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| My full name is Martinus Theodorus Maria van Lin. And i was born on June 4 1961 in Maastricht at 06:05 am. With my two sisters and 6 brothers I grew up in a village called Meerssen. In September 1980 I moved in with my lover Gerard "Sjér" Heygele. Unfortunately Sjér passed away on June 17 2002 as the result of 4 strokes. A family photo album is available on Mike's homepage. In September 2002 I moved in to my current apartment on top of the mall in Daalhof (West-Maastricht). Since the age of 17 i have been working at many places, that many, that I can't hardly remember all of them. Unfortunately currently I am unemployed. This however does not mean, I am waisting the rest of my life on my lazy bottom in bed. I spend most of the time behind some computer, working on my MultiOS project or helping out people getting their computer systems and local area networks up and running. Beside that I write some Linux documentation, but for some obscure reason i never publish my writings. My first home computer was a Phillips NMS 8220 MSX2 I purchased with a course "Programming in MSX BASIC". Rapidly I found out, BASIC was pretty nice to learn your first programming steps, but not suited my needs, so I started to learn Z80 Assembly and later on its Intel x86 and Motorola 68K implementations. Later on I switched to Pascal and finally C. My second computer was a Bondwell 38 XT, based on a Intel 8086 CPU, running MS-DOS 2.11. At that time I really loved it and I knew all its ins and outs. The third one was a Commodore-Amiga 500. Today I still have such a Golden Girl up and running, that was donated by my brother Michel. It includes a lot of extraordinary hardware extensions and eve pretty obscure hardware hacks. For example it is connected to a regular TV, has both a 1.3 an 2.4 Kickstart ROM and 4 extra buttons to select various functions, including a so called boot selector, that provides me the choice to boot from ether the internal or 3 external disk drives. After the Commodore-Amiga 500 I am loosing count. I owned lots of Intel based systems. Most of them where provided with a OEM version of Microsoft Windows. I moved to GNU/Linux in 1999 with SuSE Linux 6.1. And Linux is still defiantly my favorite OS, however I love to play around with OpenBSD (for sake of security) MINIX 3 (since I love the idea of a Micro kernel) and FreeDOS. I am not quite sure or I yet fired up my first BBS in 1987 or 1989, however I used Andrew Milner's RemoteAccess BBS package (here is a interesting link with RA related stuff), FrontDoor front end mailer and fmail mail processor. In 1998 I also started a CB Packet Radio BBS. The Land line BBS earned global fame. I was especially surprised and happy about the amount of Americans my user database counted. Which of course was pretty unusual for a Dutch BBS ran by some hobbyist. Both systems where finally shut down in 2002. Besides computers I use my spare time as a amateur composer, songwriter and multi instrumentalist one man band, since I was at the age of 13 and highly inspired by Mike Oldfield and Alice Cooper. Since 1992 I threw my instruments into the closet and my songs are mostly computer generated (what else ;) using so called Tracker Editors. And based on the typical Patrick Cowley sound. Finally Judaism and everything concerning Israel is one of my biggest interests. I studied 3 years Modern Hebrew, to make it easier to study books. So this Dutch dude is reading the Diary of Anne Frank in Hebrew, ironic hu? My personal taste of music has a wide range, but my favorite musician is David E. Farmer. If you want to know more about things I like, simply view my profile at my Dutch Web Log (the profile is in English thought). Films that I love are mostly (Oh, how surprising) Science fiction, all the movies based on horror novels by Stephen King and recently I enjoyed a couple of documentaries on Google video pretty much, especially Revolution-OS and The Code Linux. Simply surf to Google, chose video and search on GNU. Finally I would like to admit that I don't consider myself a hacker, that is a title you must earn. But it's obvious that I am a computer nerd and take part in the hacking community. Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion about what a hacker exactly is. Fortunately Eric S. Raymond wrote this interesting article on the subject. In my logo I use a red glider, if you want to know what the glider is all about, you can read it right here by Eric S. Raymond. Another interesting or at least amusing read on the subject might be "How do I manage my hacker" by Peter Seebach |
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