Dennis van der Stelt

Tag, you're it

Frans Bouma tagged me. As everyone is joining in on this, I can't stay behind. So here are five things most of you don't know about me.

• As Frans, I started back on an MSX at the age of 10. My parents had spend almost Fl. 3000,= (about $1500) for a VG8020 (image) and according to the salesman it was the future. I started coding in MSX-BASIC and got totally hooked on it. At the same age, 10 years old, I knew I wanted to become a developer. My MSX was later upgraded to a MSX-2 8245 (image) with a memory upgrade to 256Kb. Later I also bought a second-hand MSX-2 8280 (image) with video editing capabilities and two disk-drives. I upgraded it to 512Kb for a lot of money. My first encounter with a disk-drive was the option "Format" in a tool called "Ease". I had no idea what it did and when my MSX asked me if I really wanted to do that, I thought the computer was stupid, because I just told it so. ;-)
• When I got my pc, one of the first demos I saw was Second Reality and again I was hooked. My first demoparty was X'96 (Ik vergeet nooit 'Chop' die je Windows trepaneerde) and after that I went TakeOver (picture), Wired in southern Belgium and Bizarre. I loved going there as you could talk to people who you had been chatting to on #nlcoders and #coders, two irc channels dedicated to the demoscene. It was the geekiest time of my life.
• I hate (or at least have a hard time) reading books on technology. Although I really force myself to read, I hardly ever completely finish a book, even though I really want to. I much rather read articles on MSDN that go into detail really fast. Most books (and articles as well) tend to stay really superficial and don't get to the point, which I rather hate. Unfortunately I have the same disability so this post is already getting way too long. ;-)
• I've never been on a plane and/or at a large conference. Although I've been to DevDays regularly, I've never been to TechEd or PDC for example. I really hope to be able to go to the PDC this year, for both the plane and the conference will be my first time.
• I like to laugh, a lot. Problem is, when I laugh, it's really, really loud. When I had an apartment I used to watch Friends and everyone living around us knew when it was on, because they could hear me laughing. So if you're at the PDC and you hear someone laughing really loud, try to look me up. ;-)

The 5 people I'm tagging are Alex, Mike, Anko, Pascal, Miguel, Jan, Erwyn and Saber (Saber, it's about time you start blogging again!).