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| Everything you didn't want to know... |
| Preface |
| Someone may be wondering who I am. Is this page a biography or is it a CV? The existance of it might say as much about me as the contents does. :) |
| Trivia |
| Here are the facts about me. |
| Index |
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| Background |
| Education |
I was born in Uppsala, Sweden in december 1972. After eight years in the city my family and I moved to the edge of the small suburb Nåntuna in the year of 1980. It was close to my new school and to the nature. I joined the local scouts 1982 where I was active for about eight years. More about this below.
After my nine years of compulsory school 1979-1988 in Nannaskolan, Nåntunaskolan, Uppsävjaskolan, Danmarks skola and Vaksalaskolan, I attended 4-years of gymnasium, technical engineeer and the two first years in Lundellska (skrapan), and the rest in Fyrisskolan, with focusation on electronics and telecommunication, and graduated as gymnasial engineer in 1992.
After that I worked four years, and then began my studies in computer science at Uppsala university. These are my courses I've taken. Now I'm working at Imenta Sweden with development of business and e-commerce software.
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| 1979-1980 | 1980 | 1980-1982 | 1982-1986 | 1986-1988 | 1988-1990 | 1990-1992 |
| Nannaskolan | Nåntunaskolan | Uppsävjaskolan | Danmarks skola | Vaksalaskolan | Lundellska skolan | Fyrisskolan |
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| Work |
I did my compulsory practise (trainee) at a small company that repaired computers. From there I got invaluable knowledges and a beginning interest in computer hardware.
After graduation i got a trainee place (paid by the state) at a company that sold computer components as processors, memory etc. which later lead to a real employment. At that place I worked as a computer technician and responsible for the stock-in-trade until 1996 when I succeeded in getting a place at the university, computer science program (DVP) at Uppsala University. I'm still working on my master thesis and hope to graduate soon. I work at the small company Imenta Sweden AB with a couple of bright friends from DVP.
I did the military duty 1993-1994 at the Swedish airforce base F16 outside of Uppsala as a security guard.
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| Scouting |
Back in the days i used to do scouting. I belonged to the Wasakåren, first in the junior scout group rovfåglarna (in the eagle), then patrullscouterna stigfinnarna (in the beaver) and most recently the senior scout team LaCåst. It got to be a lot of camps, and one of my most memoriable was the Scout-86 in Tärnaby. I quit the scouts when my gymnasial studies began to take too much of my time.
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| Hobby |
| Computers |
As I have had computers for quite a long time and they've always messed up and broke down, or I've built new equipment for them, I got to be quite good at fiddeling around with the hardware. The truth is I like them best when they just works.
I have had these: (nerd alert!)
- Commodore 64 (1MHz), 1986-1989
- Atari 520ST, 1989-1990
- Amiga 500 (7MHz?), 1990-1992
- PC (assembled by me)
- Intel 386sx (25MHz), 1992-1993
- AMD 486DX2 (66MHz), 1993-1994
- Intel Pentium (90MHz), 1995-1996
- Intel Pentium Pro (200MHz), 1996-1999
- Intel Celeron 300A (@450MHz), 1999-...
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| Programming |
At my Amiga days I began programming pascal and AMOS (a basic like procedural language, designed to programming of games), and I continued with pascal until 1994 when I first tried programming in C C. Love at first sight, even if some details as memory allocation was annoying. What did I make then? Well, demo effects like (starscrollers, 3d-vectors, text scrollers etc.). To be able to make that you also have to know assembler, and I mixed it inline with the rest of the code...
At present I like C better than before C, but I also know other languages (I reserve myself against memory blanks). I have maintained my homepage since 1996 and used most tricks with HTML, javascript and stuff.
These are the languages I've ran into (no particular order):
AMOS, Basic, Pascal, C, C++, (S)ML, Little SmallTalk, Prolog, POVray script, x86-assembler, MIPS-assembler, HTML (+dHTML +CSS), Javascript, Java, LaTeX, bash shellscript, awk script, embedded SQL, ...
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| The demo scene |
I've been active in a few demo groups during my life. Not any longer though. The first I joined was named Maffia. It was modest effects on the Atari, I made the graphics and music. And so I continued with the Amiga with the group Tetragon. In those days I called myself Turtle, a combination of my interest in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the original pretty violent adult comics) and turtle graphics. A demo party I attended was for instance the Amiga Easter Conference -90 in Gothenburg.
With this background I'm still hooked to the music created with computers, that is .SID, .MOD, .S3M, .XM and what all the formats are called. So incredibly lot of talent there is among young computer equipped musicians. They should of course be listened to with the original demo they were released for in the extent they exist, IMNSHO. (!)
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| Electronics |
During my (whole) life I've been interested in electronics, preferably digital electronics. At home I try different couplings at time but there is seldom something I can use from it. Some things do have worked flawless, like autofire to a joystick (well actually the whole joystick) and a joy/mouse switch to the Amiga. I have to push for my audioswitch which I ddesigned and built, andd now is on the Internet for everybody else to read. I use it almost daily at home, with so many sound sources and so few inputs on my amplifier...
My "specialarbete" in my last gymnasial year was about the VU-meter (volume unit meter, like the one on your stereo ;) ), and that was the first time i etched myself.
I built a joystick-wheel to my computer. Why buy when you can build one from trash. New dimensions in the cargames are opened. Hehe. One day I might build in support for more than four buttons, but that lies in the future for now.
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| Art |
| Raytracing |
Raytracing is one of my favourite interests. It's a method of generating realistic images using computers. I'm an active (well, on and off) participant of the IRTC (Internet Raytracing Competition). It's a competition for amateurs in raytracing, and preferably using free or cheap software tools. The competition is about given a subject topic making one or more images during a two month period, after which all entered images are judged by a panel and all participating people.
I myself write all scripting code and render them in POVray. That's a fre program which is very powerful. It's an amazing feeling to see what you code be rendered on the screen, and then be able to rearrange camera angles and lighting to enable precisely the right mood.
In the course Programmering methodics DV2 we wrote our own raytracer which was POV-script based. :)
// Example of POV script code
// (The sand shell in my IRTC submission Nov-Dec 1997)
#declare sand_shell =
union
{
#declare c = 0
#while (c < 10)
sphere { <5,0,0> 2 rotate y*(360/10)*c }
sphere { y*3 2 scale <2,1,1> translate x*1 rotate y*(360/10)*c }
sphere { y*1.7 2 scale <2,1,1> translate x*2.2 rotate y*(360/10)*c }
#declare c = c + 1
#end
texture { YellowPlastic }
}
See all my competition images and then some more at my raytrace page.
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| Manga & anime |
I like Japan, japanese culture and that includes manga. It's modern cartoons with ofter very futuristic contents. There are also animated pictures called anime. My favourites are Tenchi Muyo, Ranma ½, Dominion tank police and the best movie is Ghost in the shell. Unfortunatly I've only got a few minutes of video, but more scans from the Internet to view...
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| Miniature figures & airplanes |
Some years ago I used to do miniature figure painting. It was miniatures from Warhammer 40k (a board game of war in the year 40000), and some other fantasy figures. They got really great looking IMHO. Correction: they look awesome! ;) Here are some pictures from another artist, and here are some of my miniatures. To tell some more about it the miniatures are about 3-4 cm high and made i tin or plastic. The details are much greater than ordinary so called tin soldiers.
I have a couple of fine looking model planes hanging from my ceilin. One JA-37 Viggen painted with F-16 markings (see above) and one A-10 II Thunderbolt. (1/48 scale)
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| Spiritual |
| Astrology etc. |
My inner deeper sides (ooh!) consists of various mysticism. For example astrology and numerology. I've always been a silent thinker, but got extra fascinated when I read the description of a capricorn's charateristics. So well it fit me and explained some of my more odd properties. People reads their horoscope in the weekly press and see those short general and unusable horoscopes. If you want the horoscope to be precise you have to know much about the person in turn to examine the planets and the birthdate. One astrologer wrote that the planets are to be seen as the arms of a clock. The arms move, but that is not the reason time moves forward. Likewise the planets indicate forces, rather than expressing them. I don't have the knowledge to make my own horoscopes.
A capricorn is generally:
- Earthbound, practical
- quiet, thoughtful
- careful, sensible
- ambitious, sharp-witted
- patient, disciplined
- career hungry, workaholic
We are most compatible with the other earth signs like taurus and virgo. Here are som descriptions which maybe describes like 80% correct ;)... Excite, Excite (again), AstrologySource, TenthHouse, LionArt, LionArt (again).
Numerology is about taking letters of your name and making calculations based on the alphabetic order of the letters. With addition of birth data you can make descriptions and see what cycles in life there is for that person. The description I got was quite accurate. For links to such pages look at my link page.
Other areas of interest is biorythms, chinese astrology (I'm a rat), the combination of the above (pseudo)sciences, UFO's ghosts and unexplained phenomemons. Everything mystical interests me, but I keep an objectove approach to everything (like Aristoteles).
Tarot Is an old divination system based on a hermetic view. I.e. the cards represent every aspect of the universe and therefore they may indicate bigger schemes. The cards symbolic language is connected with astrology, alchemy, numerology, and religions from egypt, greece, rome, and christianity. The cards are to be seen as a way of asking your subconciuos questions. I made a page for storing and echanging tarot divinations... It is not finished yet, and is badly explained.
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| Music |
I listen to very various music. Some of the artists in my collection are: Depeche Mode, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, S.P.O.C.K., Orb, Ministry, Aphex Twin, Moby, Hedningarna, Björk, Kraftwerk, Frontline Assembly, J.M.Jarre, Elegant Machinery, Enya, Garbage, ...
The mixture probably speaks for it self. Otherwise I listen to the radio (P3, NRJ) och the favourite program P3 Dance. I was at the Hultsfred festival 1996, the Stockholm synth festival 1997 and the Arvika festival 1998.
At my MiniDisc page you can see for yourself how simple it is to order a walkman from Japan to Sweden.
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| Plants and other bonsai |
An old dream (?) I've just recently took up is growing of bonsai trees. Bonsai stands for "grow in pot" and I have tried with a couple of apple trees in my window. They died, sadly, but I have a lot more plants everywhere around me which are growing more nicely. I have a book by John Ainsworth about bonsai's. (Capricorns are earth signs and they have a tendency to seek up nature and I believe I've done so.)
I'm trying to have as many plants around me as possible. Unfortunately there aren't many places around where I can put them. I hope I will get a house with a garden (or at least more suitable windows) some day.
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| Books |
Books, well I don't read as much as I used to do, but my favourite authors are e.g. Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Hans-Uno Bengtsson och Douglas Adams. Preferrably science fiction, facts and humoristic litterature.
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| TV & video |
When I watch TV i most like to see science-fiction like Star-Trek, Babylon 5 and other sci-fi movies. Hong-Kong movies preferrably with humor are great (Jackie Chan), otherwise the taste is like the rest of my interests; quite broad. I have a decently large video archive with a lot of movies and TV-shows. My humor is quite brittish and I like most from Monty Python to modern humor shows on TV.
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| Mountainbike |
I do some sporting too (sometimes), like riding mountainbike. I've done that since way back in 1989. I mostly use it just for transportation and rather seldom for hard offroad activities. In the summer times I try to go for longer trips and/or offroad (singletrack). The brands i had includes Ridgeback, Haro, Raleigh och Marin (with a Marzocchi XC-51 fork). Recently I bought a KHS Comp ST (custom), which I'm rather pleased with.
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| Epilogue |
Did you read all of this? You must really be interested in me. :) This page seem to grow every update. I have a lot more I'd like to tell, because my mind is always on the move and my interests are expanding. (This was only a scratch on the surface.)
The page was last updated 24 mars 2001.
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| /Robert Fremin |
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