[hblug] Introducing myself

[Ralph Slooten]

Hi there people.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself as the latest 
member of your small Hawke's Bay Linux community. My wife and I just 
moved from The Netherlands to New Zealand. Officially we are here for a 
1-year working holiday, however we do plan on staying if we can get 
settled in this time.

My family (parents and 2 brothers) moved here 3 years ago, and while 
looking for a place to host my website I was introduced by my youngest 
brother to Daniel Faulknor who linked me up to this list/group and has 
invited me to your monthly get-together (hope you don't mind ;-) ).

Back in Holland I was working for a small company doing sales, support 
and system administration. Our (the company's) main function was the 
sales & support of the Pervasive SQL database (http://www.pervasive.com) 
which basically a direct competitor of the "famous" Microsoft SQL. I was 
employed at the company for my Linux knowledge and experience, as the 
Pervasive database software also runs on Linux. Anther "side-project" of 
the company was the selling, installation and support of a Dutch Linux 
distribution based on SuSE called "NetServer" 
(http://www.connectux.com). I was in charge of this branch as well as 
our internal servers (SuSE & Gentoo) at the company.

I have been using Linux now for about 8 years now, and after going 
through the more "standard" distributions (RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, 
Debian) I finally settled on Gentoo as it was the only one I could mold 
to my specific needs and design the way I wanted.

Linux is of course also my hobby which is how I got first involved with 
it, and I have been involved in many software projects over the years. 
Although I don't program (C/C++), I do a lot of beta-testing and 
scripting as well as websites, databases etc.

Anyway, now we have just arrived in Napier and are planing of soon 
finding a job (if you have any ideas please let me know), and of course 
a place to stay (an almost-30-year-old with wife living with parents 
just isn't that cool now is it ;-) )..

I look forward to hearing and meeting some of you.

Kind regards,
Ralph