All About Pete

Please read the disclaimer. Probably way more information than anyone would share on the internet these days, but then again maybe not. At least I did so by choice. Last updated in early 2000.

Alright, this has got to be the least interesting section of my webpage. It is the section that details my life. If you are seriously interested, then by all means, have at it.

I briefly described myself on the front page, but here's a slightly more detailed version:

I was born in Kronberg, (at the time West) Germany, on July 24, 1978. I lived in Steinbach, Germany until May of 1993, at which point my mom told my dad that it was time to move to the states. You see, my mother is from colorado, and after college she went to stay with her parents in germany, where her dad was stationed with the air force. She planned to just stay there for a year, but she got this job with this catholic charity organization, and shortly thereafter, my dad, who is from Belgium, started working at the same place. The rest is pretty much history of sorts. So Eventually I got around to being born. Those first fifteen years of my life were relatively unexciting, although I was fortunate enough to see a lot of Europe and able to pick up a few languages on the way. I also started playing with computers at an early age. I was about seven when my dad brought an Apple IIc home. It wasn't long before I was writing BASIC programs on it. Of course, the floppy drive was broken and could no longer write to disk, so any time I wanted to save a program I had written, I had to print it out and type it back in later whenever I wanted to run it again. Good clean fun. Later on I got a Macintosh and found myself writing cute little "programs" in hypercard.

So as I said, in 1993 we moved to Colorado, because my mom missed it too much. I can now see why, seeing how I've had to spend four years in Indiana. At this point in my life I picked up my love of skiing and mountain biking. So after three years of High School I managed to get myself accepted at the University of Notre Dame, and I've been here ever since. I oscillate between really loving the place and really hating it, but in general it's a pretty swell place, except for the fact that it's in Indiana. Here at ND I've expanded my programming skills by quite a bit. I also got more of a chance to learn UNIX. In high school I'd used UNIX a little, but was still mainly a Mac user. Here at ND I've become a full-time UNIX/Linux user. I helped found the Notre Dame Linux Users Group and served as the group's president for two years. I am also involved in the ND chapter of the ACM, for which I served as secretary for a year, and I am quite involved in ACM programming contests. ND sent two teams to the east-central regional programming contest in the fall of 99, and the team I was on placed sixth out of more than a hundred teams. Other things I do here at ND are listen to punk rock and ska, watch cartoons, debate libertarian philosophy, run, and attempt to make life a bit more bizarre for those around me.

I keep an online journal of sorts, where I record stuff I accomplish along with various random thoughts. I will be putting my resume up here eventually. Finally, you can see various pictures of myself and my friends.