I'm from
Dortmund, Germany, where I was born July 1969, and where I've lived
ever since.
What I do for a living
I work as an engineer. I studied electrical engineering at Dortmund university, from 1988 to 1993, as well as automation and robotics, from 1993 to 1996. The latter was quite unnecessary, but it sure was fun. I ended up working for a small hardware manufacturer in Wuppertal (about 30 km from where I live), and although my official job title doesn't say so, I'm more or less a programmer now.
Things I like
Ice-skating
I learnt skating only recently, at the age of thirty, but better late than
never. I haven't tried roller-blades though, and I don't think I want to.
Going to the ice rink is a major part of the fun, one reason being the
music that they play there, so who cares if they charge admission.
Swimming
I'm a lousy swimmer. Typical results are 6 minutes for 200 m, 20 minutes
for 600 m. Too bad that, as a child, I neither learned to swim the crawl,
nor even the proper breathing technique (one should exhale under water).
I'm working on it.
Music
I play the acoustic guitar, and although I started when I was about twelve
years old, I'm not very good at it. Titles that I like to play include folk
("Londonderry Air", "Carrickfergus"), country ("The Dixon Line", "So Much
to Do"), pop ("Breaking Hearts", "My Way"), some instrumentals by Robert de
Visée and Ferdinando Carulli, and Ludwig van Beethoven's "Für Elise".
Of course, I also like to just listen to music, and I own a large CD
collection. Most of the time, I only play
compilations that I've made from them, and I've found that, rather than
tape or CD-R, minidisc is the perfect
medium for that purpose. (Robert Palmer, by the way, agrees
with me on that.)