A Brief Pause From The Ordinary..., Demographics time--please just humor me Options

[nasaman58]

I just joined this community last night, and I'm just curious about some of the people here. I'm only 19 years old, but I'm more interested in all things space than anyone I've ever met. Just out of curiosity, what are people's ages in this forum?

[DEChengst]

Nice. Presentation time

I'm DEChengst, a 29 year old from The Netherlands. Yes, that's the country Hansje Brinker saved by putting his finger in the dike. Well not really as Hansje Brinker is just a story we tell to gullible tourists. Ofcourse after the tourists have gone the tourguide breaks down in laughter because they'll all believe it really happened. The city I live in is called Rotterdam and has the biggest seaport in the world. Other famous spots are the Erasmusbrug, the Euromast and ofcourse the Keileweg. If you're interested in the more liberal side of Holland you'll also find plenty of coffeeshops.

I earn my living by being a system administrator. The most important task I do is keeping all the UNIX boxen running. I'm also responsible for managing all Sybase database. Since a year or so I started supporting the OpenVMS boys. My final task is taking care of our SAN systems. It must be pretty clear now that my job is the geek's dream job. I get to "play" with huge and expensive enterprise class hardware while getting payed for it.

My first hobby is autosports. Ofcourse I like Formula One the most, with DTM being a good second. I'm totally not interested in American races that only drive on ovals. I really can't see what's so great about driving around in a circle. Ovals just pale in comparison with circuits like Spa Francorchamps. There is no greater sight than seeing the likes of Michael Schumacher and Senna drive a Formula One car at Spa in heavy rain. The car twisting and drifting at every corner as it's being driven around the track one or two seconds faster per lap than the entire opposition.

Ofcourse as a visitor of this forum I'm also a space geek. I like planetary missions the best. To be honest I always get nervous if an important event, like the MER landing, is about to take place. The night before the event I'll be so jumpy I hardly can get any sleep If the mission is a success you'll find me checking the web every five minutes to check if the first results are in. As soon as they are I quickly download them and try to out Photoshop NASA by creating mosaics out of them

Another hobby of mine is computers. I own a nice collection of old server hardware. Most people consider them junk but to me they are my treasures. As you may have gathered from my nickname the systems I like most were made by the Digital Equipment Corporation.

I own a nice collection of DEC computers:

-Alphaserver 1000A 5/500 running Tru64 UNIX 5.1B
-MicroVAX 3100/80 running OpenVMS 7.3
-DECsystem 500/260 running ULTRIX 4.5
-Infoserver 100 NAS box

In my spare time I'm a high priest of The Holy Church of DEC. Some of the daily rituals I have to perform, are praying while I face Maynard and geeking around with my serverpark. During my preaching you can hear me rant about how holy DEC is and how evil Compaq and HP are. This is one of my prayers I say on a daily base:

There is but one true laptop !
It's called the Alphabook One!
Bow before it's divinity!
And thy shall not commit blasphemy against it and insult it by using any other device which acts like a laptop but is not a divine Alphabook One !

Here you can see me pointing out one of the objects I worship: