Home at last

The ubiquitous 'welcome to my site', revisited.

I'm a web Belgian web developer living in the obscure German city of Bielefeld, a city that supposedly does not exist. The Bielefeld conspiracy (Bielefeldverschworung) goes something like this: Bielefeld does not actually exist but certain authorities want you to believe it does. The hoax dates back from a 1994 Usenet post and has its roots in the University of Bielefeld, one of the internet pioneers in Germany. At that time I was a zitted teenager telnetting into my father's Belgian university account to acces Usenet, Ftp and the WWW. I came to the internet for the counterculture, I stayed for the technology.

Originally I am from beautiful Ganda (Ghent), Belgium. A city that definitely does exist and has done so for hundreds of years. It took a gracious Chinese girl from Shanghai sailing all the way to Leuven, then Ghent and finally Bielefeld to tear me away from my roots in Flanders. I love Belgium and hope it will never split, if only for reasons of surrealist aesthetics.

When I'm not building web applications, I'm jumping out of airplanes, climbing on ice or simply enjoying a good book. My climbing trips through the world have taken me from Canada to China and a host of European countries. My voyages of the mind have taken me from Saussure to Neil Stephenson and back home to Amelie Nothomb.

My grandfather was an early hacker/engineer and book lover and his house was a treasure-trove of post-war technological marvels like Wire Recorders, Gramophone players, 16mm Cameras, Radio receivers and more. I spent many a wednesday afternoon rummaging through it all. I like to think some of these experiences helped me to find my geeky self. Thanks Grandpa.

The earliest programming I can remember was done in some version of Basic on a Commodore 64. It consisted of trying to simulate the movement of flying Cheep-Cheeps in Level 2-3 of Super Mario Brothers. Since then I've moved on to bigger things but I still enjoy a good game of Super Mario. These days I'm involved in research in information/interface design, web development and usability.

A few years ago a Luddite friend of mine asked me: "Don't you ever get bored of programming those dull computers? Don't you crave to do something truly creative like painting or writing instead? Thanks, but not thanks! In my book, true creativity blooms when confronted with constraints. There's nothing more fulfilling than coming up with a clean solution to an information problem. When programming, you can be an inventor every day, for the only thing you need is a clear mind. That, and some syntactic details are enough to partake in one of the purest creative processes known to man.

10 years in the Internet business; and I've enjoyed most of it. Certainly no regrets. Despite the bouts of browser incompatibility rage.

Bielefeld, July 31 2008

Francis Dierick a.k.a. c1sc0

Creator's notes

This website was built with a little semantic markup, a whiff of javascript, a touch of css framework help, some php and a great deal of attention to typography.

The font of choice is Baskerville set at 1 em for body text, a line width of 33ems, lineheight of 1.5 ems. Yes, I love my ems, so I used them to design both layout and typography.

The book-like design is in honor to my grandfather to whom I owe my early childhood exposure to technology and writing. Even after all those years the fundamental motor of human invention still remains plain old text.

The color scheme is inspired by Albin Michel with whom I spent many an evening indulging in French literature.

Since the Grand Unified Semantic Web seems to be still a while off; i've sprinkled this website with some microformats instead. A poor man's semantic web.