1. My first computer programs were exercises in FORTRAN for an IBM-7040 while I was a college freshman. The first computer I owned was an 8086 with 640K of RAM, two diskette drives and no hard disk; I don't remember if it ran DOS 2 or DOS 3. That's unless you count a handheld HP-71 calculator as a computer, it had the same processor as Hewlett-Packard desktops of the time, and thanks to "bugs" which its user community treated as "undocumented features", it could be programmed not only in RPN but even in binary; I wrote a couple LEX (language extension) files for it.
2. Thanks to the international language Esperanto, I regard the whole world as my home and all humans as my brethren (the latter is not always easy to live with), even though I never went out of Europe except once, for a one-week World Congress of Esperanto which happened, that year, in Tel-Aviv.
3. I've tried playing a number of music instruments but never achieved much with them. One reason may be that my parents decided to stop the piano lessons when they found out that I hid under the teacher's grand piano when it was time to go back home. (It was because I liked piano so much that I wanted to stay longer at the teacher's but they thought instead that I wasn't interested.)
4. I've always been interested in languages, maybe because, even before I entered grade school, my (French-speaking) parents hired a governess-maid whose father, mayor of a neighbouring borough and elected on a Flemish-nationalistic list, forbid her to speak anything but Dutch at her workplace. (My hometown, Brussels, lies astride the French-Dutch language border, and German and English are spoken a few hundred kilometers away, not to mention Lëtzebuergesch.) Also, my parents spoke English when they didn't want the children to understand, and my father left "Spanish without Toil" and "Russian without Toil" (or rather, I should say, "L'espagnol sans peine" and "Le russe sans peine") laying about in the house. Nowadays my homepage welcomes the visitor in more languages than I speak fluently.
5. My liking for science fiction started in the early seventies, when a colleague (another COBOL programmer, as I was at the time) started lending me works by Asimov and several others. Later I went regularly to the English library (W.H.Smith and Sons, at the time) where I was most interestted in the F&SF section. I've found out that Asimov wrote also non-fiction; two of his non-F books which I like particularly are "Asimov's Guide to Science" and "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" (each in two volumes, so you could call them four books).
6. I came to Mozilla via Netscape, after I found out that this competitor of Microsoft, so much talked about in the news of the time, could be downloaded for free, when I found where it was to be had from. (That was Netscape 4.72 but later I installed 4.75, 4.77, 6.0 and 7.0.) Later I installed Firefox and Thunderbird, around the time when their version 1.0 was released; but at that time, the Mozilla suite looked like something of which only the "nightlies" were interesting, and as far as I could tell, they were an unfinished, bug-full product, not really usable for someone like me. It's only when I discoverd SeaMonkey that I came back to the Suite and even (after going over to Suiterunner as soon as its Linux version went online) started contributing a little of my free time to triaging its bugs.
7. The other software product I'm interested in is the Vim editor. I don't contribute C code to it but I'm active on its mutual-help mailing list and, after finding out that I could compile it (with every new bugfix) without much trouble, I added HowTo pages about it (for Windows and Unix/Linux) on my site.
Chain letters are still contrary to my philosophical opinions, so I won't tag anyone in particular. If you feel like responding, go ahead. Either on this blog if you think you may do so without abusing KaiRo's patience, or by private mail to me (or both). Even if this blog garbles my email address, you'll find it again at the bottom of my homepage. No spam please (no advertisements for lotteries, degrees-withoout-studying, cheap medicine or penis extenders, no request for help in getting your late Nigerian grandfather's 100.000.000 Swiss francs out of the bank, and so on and so forth) — any of these will be reported through SpamCop to the abuse desk of the sender's ISP. Also nothing in languages using a non-Latin script because, even though my homepage welcomes visitors in three of these, actually I don't understand them, and if, even after "View Source", I can't tell that some message isn't spam, I treat it as if it were.
14.01.2009 08:03