About

^{Last edited: Friday January 16th 2009}

This blog…
… is a reincarnation of something I started in January 2003, when weblogs were just taking off (well, in my opinion they were…). I started with an installation of MovableType on the PC this same blog runs on. It turned out my DSL-connection was too slow to handle both my blogging- and gaming-interests (Quake III Arena, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory), so I ended up at a hosting-provider with the domainname “b-o-k.nl“.
This lasted until the beginning of 2005, when my hosting-provider was hacked thanks to a deeply buried version of phpBB and all pages were defaced. The new security-measurements made it very hard to restore my weblog, so I quit.
Until… this blog was reborn on February 18^th 2005, one day after WordPress 1.5 was released. In the meantime, the speed of my DSL-connection had been upgraded twice, so the bottleneck in the connection was not a big issue anymore.

Look ma, I’m really social!
flickr // del.icio.us // last.fm // Twitter

And just in case you want to email me for some reason, my address is: hbokh[at]xs4all[dot]nl

About me,
As the header of this blog clearly states, I (and a lot of other people too) call myself “BOK”, which is Dutch for a male goat. This is because my family-name is Bokhoven, hence the abbreviation. Oh, my first name is Henk by the way, and I was born in the last spring of the sixties, just before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I’m not married, but live together with my girlfriend (we’re DINKs indeed).
I’ve been educated as a teacher for secondary school in history and geography, but I earn my money in the IT. I was working as a Unix-, FreeBSD-, and Linux-administrator from 1998-2006 for one of Europe’s biggest IT-companies and made the switch to Oracle database-administration in January 2007. Never really could get used to it…
From January 2009 I’ll be working (again) as a senior sysadmin for a small(er) web-company named <theFactor.e>.

myself,
Some people call me a nerd, but I think I’m more of a geek. Hey, I can’t even code properly! But then, I started to like computers around 1982 or ’83, when I first touched a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Only three years later I was able to buy my own computer, a Sinclair ZX81 with only 1 kilobyte of RAM! That’s right: you could type on it and within five minutes it ran out of memory…
In 1986 my parents gave me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48k RAM. I learned myself (more) BASIC and a tiny bit of Z-80A assembly until the damn thing broke, just before I started my studies in 1988.
Only in 1993 I touched a computer again, when I got a genuine IBM Personal Computer XT from my uncle. For an XT it was very sophisticated, having a 5 MB harddisk and a 10 MHz NEC V20 processor. It helped me to write my papers for the study, using good old “WordPerfect 5.1″.
Around 1994 I heard about something called “the Internet” and it got my immediate and full attention. Somewhere in my archives there’s a specimen of the Dutch “Net Magazine” issue nr1, that told me everything about e-mail, gopher, archie, telnet and the WWW…
In those days I was just about to enter the world of bulletin boards (aka BBS), but never used them more than twice myself as far as I can remember (Telix rocked though!). Only in the end of 1995 I first set foot on the Internet at Groningen University (RuG) and never left it ever since!
In the meantime I bought a new big tower, multimedia-PC: an AMD 486DX2-80 with 8 MB of RAM, 1 GB hard disk, sound card and a 4x speed CD-ROM. A state-of-the-art machine at that time, but Windows 95 sucked since day one, so I installed Linux. Almost the best thing that ever happened to me!
In 1996 I picked the infamous “World Online” as my ISP, using a 28k8-modem to setup the connection. This lasted until September 1997, when the student-dorm -I still lived in- got a connection to the fiber backbone of the Groningen University.
Oh, and in 1999 I also gave FreeBSD a try – it’s still powering this weblog.
Once ADSL was available I left the student-dorm to go and live with my girl-friend in a nice spot just outside of the city-center. Since 2001 I have a connection from XS4ALL (currently 8MBits/s).

and I…
Besides being a bit nerdy geeky I like to watch movies in my humble “home theater”, make photographs with my Nikon camera’s (Coolpix 2500 and D70 dSLR), listen to progressive rock-music like Dream Theater but also indie like Editors and Bloc Party, go out for dinner, drink (Belgian) beer or (single malt) whisky and read a book or two.

Todo-list
Some things I’m planning on doing:

• buy an Apple computer, either a secondhand G4 / G5 or a new one with Intel inside I bought a secondhand Apple eMac 700 on March 27th 2006 (PowerPC G4), but it was b0rked from the start (raster shift), so on June 8th I traded it in for an iBook G4 – 1.2 GHz with 768MB RAM… These days I own a MacBook Pro (unibody) too.
• learn better / more CSS
• find a new job Since 1/1/2009 I’m working as a senior sysadmin at <theFactor.e>
• make a trip to Canada
• and a trip to Western Australia