Some snippets about myself

My name is Alfred Klomp and this is my website. The basics about me: I was born in The Netherlands 25 years ago, and still live there, in the town of Delft, where I study Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft. I'm currently graduating on a really cool project, and hope to be finished somewhere in the start of 2009.

I have many interests and hobbies, which this site goes to show. In high school I used to be an avid photographer, both on my own time and for the yearbook. Back then I had the benefit of being able to use the high school darkroom, but now I mostly muck about with my analog cameras and my old faithful film scanner. You can see some of my best shots on my photo site. I once had the dream of becoming a photo journalist, but common sense prevailed. I still love the whole métier though.

I was a student assistant in design drawing class from 2004 to 2007, teaching other students how to draw, hanging up drawings, cleaning the drawing board and fetching coffee. It's the ideal student job: good pay, good hours, getting to know your fellow students, practicing your own skills, and relevant to your CV. Much recommended if you can get the position, or any other student assistant position for that matter.

Between November 2007 and February 2008 I embarked on one of the coolest things I've done: an industrial design internship at Art. Lebedev Studios in Moscow. There's a lot I could say about the whole experience (not the least of which are my big adventures in Russia and the Moscow/Minsk nightlife), but I'll short-circuit that by saying that everything was awesome. My name is now forever linked to the Optimus Tactus, and I have a personal profile on the Studio site.

I'm a member of European student's organization AEGEE, although I'm not all that active anymore. I travelled a great deal with AEGEE through the years and got to know many people; I would definitely recommend it if you want to see more than just your own student town (or country). I was in the local board of AEGEE-Delft in 2004–2005 as secretary and vice president, and have been active in various committees. In the IPWG, I made (with some help from others) the AEGEE Network Map; in the local PR committee I made the newsletter, and in the Euroflash committee I wrote some articles and did the layout.

I like to travel, but don't like sweltering heat all that much and don't really get much kicks out of the gritty, sticky backpack/nightbus kind of travel, though I've had my share. Train trips I love, though. I can't really boast a lot of travel outside the greater European area, but I did see the USA in 2001, a few months before everything turned sour. I think I made up for it by visiting almost all of Europe, with the notable exception of mainland Spain, Albania, the Scandinavian countries and some of the micronations (Monaco, Andorra, Malta, Sealand, San Marino and others). The Eastern part of Europe is definitely my favourite: I like the mentality, the architecture, the occasional weirdness, the daily life, and of course the prices. I've been known to daydream about moving to Hungary for a year or so.

As this site will faithfully inform you of, I have many different "collections". There's my telephone collection, my rather large camera collection, my calculator collection, my Estonian buttons collection, my collection of old newspapers, my collection of keyboards, my postcard collection, and so on. Please don't get the impression that I'm some kind of crazy packratting hermit; I just take to that kind of cool old stuff and tend to buy it when I see it in second-hand stores. And then I showcase it on this site, because you need to do something with it apart from just stash it away, right?

This site is not "me". It shows only what I want to show the world, and none of the personal, potentially embarrassing things that I wouldn't like to be reminded of at some later time. I believe in these two ground rules of personal websites: that a website is like a publication that should be of practical use to the Internet at large if you want it to thrive (as opposed to those onanistic "personal blog" type sites, which I don't loathe per se but are not my cup of tea); and that everything you put on your website is public record forever, so it better be sanitized, wholesome, useful and non-embarrassing. I think that if I would blog or paste this site full of personal rants, I'd regret it later, especially since I'm posting everything under my full, real and rather unique name.

(To expand that point a bit: yes, to my unending surprise there are other people named Alfred Klomp on this earth. I've never been in contact with any of them, but know of the existence of at least two others. If you found this site by googling our common name, please make sure you've got the right individual!)

When it comes to online social networking and the like, I'm a bit conservative. I reluctantly have MSN and Skype, but I refuse to create profiles on any and all social network sites. I have this dotcom for information that I want to share, and that's it. My pictures don't go on Flickr, they go on my own photo site where everything is under my control. My mail doesn't go to Gmail, it goes to my own home server that I control and backup, passing through my own tuned mail backend, just as I like it. Get off my back, commercial demons of privacy violation, "extended friends" and wasted time. I'd host this site myself if I trusted the electric grid in my apartment block and my server's hardware a bit more. It's now hosted in Germany by All-Inkl, who do a hell of a job for little.

The first large site I administered was my Russian cameras website, which is still online and by far the most popular site that I made. I see that as a function of the "usefulness to others" mantra explained above. When I set out to create that site in 1999, I was consciously looking for something that others might find interesting, in this case my collection of Soviet-Russian photo paraphernalia. My interest in the subject has wanted quite a bit since then, and I've been playing with the idea of selling off the whole collection to some dealer to pay for a nice digital refex, but the site will probably stay online forever. I'm a bit embarrassed about the thing, having written it in my teens, but what the hell.

This website is built, prototyped and proofread on my home Linux server, and then mirrored nightly to my web hosting. Everything is handcoded in vim, and the only "advanced" technology it uses are server-side includes. Which I prefer above dynamic PHP solutions and the like, because they are fast, flexible enough and much more maintainable. I've done some experiments with a twocolumn layout that collapses to a single column on smaller screens or when the browser is resized; you can see it in action on most pages, this one included. I pride myself on the pure, readable and fast code that went into this site.

Note to self: extend this page in the future with more stuff.