Ticklish Techs

… I’m a man of wealth and taste. (Stones)

Yes, I am the new kid on the blog. Thanks to Benjamin for the first introduction. To introduce myself I tried to write a short version of my ‘computational biography’, but I ended up writing pages. If you really would like to read it, you will find the whole story here soon – with all comments and debug symbols. Now here is the compilied version:

Aged 33, I am living in the beautilful city of Düsseldorf (near Cologne) with my wonderful girl Grace. Thanks to my father I started programming 25years ago and couldn’t stop. In school I liked mathematics and languages, which was a strange but unique combination. Consequently (meaning ‘through wild twists in my personal life’ 🙂 ) I became a student of linguistics and quickly came to the field of computational linguistics. I graduated and after some more turbulences I started working for a nice company in Cologne. That’s where I first met Benjamin: The company was working on “java to .NET”-thing, Ben had already done the difficult tasks and I should type in some simple wrappings. I had learned C# like a week ago and felt dump like sh*t.
But I had time to improve and two year later we did the coolest project my working life so far: A converter from C#-Code to a special kind of process diagrams. I still like that tool a lot and realising it involved some of my major fields of interest like building parsers and pushing around graphs.
Since mid of 2006 I am a freelancer and currently I am working for a big German retail and logistics company.

I am interested in almost any subjects related to computers, except networking stuff :-). I am attracted most to games (boardgames as well, especially chess) and gaming theory, parsing, solving problems using graphs and .NET (of course).

My personal main task for 2008 is to lose some significant amounts of weight. I am not a fat guy, but during the last couple of years I gained the typical IT-belly.

I’ll come up soon with a nifty little post about comparing numbers. Stay tuned!