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126 
Hi, i'm Rob. This is my virtual home, my hiding place. When I want to escape from the real world, I just go to here. Add some furniture (write an article, personal or business, well ... is there a difference?), add a room (implement some new functional module) or just paint the walls again (change the template, the layout of the site). That's why it changes here sometimes, not too often coz otherwise it won't feel like home. The articles though, have a tendency to change iteratively in a couple of weeks time or maybe even after a few years after getting some new insights. Sometimes I even rewrite it completely because I'm not happy with it anymore. Hey, that sounds like agile development! .... Not?
Well ... don't get confused ... enjoy :)
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My career in IT started in 1977 at the age of 20. In fact I was studying geography but there was a strike on my campus (yes, the roaring and left 70's :) so achieving decent results was difficult. I needed some money and decided that I had to work for a while and wait until the strike was over. I responded to an ad where a company was explicitely looking for people who did not finish their study but were motivated to do something else. Weird, but not in those days ;-).
Although I kept myself a geography student for a year or 2, the IT-profession caught me and touched my heart. So I decided to stay and started to study informatics both with a pretty tough internal and role-focussed training as well as an external and more general IT college program.
The first 10 to 12 years I ran through the classic path from programmer to designer and projectleader. Most of the time engineering applications in an IBM environments. Most of the clients were in the manufacturing business so I designed and developed various CRM, PDM and ERP applications.
35 Perhaps a bit pointless to say but everything on this website reflects my personal opinion based on my knowledge and experience in life and work of the last 40 years. I usually never have the intention to personally "attack" someone. If it looks that way, please accept that this happens by accident and sometimes due to the (mis)use of the English language.Not my native tongue.
In my articles about politic or politicians my tongue could be a bit sharper. I guess it's just how it's done lately.
Additionally, I will try to quote and reference other people as accurate as I can but sometimes I just don't remember where some ideas came from and I can't always know somebody already had the same ideas long before me. I don't pretent to be a scientist, I am just human.
