I am currently living in New York, after some years in Santa Monica, Los Angeles County, Calfornia, and before that in the Netherlands.
When I am writing this I am 48 years old but who knows for how long this text will be up, so I better say that I am of 19 June 1960. I am 1.89 meters tall (6'2"). I weigh 79 kg (174 lbs) and have brown curly hair.
Some time ago someone showed me a site on the web with a fairly simple personality test that you can fill out on a web form and get the outcome immediately. I was astonished by how well the outcomes were describing me. If you want to know more about this try clicking here and here. I am an INTJ.
I've studied plant pathology at the Agricultural University. That university is in Wageningen, that's why I've moved from my place of birth which is Vlaardingen (near Rotterdam).
After my studies I've worked for a year and a half as replacement for military duty, in that time lots of Dutch guys were required to defend our country against the Soviet Union. I still think that was not such a good idea. Some people now say that the bolshewist system collapsed because of their need to build up too much against the overwhelming military surplus from NATO. I am not so sure about that, and they did not tell it this way when I was supposed to potentially serve as canon fodder with the purpose of killing equally good willing Russian and Eastern European guys. What do you think?
Those one and a half years I spent working for the Foundation for Life Sciences and Society. They are working on public awareness of what modern biology and medicine are doing to our lives and society. I helped students making papers on subjects we covered, maintained and sort of automated the documentation system, and wrote some articles for publication in newspapers. After I left the foundation I made a few more articles for them on free lance basis. So I might still call myself a free lance scientific journalist, though I don't take the time any more to a do lot about that.
Because I couldn't find a job in plant pathology, I followed a course on systems analyses to find one in information technology. It certainly helped to find a job. I started in May 1988 as a programmer at the Biogeographical Information Institute of the ministry of agriculture and nature conservation. That was a confrontation with what can become of ministerial bureaucracy. I was part of a bunch of programmers who were hired as the same time and who were supposed to get useful information out of raw data on amateur observations of nature: counting birds, mushrooms etc. so that the info can be used for policy making on nature conservation. But our boss appeared to have a history of preventing to publish info on a big environmental problem as a previous task at the ministry, and was prolonging his tradition of sitting on any info he might hand out. We had a lot of laughs, but after a bit more than a year it started to get not so funny any more. When I returned for a brief visit after having left a year ago, it was quite depressing to see that the situation was just as weird as ever.
And since july 1989 I started with my job at Erasmus MC (University of Rotterdam). I am telling more about that at my work page.
Since my move to the US, I spent some 7 years in Los Angeles I am mainly working for a thinktank in Santa Monica before moving to New York where my main work is health economic evaluation of new products of the pharmaceutical industry. Next to that I am holding on to my job in Rotterdam on a small part-time basis.
The work involves some travel, which I don't particularly like, but what I do like is to meet people in real life who I have met earlier over internet, in case you are interested in that, I will try to keep up here with my current travel plans. On my 'trips' page I also tell about my hosting travellers and give you some links to stories on earlier trips I made.
After having been active in the cyclists union ENFB in Rotterdam, I was active for a while in 'Cycle Santa Monica!' and keep trying to improve the position of cyclists in everyday traffic. Currently I am a not active member of Transportation Alternatives.
I like to do some inline skating every now and then, it was great on the bike path along Santa Monica beach. I found a lot of practical tips on that particularly through internet. An interesting site to start off from is: Yahoo - Inline Skating.
Also I like to sew my own clothes, of which you can see bit along with my looks. I like to develop and enlarge my own black and white photo's and I sometimes make things I'd like to call works of art, but one could have a different opinion on that. I try to keep up with my fitness training, working out with weights. I am by no means a Mr Olympia but it does show.
In case you would like to know some more about the country where I used to live, not so long before I left there, my newspaper made a nice introduction to the Netherlands in English and put it at their website. I haven't read it all myself because I think I already know where I lived, but from what I have seen of it, it is a nice overview of what makes us different from other countries. It is here: Profile - the Netherlands.
I hope this will do for the moment as a first introduction. Please ask me anything you like.