my stalkers, check my SanityCam which pretends it's live. It shows my room and proves that once I only needed to turn around my computer to irc from bed ;-). But that was at my parent's place, and my own flat has no such facilities. On the other hand, we now have a dedicated study/computer room.
My computer is a Revision A iMac, upgraded with 256MB RAM on top of the original 32MB and a 10GB harddisk instead of 2GB, and it runs Mandrake Linux 9.1, the PPC edition obviously. I also have an old Pentium machine which used to be the main affordable-prawns.co.uk and klijmij.net server but which has been replaced and now runs RedHat 7.2. It's barely used now though. My girlfriend has a P3 running a triple-boot WinXP, Fedora Core 2 and Mandrake 10. I also have a palm m130 to play SimCity on long train trips.
Any questions, comments, or whatever (except spam - I am very happy with my breasts, genitals and amount of fat thankyou): you can contact me at sanity@affordable-prawns.co.uk.
[1] Oz, Down Under, Australia, formerly knownas "Terra Incognis Australis". (back)
[2] This is dutch cabaret, ie comedy. No nakeddancing involved! (back)
[3] It sounds more technical than it actuallyis: I basically start the CD's / MD's / vinyl on cue of thepresenter, help the presenter by watching the time, puttingguests in the studio etc. All sorts ofassistance-behind-the-screens. And I get to fiddle with knobs,buttons and faders. Some photo's of me at work: Behind the panel, Wih the cabaret team (both 31/12/2001) (back)